Scragged

How To Lie with Poverty Statistics

Petrarch — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:01:00 GMT

There are two clocks ticking down the remaining days of the Obama administration and his Democratic hegemony. One is the ever-growing unemployment rate, now standing at about 10% "officially" and nearly twice that when you include the underemployed and people who have given up looking for work. The other factor is the time left to Election Day in November, when American voters will have their first opportunity to vent their fury on the party which originated the saying "It's the economy, stupid!" but now seems to have utterly forgotten it.

In politics, when the going gets tough, the tough start lying. There's not a whole lot Mr. Obama can do about the unemployment statistics; he's tried blowing smoke at Americans about the economy getting better for several months now and it simply isn't working. It also doesn't help that he's partnered with buffoons like Harry Reid who last week enthused on the Senate floor:

Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.

If that's really good, we'd hate to see what would be really bad. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

No, there's not much to be done for employment, but at least Mr. Obama can claim to be fighting against poverty.

How, pray tell, can he claim to be reducing poverty considering that each and every day, another 36,000 people (at least) are sacked from paying jobs and thrown into the penury of the welfare system? Simple: Change the definition of poverty. The National Review reports:

The current poverty measure counts absolute purchasing power — how much steak and potatoes you can buy. The new measure will count comparative purchasing power — how much steak and potatoes you can buy relative to other people. As the nation becomes wealthier, the poverty standards will increase in proportion. In other words, Obama will employ a statistical trick to ensure that “the poor will always be with you,” no matter how much better off they get in absolute terms. [emphasis added]

We've previously written that, in America, the war on poverty is long since over and we won. There is no such thing as poverty in the United States as it's understood throughout history and in much of the rest of the world - we do not have naked people starving in the gutters, literally unable to obtain food for themselves. America's "poor" are wealthy by any reasonable standard: 97% own color TVs, three-quarters own a car, almost half actually own their own homes.

The only reason we talk about poverty in America when there isn't any is because it is politically expedient for Democrats to do so. The more supposed poverty they can find, the greater the excuse to take money away from you in taxes and redistribute it to their supporters in return for votes.

But back to the lie of the statistics. America's poverty statistics have long been indexed to inflation and economic growth in various ways to make sure that the poverty rate doesn't go down much even though the objective material wealth and comfort of the poor, like everybody else, is constantly increasing. No news here.

Karl Marx, Call Your Office

Mr. Obama's changes go one step further: His administration plans to effectively index the poverty rate as a percentage of GDP per capita. The implications of this are far from obvious, so let's look at some examples.

First, America's GDP is the amount of money the whole nation makes. It's a whopping big number - in 2009, even with the recession, our GDP was around $14.25 trillion. There are a bit over 300 million Americans; a little division gives you the average GDP per capita of $46,400. Anybody making less than that is below average; anyone making more is above average.

Let's arbitrarily define poverty as someone making one-quarter of the average, or $11,600. This is not a lot of money, it's true; but compared to the millions who live on less than a dollar a day, it's a king's ransom. You cannot live a cushy life in America on $11,600, but you certainly will not starve or freeze to death.

So far, so good. Now let's consider what would happen in a successful Reagan economy where the rising tide lifts all boats, but the yachts get lifted more. In other words, everyone gets richer, but the rich get richer by more.

The GDP of the whole nation would increase - naturally, since everyone is getting richer. The GDP per capita would also go up, so our arbitrary poverty line would go up too. The poor are getting better off, but the bar has been raised, so despite a strong economy, it looks like we've made no progress.

But wait! Remember, in this scenario the rich got richer by a greater percentage than the poor. So while the poor's income went up - they objectively got richer - the poverty line raised by even more, since the distance between poor and rich has increased.

The result? Under Mr. Obama's self-serving calculations, in a good economy such as we saw under Reagan, Clinton, and for a few years under Bush, the official statistics would say poverty is getting worse - even as the actual poor people were getting more money, able to buy more stuff, and living more comfortably in every objective way!

OK, so it's a long-term plot to make Republican governance look bad, is that it? No: this statistical fraud has a far more immediate goal of flattering Mr. Obama's wealth-destroying policies.

For instead of a good economy, consider the opposite scenario of Mr. Obama's economy, where everybody is losing money, but the rich most of all. The financial crisis has certainly harmed ordinary Americas, but in both absolute numbers and percentages, it's been a bloodbath for the very wealthy.

What happens when the very rich lose their shirts? They stop buying Learjets and investing in new companies which means that ordinary people lose their jobs. However, on average, in this recession the wealthy have lost more than normal folks have. In other words, everyone has gotten poorer, but the rich have gotten poorer by more.

Don't feel too bad for them, they've still got way more than you or I, but the effect on Obama's newly rigged poverty statistics is startling.

When the rich lose their shirts, GDP falls enormously. So does the GDP per capita, and so does the poverty line. Now we have poor people getting poorer, but the poverty line drops beneath them because of what the rich have lost. Sure you may be making even less money than you were last year, but you're not poor anymore! The statistics say so!

What sort of a system is it where making the nation richer raises the poverty rate, and making it poorer lowers the number of people who count as poor? There's a very simple phrase that explains both this sort of system and Mr. Obama's core beliefs:

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.

It is now crystal clear: Mr. Obama does not want America to be a land where each individual can rise by his own efforts to whatever heights his abilities enable him to reach with the unavoidable result that some will be rich and successful and others will be poor and failures. Instead, he wants an America where we all are pretty much the same, no matter our talents or hard work, and there is a much smaller gap between rich and poor. For Mr. Obama, poverty isn't being hungry or cold; it's knowing that there are other people out there with more than you.

And when, as in the Soviet Union, there is equality in poverty - we are all equally poor, cold, and miserable, by force of government policy - then the statistics will show poverty has been eliminated, and the great dream of liberalism will finally have been achieved.

There's a better way: Recognize that absolute poverty has already been eliminated in the United States, and that our current command-and-control welfare system simply perpetuates the relative poverty of laziness and failure. But that would mean there'd be no need for liberals, leftists, Democrats, or any of their liberty-destroying government programs.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on liberalism, lies, poverty and statistics

Snaky Politicians Doom the New Hampshire Advantage

Will Offensicht — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:45:00 GMT

In "Snake Market Crash," the Wall Street Journal reports that even though stock prices are getting back to something approaching normal, the market for exotic snakes has collapsed:

Early in 2009, "investment grade" big snakes—critters with genetic mutations that create rare colorings—still held their premium values. But since last spring, the mutant-snake bubble has burst.

Premium pythons that could fetch $40,000 in 2007 now go for half that sum, breeders report. The price for a hypomelanistic boa constrictor, one with a mutation that lightens its skin tone, was $99 on Feb. 1, down from $5,000 in 2007, on Kingsnake.com, a classified-ad site that acts as a market-maker for snakes.

People want snakes as pets. The rarer the snake's coloring, the higher the price used to be, until the government destroyed the market.

The turning point: Senate Bill 373, which Florida Democrat Bill Nelson proposed in February 2009 to prevent situations like one in the Everglades, where escaped Burmese pythons have devoured native animals. The bill would ban importation and interstate transport of boa constrictors, anacondas and large pythons. A similar antisnake bill followed in the House.

Neither bill has passed yet, but "no one is willing to give me $10,000 for a snake when they think they may be added to an injurious-species list," says Mike Wilbanks, 41 years old, an Oklahoma python breeder. [emphasis added]

The government doesn't have to pass a law to destroy a market along with many people's livelihoods. This bill hasn't passed, but just having legislators talk about a new law wiped out the market. This is a perfectly natural consequence of our conceding that the government has the right to regulate pretty much anything it chooses.

The Massachusetts Miracle

When I entered college in Boston many decades ago, Route 128, the circular beltway around Boston, was booming. Graduates of MIT, Boston University, Harvard, and many other Boston-area universities were starting businesses as they graduated from college. At the time, believe it or not, there was no Massachusetts sales tax!

All good things come to an end, of course. Over time the Massachusetts legislature harmed many businesses and drove entrepreneurs to California by boosting taxes to the point that it was better to move 3,000 miles and find a whole new set of business contacts than to stay in Massachusetts and pay Massachusetts taxes.

As taxes went up, some entrepreneurs moved to New Hampshire which had neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Although New Hampshire had no major airport and there were no banks that could handle a growing business with international sales, a significant number of entrepreneurs took advantage of what became known as the "New Hampshire Advantage" of lower taxes and much cheaper real estate.

Loose Lips Sink Economies

I was recently talking with a friend who's been involved in over 100 start-ups. His first forays into entrepreneurial capitalism were in Massachusetts; I worked for him at one of his Massachusetts start-ups before he moved north.

When he left the People's Republic of Taxachusetts about 30 years ago, I thought it was because taxes were going up; that was the reason I moved a few years later. In our recent conversation, however, he told me the real reason he'd left.

It wasn't because taxes were going up. They were, he said, but the rate hadn't gotten to the point that it was worth the trouble for him to move quite yet. What drive him out, then? It was a law that didn't pass.

Massachusetts legislators had noticed that more and more entrepreneurs were moving to California and fewer were starting businesses in Massachusetts. What's worse, some entrepreneurs who'd started in Massachusetts were moving their business west as the owners realized how much money the move would save them at tax-time.

It's the nature of legislators to legislate regardless of consequences. The Democrat's determination to ram Obamacare through regardless of the public's views and regardless of the fact that it will make our entitlements crisis a lot worse shows that politicians don't care how their laws work out, they just want to pass laws.

