Obama's most frustrating economic statement of 2015 (so far)

A good friend of mine who studies political science has been trying to convince me that President Barack Obama is a moderate. My friend knows more than I do on this topic so I take him seriously, but I just can't get the idea to gel, mostly because the president makes statements like the one he just did about Staples Inc. and the Affordable Care Act.

Clickbait website Buzzfeed recently sat down with the president about a number of topics, one of them was about how the office supply store Staples Inc. limits its part-time employees to 25 hours a week to avoid working a long week and passing the threshold where full-time benefits kick in.

Obama was told that those employees are having their hours limited to avoid having to provide health insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Staples Inc. has since said that was wrong and the policy is actually a decade old and unrelated to the Affordable Care Act. However, look at the position the president took when presented with the scenario that his policy has given companies an incentive to cut workers hours instead of paying the high costs of the benefits:

...There is no reason for an employer who is not currently providing health care to their workers to discourage them from either getting health insurance on the job or being able to avail themselves of the Affordable Care Act. I haven’t looked at Staples stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is, but I suspect that they could well afford to treat their workers favorably and give them some basic financial security, and if they can’t, then they should be willing to allow those workers to get the Affordable Care Act without cutting wages. This is the same argument that I’ve made with respect to something like paid sick leave. We have 43 million Americans who, if they get sick or their child gets sick, are looking at either losing their paycheck or going to the job sick or leaving their child at home sick. It’s one thing when you’ve got a mom-and-pop store who can’t afford to provide paid sick leave or health insurance or minimum wage to workers — even though a large percentage of those small businesses do it because they know it’s the right thing to do — but when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers’ wages, shame on them.

This is a very telling answer, and it tells me above all else that the president is not a moderate, nor does he seem to understand that business owners who provide health insurance aren't giving their employees a gift. No, employers provide health insurance as a form of payment. They don't do so "because it's the right thing to do" but because they have to compete with other employers.

Maybe the president's brain just can't grasp economic reasoning, and if so he's far from alone, but let's be honest, his ignorance is left-wing ignorance, not moderate ignorance. Just look at the cliche he ended his statement with:

...But when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers’ wages, shame on them.

The president is evoking the concept of infinite wealth, that a company that makes a large amount in profits should be able to provide unlimited expensive benefits to every one of its employees. However, most of those companies have huge labor forces and those expensive health insurance plans add up. It's telling that people making this argument don't list the actual cost of this course of action.

For what it's worth, Staples Inc. reported a net profit of $707 million in 2014, not actual billions like the president said, and actually lost money in 2013. I can't see a number of how many part-time employees it had, but total employees in 2013 are listed on Wikipedia as 83,000 people.

The president has made it more expensive for businesses to have full-time employees, and when told that businesses are responding the way conservatives predicted they would, his response is to blame the companies? Shame on them? No, shame on him and his infamous audacity.


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Outrage culture is to blame for boring politics

Politicians give terrible pre-scripted interviews not merely because focus-group testing works so well, but because speaking off the cuff is too risky with partisan opponents ready to twist everything they say.

That's Matthew Yglesias's point in his recent piece about the response to his interview with President Obama. When they talked, the president said:

It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.

Opportunists on the right claimed the president was denying a Kosher deli was targeting Jews, even though his administration had outright declared it before. This turned into a mini-scandal that has since fizzled. Yglesias believes those critics were sincere, but blinded by their politics. I think he's being generous, while the president's critics were not.

Two years ago Steve Novella wrote:

Before you set out to criticize someone’s claim or position, you should endeavor to grant that position its best possible case. Don’t assume the worst about your opponent, assume the best. Give them any benefit of the doubt. At the very least this will avoid creating a straw man to attack, or opening yourself up to charges that you are being unfair.

And that's the problem isn't it? Politics is dominated by the uncharitable interpretation of one's opponents? Todd Akin simply must have meant by "legitimate rape" that some rapes are acceptable or John Kerry must have been mocking the troops, not George W. Bush, when he said people who don't study in school get stuck in Iraq.

