When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington– and who can predict what politicians will do?

As Dr. Sowell explains in the remainder of his characteristically brilliant piece, the one thing politicians most certainly will not do is nothing, even if that is clearly the wisest course of action.

Think about the economic disruption caused by the presence of an aggressive, activist government in our markets.  It’s like a great white shark, prowling through a sea of much smaller corporate and individual fish.  It obeys none of the rules binding the other players in the market.  It can suck virtually unlimited funding from private entities… at least, until this suction causes the rest of the economy to implode.  This allows it to shrug off financial wounds that would kill any other fish in the sea, and makes it almost completely blind to the signals of pain that would cause private industries to change their behavior.

The government can rewrite the law to suit itself, or ignore laws it finds inconvenient.  It can rig the marketplace to punish competitors, as the Obama Administration has been doing with the health insurance industry.  It can shape media coverage to smooth over errors in judgment that would be public-relations disasters for any corporation.

As Sowell points out, these factors combine to make the State extremely unpredictable.  Would a company with President Obama’s record of abject failure dare to approach its investors for another $50 billion in funding to continue the same ineffective policies, under the same management?

How should private-sector fish deal with this massive predator cruising among them?  The very smallest fish might initially hope to avoid its notice, but there is simply no way to escape broad national mandates like ObamaCare, Card Check, or cap-and-trade legislation.  The best way to avoid the gaping jaws of the government shark is to stay agile and keep a low profile.  The last thing any small-business owner wants is to grow large enough to draw the direct attention of this Administration.  They can only hope political expedience doesn’t place their industry on the target list for taxation, regulation, or demonization.

For larger companies, invisibility is not an option.  The smart play is to become like remora fish, attaching themselves to the State and feeding on the scraps it leaves behind.  The flavor of socialism practiced by contemporary Democrats relies upon this behavior.  The objective is to bend the private sector into compliance with political ideology.  Only a modest percentage of the private sector can be directly nationalized, unless the government shark is ready to mutate into something even more huge and feral.  This leaves the statist hungry to take on a number of “partners” in the private sector.  It has trillions of tax dollars, plus even more valuable regulatory incentives, to purchase all the partners it needs.  Al Gore became a billionaire selling carbon credits, an entirely artificial industry created out of thin air by oppressive government regulation.  There are more billions where those came from.

Investment is not gambling.  It is a carefully reasoned attempt to predict the future, and profit from anticipated conditions.  When the government directly controls the economy, to the degree ours currently does, scientific prediction becomes extremely difficult.  Who knows what bailouts and injunctions might lie ahead?  Businessmen are reduced to reading tea leaves, like which industries the State is spending the most time slandering, or which states the most powerful Senators hail from.  They become eager to purchase influence, which politicians are equally eager to sell.  Big Business finds it very useful to direct the hungry shark’s attention toward its smaller adversaries.  If corruption is defined as the exchange of financial support for unequal treatment, all large governments are inherently corrupt.

For the remora economy, anticipating the needs and desires of consumers is all but futile.  The smart play is to anticipate the needs of the State, and the desires of its dominant ideology… then latch onto the bloated shark when it swims by, and hang on for dear life.  Businesses attached to the State always find ways to profit from the relationship… and eventually, they become dependent upon it, and actively resist attempts to restrain the government spending and regulation which has become integral to their business model.

When the great white shark dies, everything attached to it will die along with it.  That future is unthinkable, so the State insists no one should waste any time thinking about it.  It’s also less than twenty years away.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

We’re going to “fire up sluggish economic growth” by plowing another fifty billion deficit dollars into roads, rail, and airports?  It’s hard to believe even the American media would be lazy enough to write such a headline with a straight face.

Does anyone seriously think our economy is just waiting for another fifty billion dollars’ worth of roads to come roaring back to life?  I guess business owners have all sorts of property staked out for new factories and shops.  They’re just waiting for someone to build roads leading to them.  Does all of this Administration’s economic knowledge come from playing “Sim City” computer games?