There was no need for the legislators to ask why entrepreneurs were leaving - the entrepreneurs had told them, over and over, that taxes were getting too high. Nobody even thought about lowering taxes; the state employee unions who supported the legislators would have a cow. So they proposed a law making it illegal to move a business from Massachusetts to another state.

"Yipe," you may say, "they can't do that!" Well, maybe the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution means they can't actually, but what entrepreneur wanted the hassle of a lawsuit? Starting a new business is very hard. Investors figure that if one new venture in 10 succeeds, they're doing well. The last thing a busy entrepreneur needs when he's laboring to earn enough money to be able to pay more taxes is regulatory hassles.

The law against businesses moving out of Massachusetts never went anywhere, but the fact that they talked about it at all panicked the Massachusetts investor community. The venture capitalists advised would-be entrepreneurs to start the business anywhere but Massachusetts; they didn't want to run the slightest risk of being told they couldn't sell the business to someone who wanted to move it to Chicago.

When I look back on it, I remember that the Massachusetts Miracle withered away awfully fast, virtually overnight. I now know why - Massachusetts venture-capital start-ups suddenly ceased absolutely. Why start a business in Massachusetts if the state might give you grief if you decide you have to move?

The End of the New Hampshire Advantage

My friend moved to New Hampshire and helped to start another 70 or 80 companies. Maybe 1 in 10 or 20 succeeded, but what about the rest? A few, maybe 1 or 2 out of ten, disappear entirely. The money goes down the drain, the doors shut, and it's all over. If 1 succeeds and 2 disappear, what about the other 7? They hang on, making no profit, but the entrepreneur can't let go because he knows he can make it work with just a little more effort. The investors won't put in any more money, but as long as the entrepreneur covers his costs, he can go on forever.

Some of us call them "zombie corporations" because they're the walking dead - they neither grow nor fail. From the government's point of view, a zombie corporation is no bad thing; it has no taxable profits but it employs people, if only a handful, who pay taxes. No individual zombie corporation is any big deal, but a lot of them together can make a noticeable difference to unemployment.

My friend ended up with stock in a lot of zombie corporations operating in New Hampshire. He kept them going hoping that lightning would strike because you never know. It didn't cost anything to keep them alive, so why not?

Unfortunately for New Hampshire, Massachusetts taxes and housing costs got so high that many people who were perfectly happy with Massachusetts liberalism left for New Hampshire just to find housing they could afford. Most of them didn't realize that liberal policies were what had made it impossible for them to afford to live in Massachusetts; they started voting for liberals in their new homes. Massachusetts refugees gradually turned New Hampshire blue until we now have a Democratic legislature and governor.

State spending went up because that's what liberals do, although nobody besides state employee unions noticed any benefits from the added spending. With the financial crisis, New Hampshire ran out of money, but, as with Massachusetts, cutting spending was abhorrent.

Early this year, the legislature introduced a law to tax businesses on their total sales whether they made a profit or not. Even if a business made a loss, it would have to pay a tax on total sales.

That law didn't pass because business owners raised Cain, but it came a lot closer to passing than the Massachusetts law against moving businesses out of Massachusetts.

That was the last straw for my friend - his zombies couldn't operate any more. Although the law didn't pass, it would probably be back next year because the chances of Democrats cutting spending are close to nil. The law as written was retroactive - he would have had to pay taxes on past sales even in years when he ran at a loss.

Not having any idea what his retroactive liabilities might be, my friend did the rational thing and shut down his zombies, laying off all their employees. The businesses weren't paying any taxes, but the employees had been earning money; now they're collecting unemployment. More jobs lost, thanks to ill-considered palaver by politicians.

"But," we can hear the politicians saying, "we didn't raise the tax, and it doesn't apply until a business gets big enough to afford it."

Politicians have no clue how long it generally takes for a business to turn profitable. Some businesses need a lot more sales volume than expected because there are lots of unanticipated expenses; that's why so many start-ups turn into zombies. The fact that the legislature would talk about a tax on businesses that lose money and that they planned to make it retroactive means that they have no idea why entrepreneurs would start businesses in New Hampshire - low taxes and lower rents make it more likely they can make the business profitable before they run out of investment money.

Entrepreneurs don't know much about politics as a general rule, but Mark Twain's observation that no man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session is burned into their souls. New Hampshire lacks the legal, banking, and technical infrastructure to support start-ups; low taxes and a business-friendly government made up for enough of that for my friend and many of his associates to partake of the New Hampshire Advantage.

Now that the government has demonstrated that it can't be trusted, New Hampshire shouldn't expect many new investment-driven businesses to choose New Hampshire.

Killing the National Advantage

Everyone knows, or should know, that America prospered in the past because people such as Bill Gates, Henry Ford, H.J. Heinz and countless others founded businesses that grew, sold products people wanted to buy, and hired workers to meet customer needs. That works only so long as entrepreneurs and businessmen believe that conditions won't change on them.

Like the New Hampshire and Massachusetts legislators who created economic uncertainty and killed existing jobs, the Obama administration is creating uncertainty that's killing future jobs. The Wall Street Journal documented this phenomenon:

In a letter to his shareholders, Edward S. “Eddie” Lampert, chairman of Sears Holdings, summed up how Washington’s political obstacles may impede a robust recovery:

“Sears Holdings shares the stated goal of many public officials of creating jobs. But, we don’t believe that we need large government programs to generate these jobs. Public officials often fail to recognize the obstacles they place in the way of job creation. For example, over the past year proposal after proposal has been put forward to reform health care, reform the financial system, increase taxes, and add regulations, all with the intention of making the United States a better and stronger country. [emphasis added]

“Yet, as a business, trying to understand which of these proposals might become law, what their impact might be on business prospects and competition, and what additional costs they might impose creates a great deal of uncertainty. It has led our management team and board (and I am sure those managements and boards of other companies) to spend inordinate time trying to determine which investments we should make, defer, or cancel and which jobs to create, maintain, or eliminate. The removal of this uncertainty and the constant drumbeat of new threats against various businesses would go a long way to allowing American entrepreneurial energy to be unleashed.” [emphasis added]

Here's a businessman explaining to his stockholders why their business can't grow - there's so much uncertainty that they can't decide which jobs to "create, maintain, or eliminate." That's bad enough for an established business, but when an entrepreneur's working 18-hour days getting a business off the ground, there's no way he or she can "spend inordinate time" figuring out how to cope with upcoming regulations. If regulatory uncertainty can stop an existing business from creating jobs, what do you think it does to companies that aren't even founded yet?

It's Not Just New Hampshire

New Hampshire legislators are not the only ones who cavalierly destroy jobs. Governments have been looking greedily at taxing Internet sales since there were Internet sales. Fortunately, the federal government passed a law against taxing internet sales unless the vendor had a site in the state.

Several scandals ago, New York's (now ex-) Governor Spitzer proposed a law that would force Amazon to pay New York sales tax. This was because Amazon allows affiliated merchants to advertise through their web site. Amazon provides a guarantee, so customers are willing to buy from tiny vendors whom they don't know. This is good for economic activity, but governors lust to tax the money.

Spitzer's position was that all these Amazon affiliates who were located in New York State meant that Amazon had locations in New York and therefore had to pay sales tax. That proposal disappeared along with Spitzer, but other governors took notice.

In "Amazon Hits Back at Colorado Web Sales Tax," the Wall Street Journal reports that the State of Colorado tried to get around the prohibition against taxing internet sales by requiring that Amazon report all sales to Colorado residents to the state government so that the state could go after them to collect the tax. Amazon emailed its Colorado retailers and pulled the plug on them so that they could not be said to have locations in Colorado. The Journal reported:

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter said, "Amazon has taken a disappointing-and completely unjustified-step. Amazon is simply trying to avoid compliance with Colorado law."

Well, duh! Of course Amazon is trying to avoid compliance with Colorado law! Amazon knows how their customers would feel about having their purchases reported to the state government; pulling the plug on their Colorado affiliates was much less damaging than reporting their sales to the state would have been. I have friends in the book business who tell me that Internet sales make the difference between closing the doors and surviving. How many jobs has Colorado destroyed?

Most states increased their budgets by hiring lots of new state employees during the boom times. Why not cut state workers pay now? Why not eliminate a few government jobs?

Words Have Meaning

The Wall Street Journal told us how the government wiped out the market for exotic snakes, killing jobs at snake breeders and at the businesses which sold rats to feed the snakes, simply by introducing a law that hasn't gone anywhere.

Most of the proposed regulations cited by Mr. Lampert won't become law but there is no way to tell in advance: talking about new regulations creates uncertainty.

Years ago, Massachusetts forced the Massachusetts Miracle into cardiac arrest by talking about a law.

We've seen New Hampshire do its very best to drive away job-creating new businesses by proposing a retroactive tax on businesses even if they lose money.

Never having earned any money by creating value themselves, politicians evidently have no idea how hard it is. Having confidence in their ability to get more money by raising taxes, they can't understand how easily investors can lose confidence in their businesses' ability to sell products.

Entrepreneurs labor mightily to put themselves into positions where they'll have to pay lots of income tax and to hire lots of employees who'll pay lots of income tax; so do the leaders of established businesses. The head of Sears Holdings says his company wants to create jobs. What's wrong with that?

Politicians need to watch what they say. They don't have to pass laws to destroy jobs. Just talking about raising taxes or new regulations can shut businesses down on the spot.

