The price of political ignorance: More government

By George F Will
It was naughty of Winston Churchill to say, if he really did, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Nevertheless, many voters’ paucity of information about politics and government, although arguably rational, raises awkward questions about concepts central to democratic theory, including consent, representation, public opinion, electoral mandates and officials’ accountability.
In “Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter” (Stanford University Press), Ilya Somin of George Mason University law school argues that an individual’s ignorance of public affairs is rational because the likelihood of his or her vote being decisive in an election is vanishingly small. The small incentives to become informed include reducing one’s susceptibility to deceptions, misinformation and propaganda. And if remaining ignorant is rational individual behavior, it has likely destructive collective outcomes.
...Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what. Given that 20 percent thinks the sun revolves around the Earth, it is unsurprising that a majority is unable to locate major states such as New York on a map. Usually only 30 percent of Americans can name their two senators. The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

Chart of the Century

By Thomas Lifson

Everybody's featuring their "graphs and charts of the year," like The Atlantic and the Washington Post (be sure to see Vice-President Joe Biden's "Graph of the Year" on Amtrak ridership). Well, the chart above could perhaps qualify as the "chart of the century" because it illustrates one of themost remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world's population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper "Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income," by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

The cause of this unprecedented good fortune for humankind? Those two bugaboos of the left: globalization and capitalism. Which is why those leftists who claim to be interested in helping mankind need to sentence themselves to re-education camps, or some other method of changing their views that is congenial to their side of the political spectrum.

Charles Krauthammer's minimum wage proposal is a terrible idea

By Philip Klein
On a Fox News panel earlier this week, Charles Krauthammer floated a proposal for a two-tiered minimum wage system in which the rate would be raised for individuals who are the breadwinners of their families and remain the same for others. But this would be an absolutely terrible idea.
...
There are two main reasons why this idea would backfire.
To start, launching a two-tiered system would create a lot of logistical problems. It would mean coming up with criteria to determine who counts as a "breadwinner" for the purposes of the law. Then there would have to be a whole new government bureaucracy to police whether or not businesses were paying the correct wages to each tier of employees. And businesses would have to take on more compliance costs to make sure they're paying the proper wages and to verify that applicants claiming to be breadwinners actually are supporting families.
Beyond this, the economic effects would be most detrimental for those Krauthammer's proposal is intended to help. Under Krauthammer's idea, businesses who want to avoid paying the higher minimum wage on breadwinners have an easy solution: Shift toward hiring more teenagers or other nonbreadwinners.

Karl Rove and the GOP Socialists

By Jeffrey Lord
Happy New Year.
It’s war.
While America was celebrating the holidays, the Wall Street Journal ran a page one story the day after Christmas headlined as follows:

GOP, Business Recast Message
Republican Leaders, Allies Aim to Diminish Clout of Most-Conservative Activists

The story said this right up front:

Meanwhile, major donors and advocacy groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, are preparing an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist Republican candidates for Congress in 2014’s midterm elections.

Translation?
Karl Rove (i.e., architect of the American Crossroads SuperPAC), the Chamber of Commerce, and the Washington GOP Establishment have declared war on the Reaganite conservative base of the Republican Party.
Welcome to the 2014 election.
An election which, by all accounts, both historically and in terms of the specifics of President Obama’s sinking ratings, should be a winner — a big winner — for the GOP.
Unless.
Unless there is a deliberate, willful attempt to sabotage the GOP from within. Using the GOP Establishment as a launching pad to ensure that Reagan-style conservatives — the base of the Republican Party — are defeated by Establishment, statist Republicans. Republicans who will in turn so anger the GOP base that the base simply refuses to turn out in November. Thus handing President Obama and the statist forces of Big Government a victory they should never have had and in fact would be unable to earn on their own.
Or? Worse?
The GOP Establishment wins under the ruse of being… honest, they promise, cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die… conservative. And then they do the inevitable… the usual… GOP version of the Socialist Deal. Being “realistic”… seeking (Margaret Thatcher’s hated word) “consensus.”
...To Americanize Mrs. Thatcher: Indeed, one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many Republicans have become socialists already.
Exactly.