In the fading days of the Democrats’ disastrous reign, we’ve come to a moment when they’re begging us to let them “create economic activity” by hiring one more team of union excavators to dig some random holes, and one more team of union construction workers to fill them right back in.

State governments are still sitting on hundreds of billions in unspent money from the first massive “stimulus” plan.  Why can’t they cut a few bucks out of their slush funds to build these desperately needed roads and airports?  If nearly $800 billion in madcap government spending produced nothing but massive unemployment, plus a bumper crop of road signs touting the glory of the stimulus plan, what good is another $50 billion going to do?

The Administration assures us its little espresso shot of new stimulus spending will be revenue neutral, paid for by “ending tax breaks for oil and gas companies.”  Oh, that’s just wonderful. Those tax hikes on oil and gas will be passed directly along to the consumer, in addition to hindering investment in the development of new energy resources.  The last thing a fragile, recessionary economy needs is an increase in energy costs.  I’m all in favor of tax simplification, but it has to be across the board.  Adding another few thousand pages to our ridiculous tax laws, to target unpopular companies for cash to fund more pork spending, plays up the worst aspects of a dysfunctional system.

We don’t need any more control from this incompetent Administration.  We don’t trust them to pick winners and losers in our economy, deciding which industries should be penalized to fund their latest hare-brained schemes.  We would be fools to trust them with another dime of our money.  They’re insane if they think an electorate prepared to sweep the President’s party out of office would be excited by the thought of purchasing another fifty billion dollars’ worth of failure.

The GOP should make it clear that any further spending from this Administration, including any wild schemes hatched during the lame-duck session of Congress, will be zeroed out when the new Republican Congress convenes.  It’s remarkable to note that, after two years of world-record deficits from unrestrained spending, this President has not proposed a single idea that would reduce the size or scope of our bloated government.  He needs to be sent a message that government will now be reduced. It doesn’t need to chow down on another fifty billion donuts before its crash diet begins.

No more taxes.  No more spending. Hold the stimulus, and pass the Boston Harbor tea, please.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

America’s primary international enemy–Islamic radicalism–insists on government by theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, wants to eradicate homosexuals from society, and insists on the use of force over diplomacy. Remind you of a certain American political party? In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics. Moulitsas also challenges the media, fellow progressives, and our elected officials to call the radical right on their jihadist tactics more forcefully for the good of our nation and safety of all citizens.

It’s refreshing to hear liberals are rejecting that kind of trash, isn’t it?  Unfortunately, the condemnation from liberals quoted by the Atlantic Wire is decidedly conditional.

Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect says:

Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of “my political opponents are monsters.” Indeed, Moulitsas begins the book with the Goldbergian declaration that “in their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban.”

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism says nothing of the kind.  The author takes great pains to explain, repeatedly, that his purpose is not to smear contemporary liberals as neo-Nazis.  Instead, his extensively researched and footnoted book puts fascism into its proper historical context as a form of collectivism, related to communism and socialism far more closely than anything on the “right” side of the Western political spectrum.  Goldberg wrote the book because he was tired of people like Markos Moulitsas trying to shout down conservatives by calling them fascists.  He knew he was handling a conceptual hand grenade, and he begins nearly every chapter of his book by checking to ensure the pin is still firmly in place.

All of the five liberal responses to American Taliban quoted by the Atlantic Wire include a drive-by smear of Jonah Goldberg or his book.  Either none of these people has actually read Liberal Fascism, or all of them are liars.  Jamelle Bouie has apparently seen the cover, because his review notes the similarity of the cover to American Taliban.  This testifies to the limits of Moulitsas’ imagination, not the kinship of the subject matter.