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on economics, Eliot Spitzer, entrepreneurship, red tape, regulation and taxes

Obama Goes Off The Deep End, Bans Fishing?

Hobbes — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:13:00 GMT

Appalling news from Washington is coming so thick and fast these days that it's impossible to keep track of it all. What's more, some reports are so outlandish that they seem like they must be from the Onion, yet are perfectly true. For instance, who would have dreamed that Mr. Obama would have tried to appoint as Safe-Schools Czar a man who encouraged one of his underage male student in the pursuit of a homosexual relationship with an older man, which is by definition statutory rape? It sounds like the stuff of bad late-night comedy, but apparently it is a fact.

Today comes news of perhaps the most far-out infringement we've yet seen presented as truth. ESPN, not normally noted for either political parody or right-wing bias, reports:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters... [NOAA official] Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June. [emphasis added]

Normally, this tale sounds so fishy that we'd file it in the "Yeah, right" folder. But then, for the Federal government to require all Americans to purchase a private product (health insurance) from private companies under penalty of fines or imprisonment seems far-fetched and blatantly unconstitutional, yet not only is this being seriously proposed in Obamacare, the entire Democratic party and media establishment do not even consider its Constitutionality to be a valid question.

Can the Federal government actually ban fishing? The history of waterways regulation does not provide much reassurance. For decades, we've heard of individuals whose privately-owned land was rendered useless because of the presence of "wetlands" where laws forbade construction of any kind.

Quick, call the Green Police! Something's catching a fish!

Your humble correspondent's own grandparents fell foul of these ever-growing regulations when they purchased an attractive but small building plot next to a stream many years ago. Some decades later when they wanted to actually build something on it, they discovered they could no longer do so - it had become illegal to build anything too near a waterway. Once the new setback distance was applied, the property had been filleted so finely as to be totally useless - though still heavily taxed.

The heavy regulations of "navigable waters of the United States," which makes some sense if applied to rivers that boats and commerce can use, have been extended even to tiny streams navigable only by fish. If Mr. Obama's environmentalist activists have their way, you wouldn't be able even to catch those fish!

Of course, this won't inconvenience our elites who do so like their sushi; they certainly wouldn't stoop to catching it themselves. Even notorious bully Rahm Emmanuel, who once sent a rotting dead fish to a pollster who dared produce results Rahmbo didn't like, probably just bought his fish at a store. Now he can send his opponents to sleep with the fishes without worrying about an angler hooking one by accident!

For all you little people, you can now add fishing rods to the guns and Bibles you're bitterly clinging to. At least this way we won't have to appoint lawyers for the fish like the Swiss do.

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Hobbes is a staff writer for Scragged.com. Read other Scragged.com articles on bureaucracy, regulation, statism, That's Bureaucracy! and totalitarianism

America the Ungovernable?

Petrarch — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:12:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks, a new meme has popped up and taken firm root in the mainstream media: the idea that America is currently ungovernable. Here we have a President and Congress from the same party, with overwhelming majorities, and yet somehow they don't seem able to enact their policy goals! From eliminating union secret ballots to cap-and-tax to Obamacare, many of the most significant laws proposed by Mr. Obama have hit the rocks or seized up entirely.

Yet our nation's manifold problems remain, un-addressed by Congress. Is it time for a Constitutional convention? Or do the elites simply need to import an entire new electorate more to their taste, as England's Labour government has been doing?

No. We do indeed have a highly dysfunctional government and America is indeed at risk because of it, but it's not because America is ungovernable. The current administration hasn't even tried to govern as Americans understand the term.

What Mr. Obama and his fellow liberal elites have tried to do is to rule - and yes, that isn't going to work. Americans want to be governed, but they do not want to be ruled; when somebody tries to impose an authoritarian rule on them, they tend to get, well, unruly.

The Consent of the People

Mr. Obama famously expressed his view of how his government operates when he responded to Republican criticism with a simple phrase:

I won.

Yes, he did - just like almost every other president we've ever had, not counting JFK's stolen election. He may have lied to do it, but he didn't cheat: people pulled the lever for him fair and square. The same is true for almost all of his Democratic majority. Say what you will about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, they too were legitimately elected by majorities of their constituents. They do, indeed, have the full right to the power they enjoy under the Constitution.

There's the rub: under the Constitution.

When George Washington, the Father of his Country, achieved victory over the British at Yorktown, there was a crown his for the asking. Had he wished it, he could without the slightest trouble become King George I; in fact, many of his peers expected and urged him to. The Revolution wasn't begun against the idea of kings in general, but of kings and Parliaments that wanted to impose their will on the people regardless of what the people thought.

King George Washington would never have been an autocrat like a czar, but a constitutional monarchy like England now has would have been perfectly acceptable to the nation. It's to Washington's everlasting credit that he soundly rejected this personal glory; instead, we have a republican democracy, in which the people choose their own rulers who then swear an oath to obey the written limits of the Constitution.

Where in the Constitution is the government granted the authority to require people to purchase health insurance? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi not only doesn't know, she doesn't even accept it as a valid question. When asked, her only response was a derisory

Are you serious? Are you serious?

Barack Obama may be the president, but he is not the King, nor is he a dictator. What he says goes in relation to our military, for good or ill - he is the Commander in Chief, designated so by our Constitution. In all other matters, he is obliged to uphold his oath to follow the law and honor the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

Technically, it may indeed be possible to ram Obamacare through via back-door maneuvering. Considering that two-thirds of Americans want the bill scrapped, would that be the act of a leader who wants to govern a free people? No - it is the iron-fisted determination of one who wants to rule over a land populated by subjects who do as they are told and take what they are given.

Bill Clinton was no conservative, but he understood the difference. He, too, tried to ram Hillarycare down our throats, and discovered America to be an unruly nation that wouldn't tolerate such arrogance. Unlike Mr. Obama, he quickly changed tack and started governing - listening to the voters and their elected representatives, enacting compromises, where necessary persuading the people that his way was best. Despite his personal immorality, he is to this day remembered as a pretty decent President.

The United States of America is indeed governable. When politicians start complaining that it is not, it's a clear sign that they don't want to govern at all, but that they would rather rule by force and fiat.

Our media may wish their beloved liberal icons could simply speak the word and make all their statist dreams come true, but they'd do better to consider what happens to media outlets in countries that are run that way. When the jackboots come down, journalists are the first to get crushed.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on Barack Obama, Democrats, government and statism

Betraying Our British Allies in the Falklands

Petrarch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:18:00 GMT

President Obama's diplomatic misadventures have been the stuff of comedy since the earliest days of his administration. Whether he's bowing low to foreign royalty, palling around with banana-republic dictators, or apologizing to our enemies, patriots cringe whenever Air Force One revs its engines. America is not well served by becoming a laughingstock.

There are, however, worse things, and the Obama administration is hard at work finding them. For a little perspective on the latest blunder, let's think back to the campaign. Was not a favorite anti-Republican attack line condemnation of Bush's "unilateralism"? That Republicans wanted America to do exactly as it pleased all by itself, disregarding whatever the rest of the world might think? In fact, wasn't one of Obama's arguments as to why he needed to be President, that electing him would make foreigners like us better?

Yes, changing faces caused a spike in international relations. Unfortunately, world leaders are not teenage girls or MSNBC anchormen; they don't just fall in love with a pretty face, they expect deeds to match words. What Obama says doesn't matter nearly so much as what he does. And what he is doing, is visibly and coldly betraying our allies.

Being Invaded? You're On Your Own!

Most of the British Empire has vanished into history, but England does still own the odd scrap of land here and there. One of these remaining vestiges is the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina.

There's no problem with traditional native inhabitants of the Falklands: there weren't any when European explorers discovered them in the 1500s. The first settlement was founded by the French in 1764, the British showed up the next year, and then the Spanish took over the French. By the early 1800s, the only remaining "authorities" were plaques placed by both England and Spain asserting a claim they were too cheap to do anything further about. Argentina tried to found a colony, got in a fight with the U.S. Navy, and once again there was no clear control.

Finally, in 1833 the British returned in force. They built a navy base and administrative headquarters, breezily telling the Argentines where they could stick their rather tenuous claim. Since then, for many generations, the Falkland Islanders have seen themselves as British as John Bull.

Except briefly in 1982, when after a century and a half of ignoring the place, Argentina abruptly invaded the islands. Unfortunately for the military dictatorship of the time, they'd picked the wrong moment: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in no mood to let go of any more British sovereign territory. The Falkland Island War ended in total defeat for Argentina and a much more powerful British garrison on the islands.

Now, Argentina is at it again. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has announced a sort of bureaucratic blockade of the islands, demanding any ships going there to ask Argentine permission first. Why? Because there may be oil in Falklands waters, the British are trying to drill for it, and the Argentinian government would rather the money go to their struggling economy. In response, the Royal Navy sent warships.

So far, so ordinary - this sort of thing has happened countless times throughout history and doubtless will continue as long as human nature remains what it is. This also is exactly why even powerful countries like to have allies.

We in the United States may not hear about it very often, but British soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq alongside Americans. They've been there since Day One. The political price paid back in their home was if anything greater than the disdain George W. Bush suffered at the hands of the media; previously beloved Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to resign after the public mood soured, and Gordon Brown is almost as despised. Both are testifying before an inquiry into their supposed war crimes and lies, a fate unlikely ever to befall Mr. Bush.

What did England get for their loyalty? Nothing really; they have their own North Sea oil, and are not nearly as dependent on Middle East sources as we are. Yet Mr. Blair was absolutely confident that staying the very closest international friend of the United States was worth any price, in money or in blood.

