from National Review Online
December 23, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
Random Thoughts
Live and learn.
By Thomas Sowell

Excerpts:

If there are still any educators or others who think that both sides of an issue should be presented, the non-profit Heartland Institute has put together Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and the British Channel 4 program The Great Global Warming Swindle in one package with two DVDs.

People who are impressed by how many of Barack Obama’s advisors have Ivy League degrees seem not to remember how many people with Ivy League degrees mismanaged the Vietnam war and how many people with Ivy League degrees mismanaged economic policy during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The fact that sales at Starbucks are going down, while sales at McDonald’s are going up, shows that people are adjusting to economic adversity by cutting back their spending. Only in Congress do people adjust to economic adversity and growing deficits by spending more money.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke seems to be pretty popular thus far. My own preference is for Federal Reserve chairmen who are unpopular. When Paul Volcker was chairman of the Fed back in the 1980s, he was hated like poison, but his policies finally broke the back of the inflation that had been out of control for years — not without some painful costs, but few benefits can be gotten without costs.

It is fascinating to see that politicians whose interventions in mortgage lending have created a disaster in financial institutions are now moving on to intervene in the automobile industry.

As American incomes have risen over the years, liberals have kept changing the definition of “poverty.” Otherwise, the dwindling numbers of people who could be called “poor” would take away the liberals’ main claim to influence and power.

Governor Rod Blagojevich may have inadvertently done us a big favor by discrediting the idea that we should look up to politicians as our protectors and saviors.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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