Having a low threshold for outrage is very popular in politics today, but like a leech is sucks the potential for anything interesting to come from the mouths of elected officials.
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Preaching to the choir

What was the president hoping to achieve with this line in the state of the union?

And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.

What's the target demographic for this line?

I don't need to go all Don Boudreaux on this line, which I see as grossly flawed economic logic, but I don't know what it's purpose was?  It clearly wasn't to convince anyone, as his opponents reject the idea that people try to support families on minimum wage or that raising it would help poor families. In fact, we see it as putting many of them out of work.

So then who was it for? Was it to mobilize his supporters with some kind of populist image of an evil white-haired Republican overload trying to scrape by on little money? Would he have lost points for not mentioning the minimum wage, as it only came up one other time in the whole speech and that second time was a mere passing reference.

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Looking good, Mr. President.

I watched the live press conference on TV when President Obama wore the infamous "tan suit" so many conservatives got upset about.

The outfit stood out to me too, but my actual thought was "The president looks good today."

Fellow right-wingers, can we please stop taking a stand on these ridiculous non-issues? Sometimes issues are called non-issues, but this is literally a non-issue. It's fashion.

But then again, I'm biased. (That's me on the left this spring)

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I like what Obama complained about

Am I the only one who caught president Barack Obama's crazy statement about the minimum wage today?

Jump to 6:30 mark for the full context. Basically, Obama was justifying his use of executive order to mimic the legislation he is not able to get through congress and its checks and balances, a hallmark of his administration I find worrisome and disturbing. He made a list of things he identifies as problems and when he wanted to lament the lack of a federal minimum wage increase he said something that made me squint in confusion:

States and businesses are raising the minimum wage for their workers because this congress is failing to do so.

Uh, what?

IKEA, for example, just announced that it's raising its starting pay in America, which is something companies do when they want to attract better workers. That's a good thing.

I understand why Obama's argument about state minimum wage increases is logical, but complaining about businesses raising wages when congress did not? That's a ridiculous statement and he should fire whoever put that line in his speech.

The president just said, as a complaint, that the market and capitalism are raising peoples wages instead of waiting for the federal government to do so. That's what he said.
Obama has had economic rock stars in his administration, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Cass Sunstein,
Timothy Geithner, Alan Krueger, etc., yet I rarely get the impression that he listens to them. Instead, he speaks as if the economy is something that can be subdued and leashed with legislation, when it's really a rebellious, uncooperative organism.
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I'm sorry, I should have known better

I've often heard one recurring problem with intellectuals, activists and journalists (hey, that's me) is that they bear no cost for being wrong when they advocate how our society should be run.

With that in mind, I'm issuing an apology for the immigration mess our country is facing where South and Central American children, some 52,000 so far, are being smuggled in and dumped over the border. That's just the kids who live, and as President Obama said recently; “We don't even know how many of these kids don't make it, and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking or killed because they fell off a train."

I'm sorry. This is partially my fault.

You see, I'm a supporter of the DREAM Act, a failed piece of legislation that would have granted permanent residency status to illegal immigrants who came to America as young children. These are kids in good moral standing who have no memory of their birth country and deporting them would be like deporting me to a foreign nation.

The DREAM Act has not been passed by the legislature, but instead on June 15, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order essentially mimicking the DREAM Act by refusing to enforce deportation on some of the same people who would have benefited from it. While technically that order doesn't apply to recent immigrants, I imagine the parents who shipped off their kids either didn't know that or thought it would be waived.

I opposed the executive order, as even though I support open borders I want to achieve it by changing laws, not by circumventing checks and balances and refusing to enforce laws. My concern was this sets a bad precedent and nudges us towards tyranny.

But I didn't stop to think of the obvious problem: People are smart enough to change their behavior when the rules change. It never occurred to me that parents in other nations would hand their children over to criminals and spill them onto the ground over the border.

Granted, I didn't support the executive order that caused this problem, but I supported (and continue to support) a similar piece of legislation that if passed would have caused the same problem. I failed to think of the consequences and supported something that lacks a safeguard, and now we have to send these kids back to avoid encouraging more parents to smuggle their kids.

It's been said that success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan. I'm unable to find any news reports where President Obama has apologized for this mess, but I offer my apology freely and sincerely. I should have known better and I was part of the problem behind this catastrophe.

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Props

I'm a little late to the Cliven Bundy party, but I want to give credit to two different entities for their handling of the Cliven Bundy situation with the Bureau of Land Management.

The first one is to Glenn Beck for being the voice of reason. Like Beck, I have a big concern with our ever-expanding federal government, and going into this story it looked like a federal agency was over responding with a thuggish display of force. Beck unraveled that narrative and revealed Bundy as a violence-monger who the government treated with patience for years.

Beck was confronted with someone who agreed with many of his politics, but had disturbing violent desires. To his credit, Beck did exactly what the socialist George Orwell did when he encountered Joseph Stalin: He dedicated himself to destroying him as an enemy.

Beck's framing of the split among liberty-seekers over Bundy is the definitive way to look at this situation, as the peaceful Martin Luther King, Jr. approach versus the violence Malcom X approach.

I like Beck, but he makes himself a whipping boy of the left with his support for the gold standard, declaring America a Christian nation and general  alarmism. It's risky to embrace Beck, but I don't care. Adults can see that Beck has been brilliant on this issue and it reflects well on his character and intelligence.

The other entity that needs credit here is the federal government and President Obama.

Bundy and his militia supporters probably don't want to die, but if they do die they want to become martyrs. The strategy they chose was to put the women in the front so if either side starts a shootout, the cameras will show the women being shot. That's some Occupy Wall Street-style propagandizing, and sadly fools fall for it.

I don't like seeing police forces back down from protesters who are essentially holding themselves hostage, but it was a smart move the government played here by ending the standoff and slinking away. Bundy was trying to make another Ruby Ridge or Waco here, and the Obama administration denied him that play.



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White House caught being purposely misleading

Betsey Stevenson, economic adviser to the president, was in the middle of a press call promoting "Equal Pay Day" when a reporter pressed her and Stevenson unraveled the very myth she was there to promote.

The Obama administration has bullhorned the old idea that women make 79 or 77 cents for every dollar men make and has presented it as the result of discrimination. The actual explanation, that this is mostly because men and women work different jobs, act differently as employees and have different qualifications, is becoming more and more mainstream.

A reporter called her out on this explanation and Stevenson said:

If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke... So let me just apologize and say that I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that.

Case closed. A member of the Obama administration has admitted that the way people are interpreting this message is wrong. People who speak about this issue appear to be Michael Mooreing the Hell out of it - they make a statement that is technically true, but designed in a way to misinform the listener.

And of course, some of the speakers blatantly declare the false version to be true.

What's interesting here is that Stevenson did indeed say that the 77 cent figure is for equal work. Specifically she said:

They’re stuck at 77 cents on the dollar, and that gender wage gap is seen very persistently across the income distribution, within occupations, across occupations, and we see it when men and women are working side by side doing identical work.

Those two statements were from the same interview. The only way I can read that without seeing Stevenson as a liar is to say she meant there is some gender wage gap for identical work that persists when controlling for some factors and not others, such as not controlling for education, but that's being unreasonably generous it's still cutting it pretty close.

What's happening here is that Stevenson is trying to walk a fine line. She's been tasked with spreading a message that she knows isn't accurate, but she has to make supporting statements that won't get her called out. She fell off the tightrope, and climbing back on required her to admit the whole thing is a sham.


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If you think unemployment is bad, look at this

I spent most of Wednesday driving to New Jersey and back with some friends from college. After all the reminiscing and sharing of what's going on in our life, the unemployment rate came up, along with President Obama's State of the Union address. One of my friends observed that we accidentally had a serious conversation.

