THE ENTERPRISE--A WORLD OF IDEAS
- The first is that I don't read "popular autobiographies," especially of entertainers, politicians,athletes, etc. Either they have little to say that interests me, or I don't respect their opinions enough to be worth the time.
- The second is that so many of the business and quasi-business (e.g, Freakonomics and any sequels) are literary adventures with no useful destination--except if they are entertaining. I'll give Malcolm Gladwell credit. He is a talented enough writer that I usually read his books. They are informative, follow some theme, and are fun to read. (Outliers, The Tipping Point & Blink are excellent; What the Dog Saw less so since it was a compilation of articles, not written around a single theme.)
- The third is that most business books I find these days seem "repetitive" in so many regards. That doesn't mean you might not enjoy them. It probably means I have read and thought about too many such books. If the book has some unique premise, it might grab me. A couple of those in recent years are How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer (a writer, not a practitioner), and In Pursuit of Elegance; Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing by Matthew May (a writer who was a practitioner of sorts, advising Toyota).
- I seldom read historical non-fiction. That eliminates a lot of books. I occasionally read some general interest books, typically on health related—Anticancer by David Servan-Schreiber) which offers thoughts on how your frame of mind can influence your susceptibility to/survival of cancer) or current events—Heaven and Earth, by Dr. Ian Plimer a fine book which debunks "global warming"topics)—but then the reading time simply runs out.
Ed Feulner, President of Heritage Foundation
On the ballyhooed night, cameras crept through the tunnel to the vault. There, on live TV, workers pulled down the concrete wall. The dust settled, and the cameras peered inside. And what did spellbound viewers behold? A pile of dirt, a few empty gin bottles, and a discarded stop sign. Such were the treasures in Al Capone's vault.
A quarter century later, this serves as a wonderful metaphor for the grand project of Progressivism. Since the dawn of the 20th century, Progressives foretold the blessings they would deliver. Ordinary citizens lack the wits to govern themselves, they said, so let's put an elite cadre of Progressive managers on the case. Give them power, and they’d soon have things humming -- a chicken in every pot, a Chevy in every garage.
When Progressives gained power, they served us the New Deal and Social Security, followed with helpings of the Great Society and Medicare/Medicaid. Now they're jamming the Obama smorgasbord down our throats -- ObamaCare, bailouts, stimulus packages, Government Motors, and "quantitative easing," a.k.a. printing money.
That isn't all. Far from it. For decades, public-sector labor unions harnessed Progressivism's spread-the-wealth creed to extract lavish contracts from government. Workers won guarantees of lifetime health care and generous pensions, often without having to contribute a penny from their own above-market wages.
But instead of simmering in their Progressive pots, the chickens are now flocking home to roost. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going broke and, if not reformed, will soon devour the entire federal budget, chickens and all.
The Obama spending spree is running up trillions in deficits and adding trillions to the national debt, while the economy stagnates in recession. Public-sector pension funds and health care plans are draining state treasuries. At least 44 states and the District of Columbia are in the red and facing bigger deficits down the road.
At all levels of government the dreary, dishonest philosophy of Progressivism is a crashing failure in practice. Its grandiose promises are as hollow as Al Capone's vault. The empty gin bottles discovered there serve as reminders of the spending binge Congress has been on for years. Only the discarded stop sign offers useful advice. It's high time, indeed, for policymakers to stop.
Stop the reckless borrowing and spending. Sober up, and start governing responsibly.
But who will determine the ideas that will supplant the failed Progressive project and repair the damage it has wrought? Milton Friedman gave us an answer in the 2002 preface to his 1962 classic, Capitalism and Freedom:
"Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
Of course, Friedman knew full well that ideas are never just “lying around,” but are the carefully calibrated ammunition in an endless battle. They come from thinkers on the right who produce books such as Capitalism and Freedom, and from think tanks.
Why think tanks? Well, consider the two main alternatives. Members of Congress, even conservative members, are usually the last ones to promote ideas bold enough to repair the mess liberals have made. Colleges and universities, meanwhile, tend to be sanctuaries for the most devout apostles of the Progressive faith. They're unlikely to overturn their cherished worldview and offer alternatives.
As fed-up voters send more conservatives to Congress, and as Progressivism's slow-motion train wreck continues, expect to see increased calls from policymakers for ideas from the right. After all, we have plenty of practical, powerful ideas lying around.
Ed Feulner is president of The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org).
"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.
His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.
He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?
He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals and he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.
And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.
The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.
Now, nearly a full 2 years into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters. Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain.
The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions. Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted, "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame. The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual's life.
When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America?
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