Neutral? Are You Kidding?

Now comes the time for us to be loyal to our loyal friend. And what happens? The Obama administration announces that America is neutral in the dispute between England and Argentina. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton goes, not to England to vow our support, but to Argentina to make nice! Again, our media are totally ignoring the existence of these events, but the Brits are screaming betrayal; rightly so.

It's all the more inexplicable when you consider that, to invade, the Argentines would have to mount a seaborne amphibious assault. They did this successfully (albeit temporarily) in 1982, but they're not exactly a major power. An American navy task group in the area would totally eliminate any serious possibility of conflict. In fact, this is a perfect example of the most important lesson Barack Obama has yet to learn: by making a credible threat of force, you can often avoid the need to actually use that force.

In his defense, Mr. Obama's aides point out that Ronald Reagan was neutral in 1982. This is, unfortunately, partially correct - Reagan did indeed proclaim neutrality, try to resolve the dispute diplomatically, and didn't send any American forces. We regard this as one of Mr. Reagan's mistakes. But once the shooting started, he supported the British in all ways other than American lives.

American neutrality can lead directly to American deaths. Remember back when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? Apparently he had tried to feel out the local American ambassador, who had no instructions on the subject and had no real reaction. Hussein took this to mean that America really didn't care which autocrat was running what, and that he was free to invade his neighbor. He turned out to be quite profoundly wrong on this point, but if our ambassador had made it plain that aggression would be met with deadly force, he probably wouldn't have tried it and would have saved us all a great deal of trouble.

There hasn't been any shooting yet, so it's possible that Mr. Obama is following the same mistaken path as Mr. Reagan and intends to stand by our ally after a period of dithering. Let's hope so - because if he really, truly intends to stay neutral, we will instantly lose our only major fighting ally of great significance in Afghanistan and Iraq. The British would withdraw of course; their first job is to defend British sovereign territory which is what the Falklands are.

That would leave our wars as virtually what the Democrats falsely portrayed them as under George W. Bush: an Americans-only imperial adventure. What's more, where Candidate Obama campaigned against Bush's supposed disrespect to our allies and loss of their confidence, President Obama would have showed real, substantive disrespect and confidence-betrayal in a way that nobody could ever imagine Mr. Bush doing. Wouldn't that be ironic?

Someday, we will again be in need of allies - and we won't have any.

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on England, allies, Falkland Islands and invasion

Two Cheers for Bunning's Bunt

Petrarch — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:40:00 GMT

With ten percent of Americans unemployed and nearly as many underemployed or having given up, what sort of hard-hearted Scrooge would prevent help from being given to them? What sort of madness would possess a politician to flip the bird to his suffering constituents this way? Yet that's exactly what Sen. Jim Bunning (R, KY) did in obstructing an extension of unemployment benefits - or so we are told.

Who is telling us this? The Democrats and the mainstream media, which should be your first warning. Far from being a stone-cold miser, Sen. Bunning's noble stand presented a vanishingly rare example of doing what is right, not what is expedient.

Emergency, Yes, But It Still Must Be Paid For!

First, the lie: Sen. Bunning did not filibuster the bill extending unemployment benefits. He didn't even attempt a filibuster. All he did, by refusing to agree to what's called "unanimous consent," was force the matter to be discussed and debated. Isn't that what we pay Senators to do?

Our Congress so loves creating new laws we must obey and spending money we don't have that they can't even be bothered to read or talk about much of it. For bills which are thought to be uncontroversial, like extending unemployment benefits in the teeth of a recession, they basically ask, "Anybody mind if we just consider it passed and move on? No? OK, it's passed, next bill..." Sen. Bunning stood up and said "No!", to everyone's shock.

Yet what was the result? The bill still passed; the benefits were still extended. But we had to talk about it first.

Don't you think we need to stop this?

That's what's essential. Because as important and helpful as unemployment benefits are, we still have to pay for them. Just this year, Congress and Obama signed "Pay-Go" legislation, which in theory requires all spending to be paid for either by spending cuts elsewhere or by tax increases. In other words, we're supposed to start reducing our mammoth, gargantuan, historic deficits - and not a moment too soon.

The ink on "Pay-Go" hasn't even dried, and here come the Democrats trying to pass yet more spending without paying for it. Important spending, yes. Necessary spending, even. And in the grand scheme of things, the $10 billion cost is infinitesimal.

But Sen. Bunning pointed out that the tiny size of the bill was precisely why it ought to be paid for:

Many people asked me, "Why now?" My answer is, "Why not now?" Why can't a non-controversial measure in the Senate that would help those in need be paid for? If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything. [emphasis added]

He's hit the nail on the head and anyone who pays the slightest attention to politics knows it: Our Congress has totally gotten out of the habit of ever paying for anything. They just spend, and spend, and spend; no worries about where the money will come from! The Chinese will always lend us more!

Except that, sooner or later, they won't. The Chinese have already sent us a warning by selling off a record amount of US government bonds. Chinese audiences publicly laughed at Treasury Secretary Geithner when he tried to reassure them that we're good for our debts. They are well aware that when you owe the bank trillions, the bank has a problem.

But back to poor beleaguered Sen. Bunning. It's no surprise that the Democrats complained; they've never let anything stand in the way of spending other people's money and they don't care whose it is. The truly shameful and deeply depressing news is that the Senator's fellow Republicans hung him out to dry twisting in the wind. National Review mourned in disgust:

Here’s the sad truth: For all the shining they did at last week’s White House “summit” on health care, when it gets down to actually putting the brakes on the Big Gummint Express, most of today’s Republicans are AWOL. They’re great at the debate society. But making the fight on something concrete, really saying no when it means grinding redistribution to a halt, means taking the slings and arrows. No thanks, they say, let’s just make the whole thing go away on a voice vote, the sooner the better.

We at Scragged are not really inclined to support a third party; historically, in the American system third parties simply do not work. All they accomplish is the exact opposite of their goals, since they split the vote on their side of the political spectrum and allow their bitterest enemies to triumph. Sometimes we can't help but wonder if the old canard about the Evil Party and the Stupid Party has become so profoundly true, that it's time to kill off the Stupids in the hopes that something, anything, would be more effective at stopping the Evils.

If we cannot even get the supposed "conservative" party to stand together on sound fiscal principles, what hope is there for permanent improvements? Publish all the editorials you please arguing for a Constitutional amendment limiting government spending; that'll be just as effective as promising to have a lower credit card bill next month. It's time to cut up the credit cards today, trash the debit cards, lock up the ATM cards, and live on cash only no matter how painful.

But who will lead us? The ancient prophet Ezekiel reported God bemoaning:

And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none. [emphasis added]

Not even Senator Bunning: After hanging on alone for almost a week, he knuckled under and signed off on unanimous consent, the $10 billion still unpaid for by even the slightest reduction elsewhere, not even using unspent stimulus dollars. Thanks for... well, not so very much, Senator, but more than the rest of your party!

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Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged. Read other Scragged.com articles on budget, debt and deficits

The Chinese Way to Manage Stem-Cell Research

Will Offensicht — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:14:00 GMT

The Economist reports that Chinese researchers are doing world-class stem-cell research, but they identify a problem - they don't think that Chinese medical research is regulated tightly enough. Their article opens:

In the field of stem cells, China is showing that it can do world-class science. It is a shame, then, that so many fraudsters operate and that officialdom turns a blind eye.

Their tone of viewing with alarm continues into the body of the report:

A Confucian rejection of the idea that embryos are in any meaningful sense human beings (a view shared by many Koreans), together with the possibility of stealing a march on the diffident West, has stimulated a lot of research into stem cells in China. And not only research. Chinese clinics have moved with what many foreign scientists regard as indecent haste into the offering of therapies. Patients from around the world fly in for the treatment of conditions ranging from autism to spinal-cord injury—treatments that are rarely based on science that would pass muster with the authorities in most rich countries, and are often outright frauds.

The point of studying stem cells is that a stem cell can turn into any one of the body's hundreds of different cell types. If you break a nerve connecting your brain to your hand, for example, you'll be paralyzed unless the nerve grows back. Human nerves seldom do that, but stem cells offer the potential to grow new nerve cells to give you back the use of your hand.

Stem cells offer so much promise that they're being studied all over the world. Chinese researchers are world class, but the Economist is afraid that Chinese entrepreneurs are selling unproven cures.

China’s health ministry has, however, turned a blind eye to the unauthorised stem-cell therapies offered by hundreds of hospitals under its jurisdiction. One company in particular, Beike Biotechnology in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, is notorious for its internet claims and marketing efforts in countries around the world. It claims to supply stem cells to a network of more than two dozen hospitals in China and one in Thailand for treating myriad conditions at a cost of about $20,000 a pop.

Beike says it has treated over 6,000 patients, but it has yet to publish any papers in internationally recognised, peer-reviewed journals. Yet it seems to have powerful friends. It claims to have received funding from the China State National Fund and Shenzhen municipality. It also claims to have members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering on its scientific advisory board. And Xinhua, China’s state press agency, calls Beike “a global leader in stem-cell research and treatment through evidence-based medicine”. [emphasis added]

First of all, what's so special about "peer reviewed" journals? The emails leaked during Climategate showed that the peer review process has been manipulated when "respected" scientists sought to suppress competing studies which indicated that global warming wasn't as scary as they wanted taxpayers to believe. Given what we now know about "peer review," we can sympathize with Chinese reluctance to get involved.

