Thomas Sowell on tax and dogmatism:

There was a time when Democrats and Republicans alike could talk sense about tax rates, in terms of what is best for the economy, without demagoguery about “tax cuts for the rich.” Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke plainly about the fact that higher tax rates on individuals and businesses did not automatically translate into higher tax revenues for the government. Beyond some point, high tax rates on those with high incomes simply led to those incomes being invested in tax-free bonds, with the revenue from those bonds being completely lost to the government – and the investments lost to the economy.

As President John F. Kennedy put it, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” This was because investors’ “efforts to avoid tax liabilities” make “certain types of less productive activity more profitable than more valuable undertakings,” and this in turn “inhibits our growth and efficiency.” