Pro Commerce

Tech veneer

I woke up this morning realizing that I live in a third world country that looks like a first world country because of the tech veneer.

We have buses, trains and even planes that are quite unreliable even in good weather. We have subways that don't go where people travel and often public transportation takes 20 or 30 years until it connects airports to the central city. Someplaces it simply doesn't connect.

We have schools where everybody gets beaten up and few learn rudimentary lessons. We have an entire population that never has a new thought after age 23. We have that same population incapable of rudimentary arithmetic. Virtually no newspaper or other media in the country publishes tables or numbers for the innumerate population.

We plan to build high-speed rail systems at astronomic costs while our current Amtrak system is frequently 24 hours late.

We have a police system and a justice system that is unable to stop daytime homicide on the streets.

We have a political system where government employees who cannot be fired earn significantly more money, get better health coverage and retire in luxury under conditions far better than the market workers who pay taxes to support their government employees.

On the face of it, this should make one depressed.

Not me. I have the unique experience of seeing hundreds of new businesses started and flourish in slum areas, in bad neighborhoods and in marginal legal environments because the police and government infrastructure is so incompetent.

It is the incompetence of America that gives us our commercial vitality.

That is what I keep in mind when I see our public transit stopped dead for 20 minutes when everyone pulls out their smart phone or their tablet computer.

America is a Third World country with a tech veneer.

Bag charge

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed its most recent ostrich legislation. From here on all stores that offer paper bags (plastic bags are illegal) must charge $.10 for the bag.

This is the third piece of incomprehensible San Francisco political gobbledygook.

The first was a local universal healthcare bill that took away the invoicing for service that free medical clinics had previously been using and set a minimum insurance health coverage for all businesses operating in the city ($4,700 per employee). Restaurants responded two ways.

They added a surcharge on the menu. Everybody pays more at restaurants in San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors has forced a change in the wording on the surcharge but every restaurant finds a way to change the wording to make sure higher prices prevail.

The real twist was the creation of healthcare trusts into which the $4700 per employee was submitted. The employees then had to fill out paperwork with documentation to cover any medical costs. Restaurants quickly found that employees rarely used more than $1,000 of this trust fund per employee in a year. Every restaurant ended up with a bonus of the unused health coverage funds that was never available from traditional health insurance.

Then the ostrich supervisors passed a law making sure that no toys could be given to children at fast food restaurants unless the child meal met some imaginary health-food standards. McDonald's and two other chains simply added a $.10 charge for the toy.

This should give us a clue on how the new bag charge will be handled. The stores will give coupons to offset the cost to the customer. Why is that so hard for the ostrich politicians to anticipate?

Fifty years with no voice

Before 1950 there were some conservative newspapers in the United States. A few of them were in big cities. Since then we have gone 50 years with virtually no conservative or pro-business media. The exception could be the WSJ, but it was poorly managed and focused on non-political issues.

What does it mean for a large segment of the population in the United States to go without any public voice?

It means that we had a Democratic Congress for most of that time. It means that the ideas and values that now constitute the conservative and pro-business politics had to develop on a face-to-face basis. It also developed in the hidden samizat world of private materials passed on from friend to friend.

It has further meant that the increased visibility of the conservative pro-business world has been a great shock to the controlling Lefty elite.

Most significantly it has meant great vitality and coherence for the conservative pro-business worldview.

That coherence emerged in the 2010 congressional elections.

It also means that the Left has continued to live in blind denial as it did for the previous 50 years.

Are you aware of how big and cohesive the Tea Party movement is today and how rapidly Catholics are joining the Tea Party?  You are if you follow that world on the Internet. You aren't if you depend on the mainstream media for information.

 

P.S. Superb commentary on the same subject by another blogger.

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I phoned three organizations on this list to say I had already lost enough of my family to Jew-hatred.

Farewell Andrew

Andrew Breitbart was a brilliant creative man, who like most others with those qualities, trod the path from Lefty ideolog to pro-commerce conservative. 

Andrew invented a form of expose' journalism that will be the model for my cohorts for the next half century.  Andrew overwhelmed the world of Lefty lies with 5 times the amount of evidence.

Andrew's model campaign was to expose Obama's vote machine: ACORN.  Andrew arranged for the release of the first ACORN video tape that showed fraud and criminal behavior by ACORN employees.

The entire Left claimed the video was false.  So Andrew released the second tape showing the same fraud and criminal behavior from the opposite end of the U.S.  Again there was a storm in the national press about lies and conservative deception.  Then Andrew released a third video tape and said he had more.  He had two more.  

At that point Congress could see through the Leftwing lies and in two days took ACORN off the federal payroll.

Andrew will be long remembered for his brilliant contribution that taught every honest person how to deal with the alien starship that keeps pouring lies on the world like rain in the Amazon. Have five times the evidence that a non-Lefty would need to see the light. 

Andrew Breitbart is my hero. Wonderful appreciation of Andrew here.  An excellent explanation of Andrew's single minded goal of making the mainstream media hatred of America visible.

Environmentalists for diversity?

A few years I wrote a blog that examined the core values of conservatism which are anti-ideology and pro-emperical. I asked why Zen Buddhism wasn't inherently conservative. In fact most Zen Buddhist communities are pathetic peacenik Lefties.

Once again I have seen a conflict in the core ideas of environmentalists and the behavior of environmentalists.

Environmentalism seeks to preserve the deep diversity of the natural world around us. Every theoretical effort is made to preserve the diversity of habitats, of species and of environmental milieu.

But when we look at the politics of environmentalism it is invariably, in the past 50 years, in the maw of the Democratic party. Somehow the centralization of government and power that are inherent in the ideology of the Democratic party is invisible to the environmental political world.

How can you rail against the mono-cultures of agriculture and vote for the party that subsidizes the mono crops? The environmental movement does that.

How can the environmental movement champion the diversity of life in the oceans and simultaneously support the party that subsidizes ships and ship building and unionized industries that generate the most seagoing pollution?

There seems to be a theoretical conflict in environmental ideas and environmentalists behavior.