Furthermore, why should the Chinese give away hard-won, commercially-valuable knowledge? Researchers in the US are not supposed to profit from federally-funded research, at least not much. They're supposed to get their rewards from being published and honored while leaving the profits to their universities and to drug merchants. Can anyone blame Chinese researchers for not wanting to be exploited like unpaid college football stars?

Finally, how does one test a new medical treatment? One tries it. If you're in the United States, you have to genuflect to the FDA and jump through myriad hoops to get permission to test a new therapy, and then you have to pay all the treatment costs yourself until it's approved. Thus, only obscenely well-funded organizations can afford to carry out medical research - it costs about a billion dollars to get any new treatment through the approval process.

The Chinese approach, while perhaps a bit rough on early-adopters who line up to pay to have new therapies tested on them, will almost certainly lead to faster progress than the hidebound FDA approach. Not only are there far fewer regulatory hurdles to testing a new treatment, you can ask the patients to pay for your tests! That's why a promising new cancer therapy is being tested in China rather than in the United States. It's so out-of-the-box that there's no way to get the FDA to even consider approving a trial. Since it would be illegal to test it in the US and the Chinese were receptive, it was a no-brainer to move the research offshore.

The Chinese approach may lead to more patient deaths as new therapies are tested too early, but it will probably save lives overall as workable treatments are found and debugged faster.

On the whole, we disagree with the Economist. As long as full disclosure of the risks is made to the patients so they can give their informed consent, we believe that the Chinese approach will save more lives due to treatments being tested faster than it costs as dangerous therapies are tried too soon. Only time will tell.

Read the original article on Scragged.com

Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on China, medicine, regulation and research

The Toyota Circus and Fly By Wire

Will Offensicht — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:45:00 GMT

As Obama thrashes around for a way to distract American voters from his many ongoing failures, poor Toyota has found itself cast as the Villain of the Week. It doesn't seem to make any difference that way back in 1989, the National Highway Safety Administration studied the problem and concluded that almost all cases of sudden acceleration are caused by driver error.

This should have as least calmed the issue a bit, but facts matter little when politicians need a circus to take people's minds off the situation. Some argue that modern cars have so many electronic components and so much software that problems might be caused by the electronics in addition to driver error even though there's no direct evidence of any such issues. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. LaHood [United States Transportation Secretary] said the NHTSA will conduct a deeper review of automotive-electronics issues. "There are people that believe there are electronics problems with Toyotas, and that's the reason we are going to do a review," he said. "We don't have evidence to say conclusively that there are electronic problems." [emphasis added]

There was the usual bickering, of course:

Several lawmakers criticized NHTSA for taking too long to act on reports of Toyota sudden acceleration problems. Some lawmakers also questioned whether the Obama administration has been more aggressive with Toyota than with domestic auto makers in which the U.S. government holds a stake, such as General Motors Co.

It's certainly true that sudden acceleration has been a problem for decades and that it's not unique to Toyota. Let's set aside the rather obvious possibility that the government is trying to promote domestic car makers over foreign makers and trying to boost union jobs over non-union jobs. Instead, let's stick to the engineering and consider the issue of whether there could actually be a gremlin hiding in the electronics.

Software, Software Everywhere

It's not totally bogus to suggest that the 1989 study which blamed driver error for sudden acceleration should be revisited because there's so many more electronic gadgets in cars now than there were then. In the old days, the gas pedal pulled a cable that ran to valves in the carburetor. When you pushed down, the valves opened. As more air flowed into the carburetor, it mixed with more gas and the engine gave more power. When you let up on the pedal, the valves closed, the engine got less air and fuel, and you got less power.

There were problems with sudden acceleration - when the valve stuck. Not only was this pretty rare, it was very easy to prove after an accident: the valve would still be stuck open, jammed on engine scum or whatever, or maybe the cable would be snagged on something. Unfortunate, yes, but no mystery, and almost totally avoidable via regular lubrication and maintenance.

In modern cars, there is no physical or even direct electrical connection between the gas pedal and the engine. When you push the pedal, a computer is told that you want to go faster. The computer considers the air temperature, humidity, EPA regulations, and what Al Gore had for breakfast; it may or may not command the car to go faster right away or at all. Your input is only one of many factors the computer considers in deciding how much power the engine should generate at any given time.

You're not actually controlling the engine like you did in the old days. At best, you send your desires by a wire to a computer which takes them into consideration as it controls the engine. This method of controlling an automobile is called "fly by wire."

Flying By Wire, A Wing, and A Prayer

The term "fly by wire" originated in the aircraft industry. For many years, when the pilot moved the stick or the pedals, he pulled actual cables which ran through pulleys to affect the rudder, flaps, and other control surfaces. All these pulleys had to be kept greased, of course, or the controls would seize up. If a cable wore out and broke, you'd generally had it.

As aircraft got bigger, pilots were simply not strong enough to move the control surfaces. Look at the tail of a big airplane; it's the size of the proverbial barn door. Now think about manually moving the rudder using your leg muscles when it's flying at several hundred miles per hour. Pilots have needed power assistance since before WW II, similar to power steering in cars, but the hydraulic control lines went directly from the pilot's stick all the way out the wings and way back to the tail.

Fly-by-wire broke into the big-time with the Apollo program which landed on the moon 40 years ago. When the rocket was being designed, the astronauts were opposed to fly-by-wire and didn't even want a computer on board. "We got the right stuff," they said. "Just give us the controls and we'll fly it." Unfortunately, testing demonstrated that they couldn't fly the rocket no matter how hard they tried - human reflexes are simply not fast enough to keep a rocket on course.

Once the technology of computer-controlled fly-by-wire had been developed out of necessity, it turned out to save tons of weight on pulleys and hydraulic lines. In the world of commercial aircraft this is invaluable; weight means fuel costs and commercial airlines can't afford to cart around the extra weight. Having been proved in the Apollo program, fly-by-wire found its way onto commercial aircraft on economic grounds.

Why Drive by Wire?

Putting electronics in an automobile doesn't save all that much weight, and weight isn't nearly so important for a vehicle that's supposed to keep all four feet planted firmly on the ground. Automotive drive-by-wire got its start when the EPA mandated that cars stop having bad breath and other government regulations were put in place to require better fuel mileage. Car companies aren't stupid - they know that nobody wants to buy tiny, underpowered cars. They'll use every trick they can find to meet EPA and other government regulations while compromising user-visible performance as little as possible.

Writing clever software to adjust the carburetor, engine, and transmission to current conditions can increase miles per gallon by 5% to 10%. Increasing gas mileage reduces pollution, of course - the further you go per gallon, the less pollution you emit per mile. These sorts of minute, high-speed adjustments are simply not possible to do mechanically; achieving maximum fuel economy requires complex mathematical calculations which are done in software.

Once cars had computers on board, money could be saved by putting more and more functions into fancier software as computers got cheaper. Consider windshield washers. When you hit the wash button, the wipers flip some number of times and the washer puts out a certain number of squirts. It's possible to do all that with mechanical devices, but it's cheaper just to let the computer manage the washer and the wipers since you've already got a computer onboard anyway. You can tweak the software to adjust the way the washer interacts with the wipers without changing any mechanical components.

Consider anti-lock brakes. The first versions had small sensors which figured out that it was time to release the brake when the wheel wasn't turning as fast as the car was going. All the "logic" was physically built into the brake drum. Once you pay to have a computer, it's cheaper to do the calculations controlling the brakes in the same computer where everything else happens. This reduces the number of parts in the brakes and cuts both weight and costs.

Once you've started to move functions into software, you save more money the further you go with it because the cost of putting the same software in one more car is pretty close to zero. Every mechanical part costs something, but if you can use the same software on many different cars, the cost of "just one more" is essentially nothing. It's hard to use the same drive train parts on a 4X4 and on a family sedan, but the windshield washer software can be virtually the same.

The Down-Side of Software Control

Having a computer involved in controlling a car or an airplane means that you've got a problem if the computer fails or the software messes up.

It's one thing if your engine is run by a computer. It's no fun when your engine stops, but you can in theory coast to a safe stop.

Failure modes for other functions are not so benign - for example, the power steering pump stops when the engine stops and most cars are very hard to steer with the power off. The slower the car goes, the harder it gets to steer. With a small or frail driver, losing power steering is tanamount to having no steering at all, creating an unguided missile until the car coasts to a complete stop.

I have a friend who was driving a van-load of possessions and ran out of gas. There was a gas station at his home exit just ahead, so he tried to coast to the pump, but he'd forgotten that his van used power-assisted braking. He could steer with the engine off because he was moving pretty fast, but it got hairy when he started down the exit ramp and found out that the brakes weren't working as well as he expected. He ended up literally standing on the brakes and heaving up on the steering wheel as hard as he could to get enough pedal force to slow the van so he could make the turn at the bottom of the ramp.

What if a computer failure turns off your brakes completely, or jams them on? Or won't let you unlock the doors? That can be even less fun than losing your engine or your steering.

Unfortunately, the computer can't see or feel what's going on; it needs sensors to know temperature, speed, fuel pressure, and any other data it needs. If a computer or sensor failure means that your airplane can't fly at all, you're dead, as the unfortunate passengers on Air France 447 learned the hard way. In this case, the computer itself seems to have worked properly, but ice jammed some of the instruments on the outside of the aircraft; the computer got confused and threw in the towel. Der Spigel reports:

One alarm after another lit up the cockpit monitors. One after another, the autopilot, the automatic engine control system, and the flight computers shut themselves off. "It was like the plane was having a stroke," says Gérard Arnoux, the head of the French pilots union SPAF.