A year of waste in review: 2013's worst examples of taxpayer spending on the unused, unneeded and nonexistent

By Michael Conger
...Here are some of 2013's worst examples, as reported by the Washington Examiner:
• By far the costliest is the $1.6 billion it takes each year to maintain almost 100,000 empty and underused federally owned buildings.
Poor management and a tangle of bureaucratic rules makes it near impossible to get rid of unneeded space quickly — if a few years can be called "quickly."
• Sometimes federal property gets wasted by being left out to rot -- literally. Employees at a U.S. Postal Service processing plant in Maryland left important mail equipment worth $1.3 million sitting outside in the yard that should have been stored inside.
One mail tub crumbled at the touch, which a USPS engineer told inspectors would take years of outside exposure.
USPS lost another $30,000 worth of mail loaders in Atlanta. Some were stolen, some destroyed and some simply couldn't be located.
• The Postal Service isn't the only one leaving its property out in the cold. The Department of Defense wasted at least $2 million on 774 official vehicles that sat in the lot unused or barely driven. A Ford truck that costs $4,700 to lease each year was driven a grand total of 37 miles.
• A failed nuclear enrichment company got a $30 million green energy loan from the Department of Energy -- two days after it announced it was filing for bankruptcy.
Worse, there is no market for the technology United States Enrichment Corp. has been struggling to create using mostly taxpayer money.
• Overlapping programs also waste money, and often none of them produce the desired results, Tom Schatz, president of good-government group Citizens Against Government Waste, told the Examiner.
There are more than 200 federal science, technology, engineering and math programs designed to improve American students' aptitude in these areas, which foreign students dominate.
Despite the programs, which cost about $3 billion each year, science and math achievement scores aren't going up, Schatz said.
"We're creating more programs that aren't working," he said.
• In Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence may be declining, but the waste is not. A $34 million Marine Corps command center built at Camp Leatherneck was supposed to accommodate the troop surge, but remains unfinished as those troops are leaving the base.
• There's also $500 million worth of military transport planes now sitting unused on the tarmac in Kandahar after the Afghan National Security Forces barely flew them and couldn't afford to maintain them.
• The Defense Department also sent $133 million more in radio equipment to Afghanistan than ANSF needed, leaving the expensive parts sitting in storage.
• More than $21 million has gone up in smoke at bases where DOD had trash incinerators built, but never used them.
"The overriding thing is just the complete mismanagement of the taxpayers' money," Schatz said.
While "waste" can be applied to programs some people want to cut and others think are important, mismanagement applies to overspending across government, Schatz said.
Congress pours money into programs without reining in costs. "They don't solve any problems, they just keep spending the money," he said.

Top 10 Media Hate-Crime Hoaxes of 2013

By John Nolte
The only thing the elite media hates more than America is Americans. How else to explain why the mainstream media is relentlessly willing to frame us for hate crimes we didn't commit. Time and again and again, and with nary a shred of evidence, for decades the media have dropped all pretense of basic journalistic standards -- you know, like verification -- and, armed with only their own bigoted wishful thinking and preconceptions, never fail to charge full-speed ahead to breathlessly blow up one phony hate crime after another.
This year alone there were ten -- ten! -- bogus hate crimes (and I probably missed some) that received serious local and/or national media traction before being debunked as hoaxes.
Put another way, in the media's zeal to frame Americans as bigots, the media are willing to repeatedly undermine their own credibility in the hopes that just one of these will stick.
And it is the media who are the hoaxers here, not the pathetic nobodies who dreamed up the hoax. Because after a long and sordid history of breathlessly throwing multiple spotlights on hate-crime hoaxers, future hate-crime hoaxers know they will get all kinds sanctimonious media attention before any kind of actual journalism takes place (if it ever does).
Put simply, the media are the megaphone, enabler, inspiration, and Godfather of Hate-Crime Hoaxes.
Keep in mind that this is the very same media that immediately dismissed the "knock-out game" as worthy of serious coverage as hate crimes or anything else.
Also keep in mind that it is almost never the mainstream media that does the hard work of investigating these hoaxes. Instead, the media see their role as stenographers to liars and are then caught offguard when the inevitable debunking occurs through the effort of a skeptical someone actually interested in the truth.