Palestinian Militants Threaten Bruno

The Guardian reports,

A Palestinian militant organisation that was ridiculed in the new Sacha Baron Cohen film has threatened to “respond in the way we find suitable” against the London-born satirist.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah movement, has condemned the film, Bruno, in which Cohen plays a gay Austrian fashionista, as “part of a conspiracy” against them. There was no comment from Cohen.

In the film, Cohen attempts to get himself kidnapped and arranges a meeting with Ayman Abu Aita, who, it is claimed, is a leader in the Martyrs Brigade, which is designated as a terrorist group in the US and European Union. While promoting the film, Cohen spoke of the clandestine meetings at shadowy locations and bodyguards required to set up the scene.

Quote of the Day

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

~ Adam Smith

What are the most lucrative college degrees?

According to a recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, majoring in math brings in the money. The top 15 highest-earning college degrees are all math-related and a majority of them are engineering degrees you can receive from online engineering degree programs:

The reasons are a product of supply and demand. The supply is low and the demand is high. There are simply fewer people graduating with math-based majors than liberal-arts majors. For instance, engineering and computer science each comprise about 4 percent of all college graduates, while social science and history make up 16 percent. The result leaves math-based majors with a larger paycheck.

Philosophy of Money

A phrase accepted and frequently employed by most is “money is the root of all evil.” I abhor this phrase almost as much as I do the term “common good.” I will not even attempt to attack the concept of money as evil because I cannot do so in a more convincing way than Ayn Rand. She devotes approximately three pages of her novel Atlas Shrugged to the subject (and please, for the sake of whatever deity or beliefs you hold sacred, read that book). As the entire argument is extensive, I’ll just post some of the first and last paragraphs here, which convey the core of the argument. However, I highly encourage a reading of the full text.

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

How Poor Are America’s Poor?

According to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation,

The average “poor” person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines. The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

1. 43% percent of all poor households actu­ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Cen­sus Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

2. 80% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36% of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

3. The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, Lon­don, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the averagecitizens in foreign countries, not to those classi­fied as poor.)

4. Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31% own two or more cars.

5. 97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

6. 78% percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62% have cable or satellite TV reception.

7. 89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrig­erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had suf­ficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

HT: Carpe Diem

Checking Premises

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek gives an insightful defense of free market healthcare. What I hope will be taken from this article is that free market principles can be used in government programs. Defense contractors have to bid for government contracts, DC’s voucher system created competition among school officials, the military uses financial incentives to attract new recruits — all are examples of free market principles being applied to government. Just because government does (and, at times, should) provide part of a service to its citizens, does not mean it must do so in a “command and control” fashion.

Liberty or Poverty

The Club for Growth blog recently posted on Walter Williams’ classic PBS documentary ‘Good Intentions’ based on his 1982 book, The State Against Blacks. The documentary may have been produced nearly 30 years ago, but its economic principles have not changed – nor have the problems of minorities or the causes thereof (despite the government’s good intentions).

Part 2

Part 3

Food is getting cheaper, not more expensive

HT: Carpe Diem

Unions Gaining on Charter Schools

The New York Times published an interesting piece on charter schools:

Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation’s 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools.

“Charter schools have been too successful for the unions to ignore,” said Elizabeth D. Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School, where teachers voted last month to unionize 3 of its 12 campuses.

But if charter schools have been so successful, why unionize them? Don’t fix whats not broken.

The standard argument generally admits the success of charter schools but contends that teachers lose bargaining power over their employers. A union, they argue, would correct this apparent problem.

If teachers felt this way, however, they would leave their charter school positions and teach in standard public schools. This is not occurring at any major scale. What is occurring is the freedom to choose. Teachers can choose to work under a unionized public school system or a non-unionized charter school system. This is the best arrangement.

Under this system teachers in the non-unionized charter schools get paid by merit, while teachers in the unionized public schools get paid by seniority. This is the tragedy of public education.

What can ultimately be gained from the partial unionization of charter schools is a case study. Will students perform better under unionized or non-unionized charter schools? That we will see. Hopefully the focus will remain on how students perform, not on how teachers feels. That concern has destroyed public education in the United States.

Poverty Reduction, with and without China

According to the World Bank:

• China’s poverty rate fell from 85 percent to 15.9 percent, or by over 600 million people.
• Excluding China, poverty fell by around 10 percent.