Ben Crair of The Daily Beast pauses in his breathless rush to denounce American Taliban to take a swipe at some other well-known intruders running along the walls and ceiling of the liberal subconscious:

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas has long been open about his admiration for the scorched-earth tactics of the conservative movement. So it should not come as a surprise that, after a trip through the looking glass, his new book American Taliban might have just as easily been written by Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. This is a liberal’s attempt at a conservative bestseller.

Sure, Ben.  Rush Limbaugh explicitly compares liberals to murderous cave-dwelling religious fanatics all the time. Ann Coulter is second to none in her contempt for the intelligence of the Left, but she has yet to write an entire book forcefully arguing her political opponents are exactly the same as the terrorists who murdered thousands of Americans on 9/11.  (It’s worth slogging through Crair’s entire review to reach the howler where he says Al Franken “steers clear of sledgehammer rhetoric,” instead “using humor to expose the absurdity and hypocrisy of many conservative ideas.”)

Matt Yglesias, last heard offering the opinion that lying is acceptable when it advances liberal goals, cuts to the quick when he questions the effectiveness of Moulitsas’ hatemongering, rather than its legitimacy:

I tend to think that this is one of the areas where progressives aren’t just doing the right thing, but have a smarter tactical approach to politics. There are scenarios in which tagging your political opponents with smears can be effective, but I don’t see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic “my enemies are totalitarian madmen” strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections. This should be differentiated from the occasional lapse into rhetorical excess that everyone does now and again. I’m talking specifically about the kind of sustained effort to seriously persuade people that Elana Kagan favors sharia or Dwight Eisenhower is a Communist that you see among loons of all stripes but that seems to be granted more respectability on the right.

See how he slipped Birch right in there with Beck and Goldberg?  That’s some clever writing right there!  This kind of casual slander is so typical of the Goebbels/Moulitsas/Yglesias doctrine of politically sanctioned lies.  It’s almost as distasteful as all those mainstream conservative websites pushing their “Red Dwight Eisenhower” scare stories.

These lefty writers spend a lot of time congratulating themselves for their high-minded dismissal of American Taliban. The truth is that Moulitsas has become an embarrassment to the Left.  His slavering diatribes are greatly impeding their efforts to push the new Narrative of Hate, which they hope will save their dying ideology from outraged voters.  By comparing the output of Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter, or Goldberg to inexcusable garbage like American Taliban, they render praise through faint damning.  They need to open a little distance between themselves and Markos, but they can’t resist taking the opportunity to slip in a few shots at the people they really disapprove of.

These liberals might have their boots planted in Moulitsas’ face, but they haven’t climbed very far out of his mud pit.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween.  Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House.  Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

The highest priority for Americans is the repeal of ObamaCare, whose damage to our dignity, economy, and health care system is absolutely intolerable.  Outright repeal must wait until Obama has been replaced in 2012, but a Republican Congress can neutralize the worst provisions of the bill, sealing its toxic waste into lead-lined containers until we can shoot it off into space and be rid of it.

There is some concern that a successful Republican Congress will engineer enough prosperity to pump air into the Obama re-election campaign.  Knowing ObamaCare was dead would send a euphoric surge through an economy that has spent the last couple of years curled up in the corner, hugging itself and whimpering as it awaits the next beating from Democrats.  ObamaCare killed tens of thousands of jobs almost immediately, and the weight of its mandates has been crushing job creation, especially among smaller businesses.  It seems reasonable to believe its repeal would produce a far stronger surge of payroll expansion than any of the gimmicks being kicked around by statists today.

This is why the election of solid, articulate conservatives to Congress is so essential.  If the Republican wave in 2010 is an isolated outpouring of voter anger, we’ll have trouble finishing the job in 2012, and could soon find ourselves right back where we started.  It’s not enough for the electorate to “throw the bums out” this year.  We have to teach them to build electrified fences topped with razor wire around the federal government, to keep those bums from ever returning.