Purely as a joke, I made an off-the-cuff argument against using the unemployment rate, because it only counts current job seekers. It does not count, I told them in the driest tone I could muster, people who go back to school, become homemakers or just drop out of the job market. I recommended the labor force participation rate as a better figure to follow.

The words I was saying to sound far too serious accidentally came from the heart, I realized, and the conversation got me curious about what's been happening with the labor force participation rate.

What I found, sadly, was this:

President Obama started this year's State of the Union by saying unemployment is at a 5 year low. I believe him, but it appears that some of those improvements came from Americans leaving the workforce. That problem is getting worse every year.

This is not a criticism of any of the president's policies, but a crucial revision on his framing of the issue. While the unemployment rate has fallen, it hasn't fallen to an acceptable level. We also have a big problem when potential workers are left idle, even if there are less idle workers then there were before.

I do have one caveat here: My idea of an ideal future does have a lower labor force participation rate. I share John Maynard Keynes' vision of people living like lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin. I want people to work few hours and retire earlier in life. However, that future comes from technological innovation, not a recession.

As it stands now, we aren't seeing a short-term drop in labor force participation because of labor-saving breakthroughs. It's because of poverty. The current course points us towards a stagnant or falling standard of living when what we want is progress and rising standards of living to occur while more people get to retire.
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Fake sign language dude signals all the real problems

Thamsanqa Jantjie, the infamous fake sign language interpreter at the Nelson Mandela service president Obama spoke at, represents everything that's wrong in South Africa we don't want to read about.

NPR has revealed that Jantjie was part of a lynch mob that murdered two people in 2003 using a local approach known as "necklacing," where a tire filled with gasoline is forced around the victims neck and lit on fire. He escaped legal punishment by being declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

Following the death of Mandela, South Africa has tried to stuff all of it's problems out of view, and the rest of the world has looked the other way. The high rates of violence, rape and unemployment aren't going away and the African National Congress political party that Mandela belonged to has a corruption problem.

Jantjie is part of that problem, just like he was part of at least one lynch mob. The ANC hired him before to wave his hands around pretending to interpret. It's essentially a no-show job, at least how he does it.

Tellingly, Jantjie tried the victim card when he was exposed. He wants us to believe that he really can perform sign language, but his schizophrenia made him unable to perform so he just waved a lot. There are at least three occasions where he has just waved his arms at an ANC event, so he is at best unfit for the job. That's assuming he does know sign language, which no one should believe.

South Africa has made tremendous strides with the end of the Apartheid government, but let's not fool ourselves. The country still has a long way to go.
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Give the O-man a break

President Barack Obama shook hands with Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela's funeral this week, which has brought fake outrage from his critics.

People are reading way too much in this non-incident. Raul Castro is a filthy brute partially responsible for major human rights violations, but his hand is not made of burning embers. Our president is considered the nation's top diplomat, and it does not serve America's interests for our top diplomat to snub someone at a state funeral like high school students at the homecoming dance. It would have be downright rude.

I'm not a supporter of our president and enjoy criticizing him, but this is a petty thing to get upset about. He walked up a set of stairs, Castro offered him his hands and he took it. They exchanged a few pleasantries and the O-man moved on to the next person. It was a simple, spontaneous exchange unworthy of deep analysis.

Our president is a man of empty words and shallow gestures. This is just another one of them.
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At least the title is honest

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' Healthy Young America video contest is over, which was a contest for someone to write a song encouraging young people to sign up for Obamacare, something they are legally required to do anways.

Announced this week, the winning song is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."

There's nothing I could add here that would be more scathing or humorous than that, so I'm going to say it again.

The winning song is titled Forget About the Price Tag.

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Obamacare pulls in the wrong direction

There are two major issues with health insurance in America. One is that it is too expensive, and the other is that it doesn't cover enough treatments.