It's not unreasonable on its face for the computer to shut itself off and turn things over to the pilots when it has no idea what's going on. Pilots get paid mostly to ride along in case they have to take over from the computer. As it turned out, being asked to take full and unassisted control without warning in the center of a major storm proved to be a bit much. If the pilots had been in control all along, they might have been able to handle the situation.

We may never know exactly what took down Flight 447 because the black boxes are lost at the bottom of the Atlantic, but Der Spiegel's scenario is all too plausible. The Apollo astronauts understood these issues and were utterly opposed to fly-by-wire. They consented only because the simulators proved that they couldn't fly the rocket themselves no matter what.

As automotive computers more and more functions such as intelligent cruise control, satellite navigation, collision avoidance, automatic parking and such, cars are coming to have as many lines of code as commercial aircraft. That's a great deal of software indeed.

Cars driving along two-dimensional roads aren't in nearly as complex an environment as the 3-D world of aviation, but there are a lot more cars than commercial aircraft. The more cars there are and the more software they carry, the more likely that someone, somewhere, will see the world-famous Blue Screen of Death at an awkward moment.

Software Methodologies

We've all dealt with bugs in Windows software even though Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company which hires hordes of very smart programmers. Most of us have cell phones; I don't know anyone who uses a cell phone who hasn't been the victim of billing "errors" which the companies blame on "the computer."

My Samsung cell phone has annoying glitches in that the alarm clock showed that it would use Ringer 1 to wake me up, but when the time came, it gave me a silent alarm instead. A silent alarm? Was that some kind of a programmer's joke? Software errors are all around us.

Those of us who've wrestled with computers every day find it ironic that there is, in fact, a software development methodology which produces nearly error-free code. The telephone companies didn't want to admit it at the time they were built, but their Electronic Switching Systems (ESS) of days gone by were really giant computers containing reams and reams of software. They routed calls and kept track of every call for billing.

In the 1970s, how often did your phone bill have a bogus call that you didn't make? How often did they miss a call you did make? Virtually never. ESS software was written using unusual software development techniques which aren't widely known outside the telephone industry. It would be nice if they'd share their experience.

There's another way to write very reliable software which is used in automobile factories, of all places. Auto factories are full of automatic machines controlled by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) programmed in what's called "Ladder Logic." A ladder program starts over from the beginning maybe ten times per second. It looks at every input and computes a potentially new value for every output, then it starts over again. The program always takes about the same amount of time to make control decisions no matter how many inputs change at the same time, and by the inherent nature of the ladder language, virtually never fails to behave as it's programmed. Though of course it's still possible to incorrectly program the behavior, it's much easier to replicate the problem or test for potential pitfalls because the predictability is so high and the inputs, outputs, and interactions are very clearly defined.

Conventional software, such as the programs that control most aircraft, uses what are called "real-time operating systems". A real-time OS tries to do the important tasks first and then get around to the less important jobs as time permits.

If you're in an older aircraft such as a 747, you'll note that there's a noticeable delay between the time you push the button to turn on your seat light and the time it comes on, if you push the button when the airplane is doing something that takes a lot of computing such as taking off or landing. When it's flying straight and level, the light changes much faster.

Like the pilot's stick which isn't connected to the control surfaces, your light switch isn't connected to the light, it's connected to the computer. The computer notices that you want the light changed and sends a command to the light to change. Since your wants are far less important than the pilot's desires with respect to the wings and tail, however, your request gets shoved to the bottom of the "when we get around to it" list.

Avionics engineers hope that the computer has enough speed to do all the important jobs under worst-case conditions, but it's very hard to simulate the truly worst case. Automotive software and aircraft software might be more reliable if they used the ESS or ladder logic methodologies, but those techniques are not well known outside their industries. We may have to learn to use new methodologies the hard way.

Whither Toyota?

Our Secretary of Transportation says that the government has no evidence that there are any problems with Toyota electronics, which means that they have no evidence of problems with the software. Toyota's boss says the same. I believe Toyota - they'd be idiots to put cars on the road if they knew of any issues with the electronics - but that doesn't mean there aren't any. Testing the quantity of software that's in a modern automobile is extremely expensive and fantastically difficult. Just ask Microsoft how many bugs they're still wringing out of Internet Explorer, a very old program which is far simpler than the software in a car.

Toyota's internal memo was right to express lack of confidence in the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, saying "the new team has less understanding of engineering issues and are primarily focused on legal issues.” Even if the bureaucrats understood the engineering issues, our government has no capability to develop or test software of any kind. Look at how well they've done at integrating the FBI and CIA databases to coordinate information about upcoming terrorist attacks! They can't get their software act together even though our President says he's "very very angry" about their inability to share information.

For all the posturing by our elected and appointed officials, the government has about as much chance of contributing to actual safety by looking at Toyota software as you and I have of flying to the moon by flapping our arms. That won't keep them from wasting huge sums of money looking at everybody's code, however. Does knowing that our government plans to go over Toyota's code with a fine-tooth comb make you feel any safer?

Read the original article on Scragged.com

Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on automobiles and manufacturing

Men, Women, Marriage, and Not Growing Up 4

Lee Tydings — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:00 GMT

This series has explored many reasons why a modern man would rather not grow up in the sense of taking care of a woman and helping her raise their children, and how this societal immaturity is reflected in modern Western politics. A major political force today is the conflict between the adults, who want to keep as much as possible of their earnings, and voters who insist on acting like children and who want the government to spend more and more of other people's money supporting them.

To understand how to fix a problem, it helps to consider how things got fouled up in the first place. As we bring this series to a close, let's explore the political forces that brought us to this point of familial dissolution and dissipated lives.

Society and Money

A great many so-called "fiscal conservatives" think that social conservatism is at best a waste of time and at worst an unnecessarily divisive list of old-fashioned Thou Shalt Nots which have no place in modern governance. They are mistaken - fiscal conservatism and social conservatism are indivisibly linked.

Without the old-fashioned values of our social conservatives - longstanding rules about marriage, family responsibility, duty to parents, and all the rest of the old-fashioned virtues - there can be no fiscal conservatism because the government will persuade itself that it should step in and fill the void left by the abandoned virtues. When parents don't care for their children, social workers happily put them in foster care at government expense.

The American government has tried and failed miserably to fill in for parents ever since LBJ's Great Society, but that wasn't the first attempt by government to replace parents.

Back in ancient Greek times, the Spartan government didn't think parents could be trusted to raise children militantly enough. Children were moved into dorms when relatively young and raised to government standards, creating the finest warriors the world has ever known.

Some of their legendary military feats are remembered to this day, yet the Spartan civilization is long gone, first defeated by "effeminate" Athens and then by various other invaders from progressively further away. As successful as it seemed to be on the field of battle, the Spartan culture's method of child-rearing has been demonstrated by the impartial forces of natural selection not to work.

More recently, Nazi courts removed children from the homes of parents who didn't raise them as the state expected:

Nov. 29, 1937 In Waldenberg, Germany, a court has taken parents away from their children because they refused to teach them Nazi ideology. The parents are pacifists, members of a Christian sect called International Bible Researchers. The court accused them of creating an environment where the children would grow up "enemies of the state." The children were delivered into the state's care.

The judge delivered a lengthy statement reading in part, "The law as a racial and national instrument entrusts German parents with the education of their children only under certain conditions, namely, that they educate them in the fashion that the nation and state expect." [emphasis added]

Quoted from "Chronicles of the 20th Century," 1987 edition, p 475 Chronicle Publications, Mt. Kisco, NY.

Hitler was quite insistent that every last German child, including the current Pope, must be indoctrinated by participating in his Hitler Youth regardless of how their own families might have felt about it. As with the Spartans, this thoroughgoing totalitarianism failed: the Nazi system didn't last even as long as Sparta.

In America, we don't have anything like the same adamantine demands for the government to raise every last child in the nation, but vast percentages of our children are in effect wards of the state. The Left likes to look on this as a success, but in what alternative world are they living? What, exactly, was or is great about the Great Society?

In what way are we a better or stronger nation now that half our mothers would rather have government take care of their offspring than have their fathers care for them? How is it good to have packs of single young men scampering from bar to bar looking no further than the next sexual conquest because any consequences will be the problem of the taxpayer? There will be no angry father appearing at the door with a shotgun. There may, perhaps, be an IRS agent or a process server with his hand out, but that pitfall can be easily avoided by the simple expedient of not earning enough to interest the government in coming after you for child support.

Immaturity Begets Immaturity

I've wondered for many years how liberals can live with themselves. There were problems with our former patriarchal system, but instead of reforming their men, the women decided to go to war with their men. Liberal politicians happily signed on, trashing men in return for women's votes. The awful consequences of their politics of not forcing people to grow up are now visible in broken homes, delinquency, crime rates, school dropouts, domestic violence, and a host of social pathologies.

Are liberals deluded? Do they think they're doing good? Do they know they're doing harm but are so evil that all that matters to the is getting power by spending other people's money or by passing regulations that take away other people's freedom?

Finally, a light dawned. We know that the Senate and the Congress are populated by millionaires. Despite all the lies about getting money from ordinary people, politics has become so expensive that the only people who can afford to run for national office are wealthy people who either fund their own campaigns or have connections to wealthy people who can help them. For the most part, entrepreneurs who earn the original fortune are too busy to go into politics, so our current politicians are mostly second or third generation wealthy or those who have "earned" their fortune via some postmodern nonproductive career such as that of trial lawyer John Edwards.