It takes nothing away from Obama’s failures as President to point out that he did not create our current situation on his own.  He bankrupted us, but we were already on shaky financial ground when he arrived.  He detonated the deficit to pay off his political allies in the historic “stimulus” heist, but his crew wasn’t the first to roll out of the Treasury with bags of taxpayer swag in their fists.  Barack Obama is the absurd final extension of a system that has been dying for longer than most of us have been alive.  He didn’t change the course of the State.  He just stepped on the gas.

Conservatives underestimate the inertia of that gigantic, doomed engine at their peril.  The apparatus of the federal government is like nanotechnology: self-sustaining and self-replicating.  Powers it has seized are never returned.  Its budgets are never cut.  It howls in agony if the rate of budget increase is even slightly reduced.  In the past two years, trillions of dollars in new commitments have been added to its bulk.  The media will eagerly assist Democrats in strapping the poor and destitute to its hide as armor, to turn away budget-cutting knives.

What will be crucial for Republicans after 2010 is leadership. It is essential to make the voters understand how we got here, and restate the Constitutional principles that render so much of this bloated government utterly immoral, as well as ineffective.  Encouraging voters to pour unfocused anger at Obama is ultimately counter-productive, because he didn’t create the crumbling system he presides over.  Its foundations were laid long before his birth, and it won’t magically improve as soon as he’s gone.

In fact, letting the voters work out their frustrations on an Obama punching bag is dangerous, because once they’re exhausted, there are far too many ways he could talk them out of their anger.  No matter how unpopular he might be now, a Democrat president who enjoys the slavish devotion of the media will always have potent protection against personal criticism.  We will be told that failure to re-elect Obama is a sin… an unforgivable act of racism and bigotry, and a hate crime against the vulnerable people he supposedly represents.  It is necessary to run against the corrupt and venal system he truly represents.

Look beyond that campaign to 2013, and imagine a political environment in which the signature “achievement” of the Obama presidency is seen as one of the worst mistakes in recent history.  The Democrats invested every drop of their political capital in passing it.  They twisted arms, cut seedy backroom deals, and ultimately shoved it down the throats of a protesting majority of Americans.  Imagine a jubilant nation celebrating the repeal of this disaster, and the defeat of the party that inflicted it on us.  Nothing like it has happened in the modern era.  Political parties dissolve after that kind of defeat.  There will never be more solid ground for conservatives to stand upon, as they begin the daunting task of dismantling the out-of-control system that produced the poisonous notion of socialized medicine.  There will never be a better time to return to the just, and effective, principles that guided us before we lost our way in the New Deal and Great Society.

If we fail to create and use that opportunity, our next appeal to the voters will come among the ruins, after a collapse that every one of us should be united in our determination to prevent.  There is nothing patriotic about allowing our fellow citizens – even those who hate us – to live through what is coming next.  Nothing like it has ever happened in the modern era, either.  We stand within a dozen years of watching this mighty nation devour itself in a frenzy of non-negotiable, utterly impossible demands.

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama.  It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.”  It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future.  We need healthy opposition parties.  The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats.  That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

There are few examples in recent memory of a political party being as comprehensively wrong as the Democrats were about Iraq, every step of the way.  The Democrats insist their miserable performance on the domestic economy should be measured against phantasmal scenarios of doom – the apocalypse that would have happened if they didn’t blow a trillion bucks on the “stimulus,” which “created or saved” zillions of jobs.  When it comes to military policy, however, they’re happy to believe Saddam Hussein was basically harmless, and would have minded his own business if left alone.  Their court jester, Michael Moore, made a movie depicting Iraq as a kite-flying paradise before the Americans showed up and ruined everything.  Their media allies floated stories, during the early days of the Iraqi occupation, tentatively suggesting things might have been better for the Iraqi people when Saddam ran the show.  After all, he left most of his subjects alive.