Point one is universally understood and the clear winner in national priorities. Point two is secondary, and while still important, parts of it are up for debate. Unfortunately, the president's actions as a whole have addressed point two while making point one worse.

There are plenty of articles out there about Obamacare "sticker shock" for those who have just seen their premiums go up dramatically. Some see them go down, but more people end up paying more. Instead of linking to one of those pieces, I will prove the same point in a stronger way by linking to a pro-Obamacare website's defense:

ObamaCare Insurance premiums are a sore subject with many readers; however, ObamaCare insurance premium increases are a response to the protections contained within the law, such as the mandate for insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions.

We need health reform to make it affordable. Unfortunately, the health reform we have has made it more expensive. The real problem is worse.
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Survivor's journal from the Great Shutdown of 2013

Remember folks, it's the political party you don't like that is holding the nation hostage when neither of them will budge.

Bill Clinton exemplified the hypocrisy of this viewpoint perfectly:

Former President Clinton steadfastly defended President Obama and Senate Democrats Sunday morning on their position in the debt-ceiling fight and criticized House Republicans for not being interested in real budget negotiations. 

"This is the House Republicans and tea party saying, 'We don't want to negotiate with Democrats,' " Clinton told This Week's George Stephanopoulos."They're mad because they don't want to negotiate."

Clinton defended Obama's position while calling the House Republican position "almost spiteful." "If I were the president, I wouldn't negotiate over these draconian cuts that are gonna take food off the table of low-income working people, while they leave all the agricultural subsidies in for high-income farmers and everything else," Clinton said. "I think it's chilling. It seems almost spiteful."

Clinton is simultaneously saying he wouldn't negotiate in this situation and shame on the GOP for not negotiating. What complete rubbish.

Republicans are using their power to defund Obamacare. They know full well that doing so would mean president Obama would choose to shut down the government rather than let them smother his health care act.

But in response we have both sides saying it's the other guys fault: Obama and the Democrats are to blame for his decision to shut it down or the Republicans are to blame for putting the president in that situation.

This is what gridlock looks like, and I'm sick of people saying it means Congress is "broken." This is how checks and balances are supposed to work, and neither party is required to back down when they lack overwhelming votes.

Despite all the fear mongering we're hearing today, the government shutdown of 2013 will be a brief inconsequential footnote in history.
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How dare they!

I've heard plenty of people say that if President George W. Bush was doing the things president Barack Obama is doing liberals would be outraged.

Of course, I've responded that plenty of liberals are outraged at the O-man. Now that Edward Snowden has revealed the National Security Agency is accessing private information on who private citizens are calling on the phone and President Obama wants him arrested his approval rating has fall to around 45 percent. It's clear that plenty of liberals are outraged at the president.

So what I want to know is, why are so many liberals racists now?
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

A dozen years ago I took a public speaking class where the instructor told us not to use "sexist" language in speeches. By this she meant gendered terms like "waitress" and "waiter" or "mailman," not language that trivializes a person based on accidents of birth.

Prejudice is so reviled today that talentless political hacks know they can score cheap points by twisting something an enemy said into a vestigial organ of racism or sexism.

This week we were treated to two beautiful examples. One was MSNBC's Martin Bashir who is claiming that Republicans trying to tie President Barack Obama to the ongoing IRS scandal makes the word "IRS" a secret code for "nigger." The other is a brainless post from a gender studies graduate who is accusing a gay rights advocate of being a racist when she didn't like First Lady Michelle Obama's response when she tried to steal the stage from her.

When interviewed after being escorted out of the fundraiser, Sturtz said of the First Lady, “She came right down in my face. I was taken aback.” 

...Notice the language Sturtz uses to describe the encounter. Rutgers Anthropology Ph.D student Donna Auston emphasizes that Sturtz’s word choice of “taken aback” is one of distinct privilege; Sturtz sees herself as above reproach in this situation. As Auston inquires, why was Sturtz surprised at Obama’s response? “Is it because you did not expect her to exercise agency? Did you not expect her to assert that she is your equal?” Auston asks. Either black women are supposed to tacitly accept maltreatment and disrespect, or when they do exercise their agency, they are branded as the “Angry Black Woman.”