Wealthy people have too little time and too much money. They have always had a great deal of trouble getting their children to grow up, going back to the ancient kings who were lucky to get a halfway sane and competent ruler every three or four generations. Modern plutocrats do no better: children of second or third generation wealth are famous for getting into trouble in various ways.

Consider Al Gore, whose father was a wealthy, powerful, respected, and generally honest legislator. Our current Al Gore had no qualms with publishing a documentary riddled with lies. He had no trouble traveling the globe giving high-priced lectures which contained the same lies. He stopped lying, not because he grew up enough to realize that what he was doing was wrong, but because reporters started challenging his lies.

John Kerry was not the first scion of wealth to lie about his military career. Anybody who's tried to raise a child knows that lying comes naturally to all children. The only way to get them to tell the truth is to force them to mature enough to realize that lies end up costing more than they'd like to pay.

Consider Mr. Ayers, Mr. Obama's friend the terrorist. His father was a wealthy Commonwealth Edison executive so Mr. Ayers never had to earn any money on his own. Most of the 9-11 terrorists as well as the Nigerian panty bomber were at least upper middle class. Osama Bin Laden's father is a multi-billionaire.

Then there's the late Teddy Kennedy. His father Joe the rum-runner once said that he had given each of his sons a million dollars on their 21st birthday "so they can tell me to go to hell if they want to." Joe seems not to have noticed that having a million 1960 dollars also meant that his sons could tell everyone else, and indeed polite society itself, to do the same. Having that much money at their disposal also meant that none of them ever had to grow up one bit more than they wanted.

John F. Kennedy seems to have decided at least to grow up sufficiently to put on the expected public display of maturity; his private life, conspiratorially concealed by the media of the day, tells a quite different story. Younger Teddy didn't even attempt to grow up until he qualified for an AARP card. He was caught cheating at Harvard and avoided expulsion only by the intervention of his family; his antics with Washington waitresses are the stuff of legend. There is also the infamous death of Mary Jo Kopechne who slowly asphyxiated in the back seat of his submerged car sunk in a Chappaquiddick creek while he consulted with his lawyers.

Regardless of his escapades, whether abuse of women, rape, or even murder, the lawyers and financiers of the "Kennedy machine" always kept him out of jail.

Teddy never earned an honest dime in his life because he didn't have to. Throughout his Senatorial career, he kept bleating about "fairness" and shoveling taxpayer money at people who didn't want to grow up.

When I Became A Man, I Gave Up Childish Things

What's behind liberal thought? Most liberals never had to grow up themselves and are incapable of properly valuing adult responsibility. Since they view themselves as the epitome of greatness and goodness, they don't think it's fair or reasonable for other people to have to grow up and become more mature than they are. Kennedy didn't have to work, so he thought it was "fair" to set up programs so that other people could enjoy the same benefits of irresponsibility as he did. Kennedy didn't have to worry about paying his rent so he helped set up programs so that other people wouldn't have to pay their rent either. Is this the pathway to a just society? No - it's the highway to an infantilized, Soviet-style command economy that offers nothing more than equality of poverty.

Last, there's Mr. Obama. His father exhibited no responsibility for him or to him at all. He credits his grandmother with pointing him in the correct direction, but we know how hard it is for a woman to raise a man to maturity. His male role models were questionable at best. Is it any surprise that he can't handle men like Mr. Chavez who've fought their way to leadership of a country; or Mr. Putin, an archetypal tough guy who killed and schemed himself to the top of a gangster-based society? How can Mr. Obama cope with such men? Is it any surprise that he let Nancy Pelosi write the health car bill? He's used to deferring to women. He can't lead women, he can't lead men. Has he grown up?

It's not limited to politicians. Hugh Hefner wrote many, many monthly columns about the Playboy Philosophy he epitomized, which boiled down to the idea that men should rack up as many women as possible without taking care care of any of them in any permanent way. Given that the sign over his doorbell read (albeit in Latin) "If you won't kiss, don't ring," the women who entered his domain knew the score.

His writings helped convince men that it was OK for a man not to grow up. Even in his dotage, Mr. Hefner still manages to attract limo-loads of beauties that would put to shame golf stars a third his age. Is it any surprise that he is a Democrat? Immature liberal politicians institutionalize immaturity in themselves and in their supporters.

Hugh Hefner: Not an example of a conservative!

The problem with government spending more and more money taking care of voters who prefer not to grow up is that, as Margaret Thatcher said, eventually you run out of other people's money.

What Liberals Have Wrought

Liberal policies supporting eternal childhood have destroyed our public institutions. Our schools used to focus on education - the children of earlier immigrants were forced to learn English as fast as possible and went on to become outstanding citizens. Now, it doesn't matter if immigrants end up stuck in English as a Second Language courses where they learn nothing until they're old enough to be shoved out of school.

Our cities used to have workable infrastructure. The privately-maintained parts of New York City still function well, but the unionized city employees can no longer maintain what their ancestors built. Voters and government employees have demanded that politicians subsidize their childishness, and the politicians are only too happy to oblige.

We see the FDA attempt to ban cough syrup for children because a few parents are too stupid to read the labels and might hurt their children. All the rest of us have to suffer because a few people aren't smart enough to realize you don't let your kid chug the whole Robitussin bottle at one go?

The federal government requires that all new cars have air bags. Adults who are smart enough to fasten seat belts have to pay $3,000 more for cars because some people are too stupid to fasten their belts?

Must we all suffer because of those who refuse to grow up? According to liberals, the answer is an emphatic "Yes!"

Health care is perhaps the worst example of government forcing irresponsible, childish behavior on all of us. During World War II, the government in its infinite wisdom froze wages because there was a labor shortage with so many men in the military. To get around the wage freeze, companies offered health insurance as an inducement to get the workers they needed.

As a result of this misguided wage freeze, pretty much all Americans have come to expect that someone else will pay for their health care. When someone else pays the bills, we aren't nearly as careful what we spend.

What's more, liberals are convinced that if some workers don't have to worry about paying their own health care costs, nobody should have to worry - just as Ted Kennedy didn't want anyone worrying about paying to heat their homes because he didn't have to worry about heating his homes. As costs for supplying heating oil to poor people keep going up, so do medical costs because everybody pushes their costs off on someone else.

Eventually, there will be no "somebody else" left to pay the bills. What then?

This Is No Surprise

Historian Alexander Tyler said:

A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury.

Our founders were well aware of this danger and did their best to prevent it. They explicitly set up a republic not a democracy so that individual states could run things in different ways. That way, people could move to a state that operated in a way they liked. The founders didn't want the federal government forcing all states to operate in the same way.

The Constitution had members of the Senate be appointed by their state legislatures so that the Senate would represent the interests of the various states; the House of Representatives, as its name implies, represented the interests of the people. Unfortunately, we changed the system by amending the Constitution in 1913. Now that senators are elected by popular vote, they're no longer interested in taking care of the state governments as our founders intended. Why are we surprised that the federal government gets bigger and bigger?

At the time our Constitution was ratified, John Adams stated, “Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people; it is wholly inadequate for any other.”

For all of American history even to this day, the most familiar set of moral and religious principles was what's taught in the Bible. Mr. Adams didn't say that the Christian religion per se is required for democracy to flourish, it's the personal maturity and restraint from vice that classical Christianity demands which makes the Constitution work. A complete discussion of Max Weber's opus The Protest Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism would be too long for this article, but a few tid-bits of Christian writing will give you the general idea:

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.

- I Thessalonians 4:11

Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.

- II Thessalonians 3:12

For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.

- II Thessalonians 3:10

The Bible clearly taught that Christians must be mature enough to support themselves. In addition, men are required to support their families:

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

- I Timothy 5:8

Christian morality, which used to be the basis of acceptable behavior among Americans, required that men support their families. Men who failed in this duty were subject to considerable popular criticism.

When the Pilgrims landed, their number included some "gentlemen" who expected the others to provide for them as the peasants had supported the gentry in Merrie Olde Englande. At first, the Pilgrims agreed to share their food in common, but the colony quickly ran out of food because everybody found something better to do than grow food for other people. Once they gave up socialism for capitalism, individual initiative promptly solved the problem because each person was permitted to keep what they grew.

Similarly, Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame found that he had to enforce a policy of requiring people to labor in exchange for food in Jamestown. In other words, everybody had to grow up and take responsibility for themselves.

Freedom to Remain Children at Taxpayer Expense

Times have changed. Instead of expecting families to care for children, our politicians say "It takes a village" and try to get votes by seeing who can shovel the most money at their supporters.

That path leads to social collapse because people aren't forced to grow up. Children can't run a modern society any more than the Lost Boys were equipped to keep the City of London operating. We've let our voters grow up to be children instead of citizens and the cost of all that whole-life child-care is bankrupting our nation.

The Tea Party protestors are demanding that government be less involved in their lives and in their wallets. They want government to treat them as adults who can take care of themselves, butt out of pushing them around, and let them keep their earnings. The question for our particular moment in history is, will Americans insist that our multiple generations of "adult" children be forced to grow into citizens or will they allow them to stay children? Are we a nation of citizens or a nation of children? As Reagan's great speech once put it, we have arrived at "A Time for Choosing" - for the two systems cannot permanently coexist in the same economy.