Although most Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq, they quickly changed their minds when public opinion soured on the war, and they saw a political opportunity.  This led to the tortured birth of the Idiotic Evil Genius narrative, in which the Democrats claimed George Bush was a simian cowboy moron who diabolically tricked them into supporting his neocon war for oil.  Mainstream Democrat politicians made common cause with the wilder fringes of the nutroots.  Anyone who remembers the melancholy Cirque du Soleil of the Kerry presidential campaign could only laugh at President Obama’s assertion tonight that “Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11.”  In reality, a sizable chunk of the President’s party had no interest in the Afghanistan operation until it became a useful club against Bush’s Iraq policy.  I wonder how the Kos Kidz feel about Barack Obama declaring them completely outside the “political spectrum.”

It is a simple matter of fact that almost every major Democrat, including Barack Obama and all of the other 2008 presidential contenders, opposed the surge strategy that brought us victory in Iraq.  In other words, if Obama and his party had been in charge from 2004 onward instead of Bush, we would have lost Iraq.  A suggestion to any major Democrat, during the 2004 campaign, that victory could be secured in Iraq by sending more troops would have been met with absolute contempt.

During his speech, Obama boasted of sending troops under General David Petraeus to “break the Taliban’s momentum.”  That would be the same general Obama’s dedicated supporters at MoveOn.org called “General Betray Us.”  Obama’s party accused this man of treason for “lying” about the success of the surge strategy.  MoveOn.org has not been denounced or given the John Birch Society heave-ho from the Democrat party.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, spent much of 2007 declaring the war in Iraq a lost cause.  He plainly stated the surge was “not accomplishing anything.”  The only way the Bush White House could get him to shut up was by daring him to vote with the courage of his convictions and cut off funding for the war effort.  Democrats worked relentlessly against the war effort, relishing the political damage inflicted on George Bush.  Here are Obama’s remarks about Bush from his Tuesday night address:

I am mindful that the Iraq War has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it is time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.

Note the complete lack of credit for Bush’s winning war strategy.  Obama is only willing to concede that Bush supported the troops and loved his country… and that very statement from Obama is an outrageous lie. “No one could doubt” Bush’s love of country and commitment to our security?  How about Van Jones?  You remember him, Mr. President.  You installed him as one of your dozens of unelected, unaccountable “czars,” and gave him a $30 billion budget.  He was forced to resign after revelations he was part of the sub-moronic “9/11 Truth” cult, which believes President Bush deliberately destroyed the World Trade Center in a murderous conspiracy.

If you’ve forgotten Mr. Jones, perhaps you remember Cindy Sheehan, elevated to sainthood by the Left because she used her “absolute moral authority” to declare the Iraq operation a futile waste of life, and George Bush a subhuman tool of the international Zionist conspiracy.  The Democrat Party treated her as a major celebrity back in the day, but discarded her like so much rubbish once Bush was out of office.

It would have been absurd to expect Obama to offer a humble apology for his personal mistakes during the debate over the Iraq war, and admit his party was wrong to actively oppose the victory he celebrated Tuesday night.  Politicians rarely admit mistakes, or offer apologies for errors in judgment.  To cite another example from Tuesday night, during one of his awkward pivots to domestic politics, Obama said that “to strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve.”  This leads one to wonder what Obama’s lavishly funded friends in the NEA, and the bloated Department of Education, have been doing for the last thirty years, aside from making field trips to attend Al Sharpton hate festivals.  No amount of dismal failure will ever lead Democrats to concede that public education is flawed, or a single dollar of funding for its bureaucracy should be cut.

No mistakes, no apologies, no accountability… why learn from history when you can rewrite it?

Thanks are due to the incredible courage and resourcefulness of the American military, the vision of commanders like General David Petraeus, and the remarkable determination of President George W. Bush.  They overcame stiff opposition from Barack Obama and his party to give Iraq a chance at becoming something greater than a plaything for billionaire tyrants and savages.  The long struggle against Islamic fascism may end in something better than mind-shattering bloodshed, because of their efforts.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

It certainly hasn’t been lost by all of us.  Individuals, families, and communities across America never broke faith with the noble traditions of self-reliance, responsibility, and adventure that forged this honorable nation.  Such people can be found in every neighborhood of every city… but the nation as a whole has lost its way.