Issues like this are obvious examples of false flags, where racism is invoked for a situation just because one of the participants was black. What I find more troubling is the expanded definition of words like racism and sexism for issues of insensitivity.

For example, it's insensitive to assume that all black people like hot sauce. There is a stereotype that most black people enjoy putting hot sauce on food. There's nothing degrading or unworthy about enjoying food with a little kick to it, but it's still a stereotype.

Say I had a few people over and we were eating French fries and one of them was black. It would be insensitive for me to ask only the black person if he would like some Sriracha sauce. It would also be somewhat insensitive if I only thought  to get the Sriracha bottle out for everyone to use because there's a black person present.

Both of those are examples of acting on stereotype, but there's nothing hostile or malicious about it. While we still need to address those issues, it's deceitful to compare a host who wants to make their guests feel welcome with a KKK member who wants to harm other people and thinks of them as inferior.

This could be part of a vast spectrum, as a host who offers fried chicken to a guest is clearly acting on a stereotype in a way, but there is also a different context here. Taunts about fried chicken and watermelon have been used maliciously for years. That's not true for hot sauce.

By blurring the line between acts of malice and hate and insensitive acts that may even be kind, we are watering down the term "racism" to the point it is useless. This vague use of language allows some progressives to declare that no major advances have been made in terms of race relations over the past 50 years because "racism" is still alive, even though things are clearly better. We no longer tolerate rhetoric and attitudes that were socially acceptable two generations ago.

But notice how quickly the rhetoric snaps back to the original definition when needed. Suddenly, "racism" means the old definition again and anyone guilty of the modern definition of racism  is going to hate rallies and burning crosses on lawns. It's just like how anyone critical of third-wave feminism is painted as opposing the first-wave.

We have two reasonable choices here. Either use new terms such as "racial insensitivity" or declare that racism isn't that bad.
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You mad bro?

I'm still putting a piece about the Boston Marathon Bombing that occurred about 50 miles from my home. Until I have that piece ready, here's a clip from President Barack Obama's long, bitter speech he gave today about how the Senate blocked his feel-good gun control proposals.





Here's a link to the whole thing. It was playing in the other room tonight and I was a bit surprised at just how childish the president was acting.


Adamantium: Man, The Onion writer's are pretty bitter too. They've never been above creating a phony scenario to make their political fantasies come true, but this is one is just flailing wildly.
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Follow-up on secular poverty cures

I'm writing to make some corrections and clarifications on several details from last week's article about realistic ways secular and skeptical groups can go about fighting poverty, which included heavy criticism of a David Hoelscher piece that sought to corrupt those movements with Marxist doublespeak.

In a private message Debbie Goddard suggested that "demand" was too strong of a word to describe her attempts to include an education focus in secular activism when I wrote "I've previously criticized demands for skeptics, atheists and secular people to [fight other causes]." Fair enough. I had other people in mind when I wrote that sentence, as some people are demanding that third-wave feminism should become a central aspect those movements. I did not intend to imply Goddard was part of that group.

I stand by when I wrote that Goddard and Walker Bristol endorsed Hoelscher's piece. Goddard said she did not endorse it, but did agree with some of its points about Atheism+ falling short on its promise to fight for social justice. She referred to it as "...A provocative and substantive (i.e., worthwhile and quite long) article." I consider that an endorsement, but either way she did not specifically support the anti-capitalist sections.

Bristol wrote to clarify that my introduction mischaracterized his stance for working with churches to fight inequality. His stance is not to work like the churches do to fight poverty because it would increase prestige and win converts in the black community, but to work with the churches to fight inequality because they are effective.