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Lee Tydings is a guest writer for Scragged.com. Read other Scragged.com articles on liberalism, marriage and children

Obama's Clowns Crashing Toyota's Circus

Will Offensicht — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:35:00 GMT

By now, everyone who follows the news in America has observed our government heaping scorn on Toyota because of suspicions that design flaws in their cars lead to "Sudden unintended acceleration." Judging from the welter of words coming out of Washington, one could be forgiven for thinking that Toyota cars are uniquely subject to this problem, but that's simply not so. The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb 25, p A7:

Congress this week has begun wading into an issue that has vexed the auto industry for decades: Is sudden acceleration caused by driver mistakes, or by problems with cars? [emphasis added]

The consensus among industry executives and federal safety regulators, embodied in a 1989 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is that most cases of sudden acceleration result from drivers hitting the gas pedal when they meant to hit the brakes. [emphasis added]

Sudden acceleration is an old problem: it's been around "for decades", long predating Toyota's entry in to the American market. Generations before it became a useful political cudgel, the government studied the problem and concluded that driver error accounted for most cases of sudden acceleration.

Not only that, Toyota has a good record with respect to recalls and other defects:

From 2004 to 2009, based on NHTSA data, Ford had 2,806 complaints, compared with Toyota's 2,515. General Motors Co. had 1,192. A study by Edmunds.com, an independent market-research Web site, found that based on the number of vehicles on the road, Toyota ranked 17th in recalls, with Land Rover, recently acquired by India's Tata Motors Ltd., having the most.

The usual suspects are viewing with alarm:

Consumer-safety advocates and plaintiff attorneys are concerned that Toyota and the NHTSA are fixated on mechanical explanations and haven't adequately looked into the vehicles' electronics. [emphasis added]

It's always wise to carefully consider alternative potential explanations, but safety experts are looking in a totally different direction. They consistently blame human error:

Safety regulators, human-error experts and auto makers say driver error is the primary cause of sudden accelerations, and if there are no error codes in the electronics, there is no evidence to support an electronic failure.

"Many, if not all, are pedal errors," said Richard Schmidt, a leading expert on human error, said of Toyota's sudden-acceleration complaints. "There are all of these hypotheses flying around—the computer went haywire and it was left without a trace of evidence. What's the evidence?" [emphasis added]

So What's the Big Deal?

The problem has been around for as long as car-wreck statistics have been kept. The government long since studied the problem and blames human error for most cases. Some of the highest-profile Toyota incidents involve drivers who are elderly or with health issues that might plausibly affect their performance behind the wheel. Do Toyotas sometimes abruptly accelerate? Sure they do - and so do Fords, GMs, Lamborghinis, and even the occasional Yugo though you'd hardly be able to tell.

Why, then, all the fuss, feathers, and furor over sudden acceleration and Toyotas specifically?

First, the Wall Street Journal notes that "plaintiff attorneys," the Democratic party's major paymasters, are following the testimony closely. This publicity will make it easier for them to recruit people for lawsuits against Toyota. Then once they've collected a large client base, whatever information the hearing committee collects will save them money running down data. We can expect more lawsuits complete with bogus science - if the full power of the Federal government can't find any evidence of electronic malfunction, how can an attorney, not matter how well funded by earlier settlements?

Second, the Obama administration's popularity is dropping like a rock. From sky-high polls at his inauguration, Mr. Obama has messed up so badly that people are talking seriously of the Republicans capturing both the House and Senate this November. Politicians in that situation will do anything at all to distract voters from their failures.

At a maximum, sudden acceleration in Toyotas has led to 34 deaths since 2000 according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, putting it somewhere between slipping in the bathtub and being struck by lightning as a Leading Cause of Death. By way of comparison, roughly 40,000 people die in highway accidents every year. Even if all the Toyota fatalities had occurred in one year, which they didn't, that would represent less than 1/1000 of all automotive fatalities.

If the government were really concerned about safety, they'd address the other 40,000 deaths, but that's not the point. The point is to distract voters and to enrich their union supporters.

Since Toyota plants are not unionized, every Toyota sold is that much dues money that doesn't go to the United Auto Workers. Every Toyota sold is that much money that the UAW can't use to help Democrats this coming November. Barack Obama famously fired GM's CEO; in effect, he now is the CEO of "Government Motors." Is it any wonder he's using his power to promote his company and hamstring the competition?

A Government That's Anti-Business

The real reason for the media circus is found in an internal Toyota memo which was discovered by a subpoena from the House Oversight and Government Relations committee. Toyota cited the “changing political environment” as a real problem and anticipated a "more challenging regulatory" environment under the Obama administration. They also worried about “massive government support for Detroit automakers,” and said that the NHTSA “new team has less understanding of engineering issues and are primarily focused on legal issues.”

In summation, the document characterized the Obama administration and Democratic Congress as “activist” and “not industry friendly." Truer words were never spoken!

The question arises, why would a high-level Toyota executive write such a potentially inflammatory memo even if it was intended only for internal consumption? Consider the position of Mr. Inaba, president of Toyota North America, whose name appeared on the memo's cover sheet. This firestorm blew up in his territory on his watch.

It's gotten so bad that his boss, the camera-shy Mr. Toyoda, great-grandson of the founder of the firm, has to risk a subpoena by traveling to the US to testify before a hostile US Congress. Mr. Inaba has a limited window of opportunity to tell his boss whatever Mr. Inaba thinks his boss needs to know to navigate the hostile currents of the hearing room. So what does he tell his boss? That the entire administration and Congress are anti-business.

Any American businessman knows that Democrats are anti-business by reflex and that American government employees don't care about putting a business into bankruptcy so long as their own livelihoods aren't hurt.

The attitude in Japan is quite different. Japan has had a stable government since Iyeyasu Tokugawa unified the country in 1600. The Japanese never had any notion of "inalienable rights" as Americans think of them - Japanese citizens had no rights that the rulers couldn't take away at any time. Despite having pretty much absolute power to set taxes as high as they chose, however, the government and its employees learned over time that their comfortable lifestyles depended on having a private sector which was prosperous enough to pay taxes, and thus that the taxes could only be raised so high.

History doesn't tell us how long it took Japanese rulers to learn that there were limits to taxation. If they took too much rice away from a farmer, for example, the farmer starved to death and there was nobody to farm next year. Dead men pay no taxes.

As the economy grew more complex, the government learned that wealthy merchants could pay more taxes than farmers could, but similar limits applied: if they taxed away all the profits, businesses would fail and there'd be no taxes next year. With the coming of international trade, the government learned that excessive taxation raised prices to the point that the goods couldn't be sold in foreign markets. Once again, excessive taxation reduced government revenue just as it does in America.

Where Government Funding Comes From

No matter how hard they try, no government can get enough income tax from a government employee's salary to pay the cost of having him on the payroll; the old USSR discovered this eventually. The only way to support the government in the style to which they'd like to become accustomed is to get money from elsewhere, which means the private sector. Over the centuries, the Japanese government has learned that the best way to increase government revenue is to help businesses increase sales and employment.

This attitude extends to the bureaucracy. When the Lexus first went on sale in the US, American car makers could not match the paint on the Lexus because there was no way to get the paint looking that good without violating EPA regulations. The Japanese EPA had similar regulations, but the Japanese bureaucracy recognized the value of letting Toyota create more high-paying jobs whose income could be taxed. The violations were more technical than substantive; they wrote a waiver which didn't harm anyone and let business be done. America's EPA, being more beholden to radical environmentalists than American workers, couldn't care less.

Mr. Toyoda has become accustomed to having the Japanese government cooperate with his efforts to be able to pay more taxes to the government and to hire more employees who can pay more taxes to the government. Not only that, every time Toyota wants to open a new plant in the US, state governments compete to out-cooperate adjacent states. State governments realize the value of having businesses locate in the state so their employees can pay income tax and sales tax.

Mr. Inaba had to get Mr. Toyoda to understand that the federal government, unlike the governments he was familiar with, was at heart truly anti-business. He also had to convey the point that Congressional hearings had nothing to do with finding the truth. Their purpose was to take peoples' mind off their anger at the Obama administration and to promote unionized car manufacturers over non-union Toyota.

The Japanese government and the Republican party have realized that unemployed workers pay no taxes and that bankrupt businesses pay no taxes either. This is an obvious-seeming concept that seems to have utterly escaped the current administration.

The last time we had such an anti-business President, Roosevelt kept yelling about how the rich had caused the Great Depression, spent lots of money to get the economy going again, and kept pushing up taxes. Like most Democrat leaders today, Roosevelt had no real concept of how money is earned; he had been born into wealth, and neither he nor his father ever had to earn a cent. People with money who actually knew how more is made were frightened by Roosevelt's massive tax and regulatory increases, decided not to invest, and the economy stagnated until World War II jumpstarted it.

Roosevelt never did learn that you can't be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time; his intellectual descendants haven't figured it out either. Will it take a war to undo the bad effects of Obamanomics?

So far, the Obama administration has managed to finance its hideous deficits by borrowing. The experience of Greece shows that can go on only so long and, when the crisis hits, there'll be exactly two choices: either cut spending drastically or put taxes up through the roof.

The Toyota memo is entirely correct - we have an anti-business Congress and administration. Where do they think they'll get all the money they plan to spend? People who have money already know, and are stashing what they have offshore as quickly as they can shovel it while they still can.

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Will Offensicht is a staff writer for Scragged.com and an internationally published author by a different name. Read other Scragged.com articles on automobiles, Big 3, manufacturing and regulation