We dishonor ourselves when we tolerate the use of our fighting men and women as pawns in a political game.  As long as they stand in harm’s way, we should accept no insult or slander against them.  Robust criticism of the policy makers who declare and end hostilities is fair and welcome… but there is a line between politicians and soldiers, and it is easily visible to honorable people.  We should have nothing but contempt for the likes of Code Pink.  Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s political career should have ended the day after he compared our service members to Nazis.  There is no place for such creatures in the Congress of a nation that answers the dedication and sacrifice of its veterans with love and respect.  In a rough economy with an uncertain future, Beck’s rally raised $5.5 million to help the families of special-operations soldiers killed in battle.  That is a strong step in the right direction.

We dishonor ourselves when we create massive obligations with unsustainable financing.  This shows disrespect to the future, and a craven refusal to face the realities of today.  If time is money, then madcap deficit spending steals the time of the future… draining it away like so much sand down the neck of a broken hourglass.  As parents love their children, we should be mindful of the future, and eager to shoulder our current burdens instead of passing them along, with interest.  We cannot know the shape of tomorrow, or what hardships they may be facing when the bills for our indulgences come due.

We dishonor ourselves when we declare the rights and freedoms of our fellow citizens to be conditional, and subject to our needs.  Free people do not expect the State to confiscate and ration.  They don’t subcontract the design of the future to political appointees.  They understand such designs require obedience, and obedience requires compulsion.  You cannot “honor” a neighbor you deem unfit to manage his own affairs.  There is no honor to be found in the pursuit of a perfect State to rule an inadequate people.

We dishonor ourselves when we embrace death as the solution to inconvenient people.

We dishonor ourselves when we deny the possibility of progress to embrace tribal hatreds.  Race and feminist hustlers peddle a message that says the vast majority of people cannot be trusted to show common decency to minorities and women.  We’ve had enough of this toxic superstition.  Precious lives have been wasted, and ended, because there is power and profit to be gained in pretending the Civil Rights Act happened yesterday, and slavery ended the day before that.  Where is the honor In shrieking that people who disagree with your politics are “interchangeable with the KKK?”  An ideology so weak that it must resort to these underhanded tactics is garbage unfit for the intellectual consumption of a proud people.  Those who are foolish enough to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears, and consume that garbage, will rediscover their honor after they find their self-respect.

Most crucially, we dishonor ourselves when we forget we “have the same steel spine and the moral courage of Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King,” as Sarah Palin said at the Restoring Honor rally.  We remain the proud inheritors of a revolutionary philosophy, the children of vision and industry.  We have not diminished into timid weaklings, unworthy of the trust of our ruling class.  Our land is still abundant, and filled with parents who want to make a better life for their children.  Why should we listen to assurances that our future will be one of decline, where children hear their parents mourn better times from distant memory?  Why should we accept that ten percent and more of our population must remain unemployed forever?  Why should we excuse the failure of an incompetent Administration by believing we became helpless and destitute in just a few short years, and are now obliged to provide limitless resources to our caretakers?

We have listened too long to the poisonous whispers of those who say we’re too old and feeble to stand up and deal with our own problems.  The doom they have written for us can be swept aside like so many cobwebs.  Honorable people do not fear risk and challenge.  We dishonor ourselves by believing we have no moral claim on the entirety of our labor, or responsibility for the maintenance of our needs.  We dishonor ourselves by paying trillions to hear the same old fairy tale about limitless entitlements distributed by friendly giants wearing power ties.  The American people have wasted enough time reading the elaborate limited warranty on the inside of the coffin lid our Left is preparing to nail shut.

We reclaim our honor by turning away from those who believe the great mass of us are beneath their contempt, and compassion is best expressed through domination.  They have no power we didn’t give them, which means they have no power we cannot take away.  Let us begin.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!