In a blog comment to my piece, Hoelscher informed me that I got his stance on a Noam Chomsky quotation backwards. Rereading that area, the previous paragraph tells us that classism shows up in unexpected places so the Chomsky quotation was intended to be criticized. That was my mistake.

Of course, this didn't have anything to do with the focus of the piece. The Chomsky error was one of several examples intended to demonstrate Hoelscher's insistence that secular and skeptical activists need to fight capitalism. Two hours after he wrote his comment he posted this image on his Facebook page.

Of course, his intention with the Chomsky quotation would have been a lot clearer if he had included any actual criticism of the remark. As it stands, this is what he he would have us believe is an obvious case of classism:

Take for instance Noam Chomsky. The New Atheist message, he once told an interviewer, “is old hat, and irrelevant, at least for those whose religious affiliations are a way of finding some sort of community and mutual support in an atomized society lacking social bonds.” If “it is to be even minimally serious” he continued, “the ‘new atheism’ should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship” such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism.

I have no idea what Hoelscher's issue is with Chomsky and he didn't try to explain it.

Hoelscher's essay is a perfect illustration of "Modern English" as described by George Orwell in Politics and the English language. The writing is snaggletoothed, meandering and pretentious and fails to convey ideas without hiding behind vagueness and impenetrable run-on sentences.

Of course, I would expect him to say his writing is clear as an icicle during a spring thaw and I lack the ability to understand him. I say the Emperor has no clothes. It's up to the reader to determine which is true.

Hoelscher also called me out for tossing a few rude words in to describe his views on economics. He right, of course, but I offer no apology. Anti-capitalism is an adolescent disease and I can give Bristol a pass because he's young but Hoelscher is a tenured professor and needs to be held to a higher standard. As I've said time and time again, there is no excuse to be a Marxist in the 21st century. These are dead-end ideas and the lessons of history are both fresh and clear. Honesty requires harshness in criticism of that position.

If he wants to be rude back, then I have no right to complain. Fair is fair.
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How should secular people fight poverty

Debbie Goddard wrote an interesting piece last week that says promoting education should be an important goal of the secular movement.

I want to see the movement do more than pay lip service to the value of education. I’ve talked about this before, but I am frustrated that we-the-movement only seem to get involved with public education when a teacher puts Bible quotes on the walls of her classroom, when a football coach leads his high school team in prayer, when a science teacher spends time promoting intelligent design, when an administration prevents a student from starting an atheist club, or when a high school graduation is scheduled to take place in a church. Then we swoop in with our science advocates and Wall of Separation to make everything right…but don’t seem to worry about the fact that the high school’s graduation rate might be less than 50% and the shared science textbooks are older than the students.

I've previously criticized demands* for skeptics, atheists and secular people to engage in mission creep, such as to shift their focus away from their central themes and towards other causes that already have support movements. There's no need to retrace those steps, and Goddard did reiterate a good point from Walker Bristol that the black church gains a lot of its power from presenting itself as a force to combat poverty* and it is in the interest of secular groups to copy that approach..

So assuming secular groups should fight poverty what approaches should they use?

Bristol's concentration was on the Why and not the How, so he didn't name any specific approaches the way Goddard spoke of funding education scholarships. Unfortunately both* of them endorsed a piece in the fringe leftist publication CounterPunch written by philosophy professor David Hoelscher about class problems in atheist circles.

To be fair, I do remember thinking when I signed up for my first TAM, the biggest conference of the skeptics movement, that the high registration fees assume that everyone is rich.

Hoelscher started his sprawling essay with a quote from Karl Marx, which should hint at the quality of the rest of the piece. He later quotes Noam Chomsky favorably* as saying "'the new atheism should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship' such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism." Later he wrote:

As the Marxist Terry Eagleton observes, there is something egregiously amiss when “[atheist] avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam” and “most of them hardly mention the word ‘capitalism’ at all.”

So what are we to make of this, should secular groups who want to fight poverty spend their time fighting capitalism? Instead of asking a shallow philosophy professor, why don't we hear what economist Milton Friedman had to say on the subject:

...the question is how can we as people exercise our responsibility to our fellow man most effectively? That is the problem. So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free-market.

But let's not kid ourselves, secular people who don't study mainstream economics are hostile to capitalism and market-based solutions and reject Friedman. It doesn't seem to matter that economists like Cass Sunstein have convinced modern progressives like President Barack Obama to view markets as an effect tool for organizing society. For example, in last night's State of the Union Address the president advocated market-based solutions to climate change. When it comes to economics, there are far too many secular people on the fringe.

It's also true that capitalism hasn't worked as a magic panacea everywhere, such as in the former USSR and chaotic poor nations. It has, however, worked to eliminate a lot of poverty in famous cases like Hong Kong, Sweden, Estonia, Singapore and Denmark. It even worked when brutal dictators tried it while keeping the rest of the country locked down in China and Chile. Compare West Germany with East Germany or South Korea with North Korea to see the difference between capitalist and anti-capitalist approaches.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for eliminating poverty. If we knew of one beyond all uncertainty then academic economists would be advocating its adoption. With no sure-thing to advocate, here are some positions and actions for secular groups that I believe will reduce poverty:

* Promoting financial literacy for poor people. This could take the form of luring adults to free classes with free food, or raising money for public schools in poor districts to require a personal finance class.

*Addressing condom fatigue. I know that sex education is important for reducing unwanted pregnancies, which are a poverty-creating machine, but we can't keep looking at poor people as too stupid to understand how pregnancy works. Americans have access to cheap contraceptives and know plenty about them but many choose not to use them.

*Help increase the purchasing power of the poor through housing zoning deregulation, ending rent control laws, fighting price cartels like barber licensing and increasing access to affordable food.

*Promote international trade as a way to bring lower prices to poor consumers and increase the standard of living for poor foreign workers. For the exact same reasons, promote free and open immigration.

* Stop listening to economic know-nothings like David Hoelscher. Seriously, just close the browser window when he comes up. You have nothing to learn from him about economics except efficient ways to kill poor people.

We should never make zero-sum assumptions and think wealth in one place causes poverty in another. Poverty is the natural state of the world and it is through innovation and human cooperation that we are able to eliminate it. Some places just haven't had as much growth and have been left behind. Those of us who know about growth owe it to everyone else to share what our civilization has learned.

Adamantium Claws: I received messages from Goddard, Walker and even Hoelscher pointing out details I got wrong. I chose to preserve and asterisk them and the clarifications, responses and  admissions of errors are found here. None of these issues challenge or change my thesis in any way.
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Only the White House defends drone strikes

I've seen a barrage of criticism dropped on President Obama this year about his lax rules on who to assassinate with a drone strikes, including NPR, the ACLU, The Daily Show, my liberal friends and now even Buzzfeed.

I think the Buzzfeed article is what brought it to critical mass. It's not fair to say that liberals are giving the O-man a pass on this issue because all one hears today is criticism of this plan from liberals. The only defense I have heard comes from within the White House.

So yes, if George W. Bush was still in office the left would be going crazy over this issue, but it's not like the Obama drones are endorsing Obama's drones. Maybe they'd be organizing more protests and recording stupid folk songs about it if there was a Republican behind it, but they aren't ignoring it either. I love pointing out liberal hypocrisy but it's not coming from the rank and file.

The only hypocrisy comes from the president himself. The sweetest part of this whole ordeal is that the even President Obama doesn't think this policy is a good idea, judging by the post-election New York Times story that started:

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

I do need to separate myself from some of the other critics here. I don't oppose the United States using assassinations in the war on terror, and it doesn't make a difference to me if they targets are American citizen or not. By all means, Anwar al-Aulaqi needed killing. My issue is the method the O-man uses to approve the assassination and the lack of oversight or even judicial review that could influence further drone assassinations.

The president wants us to trust him, and by extension, everyone that takes office after him. That's a horrible way to run a country.
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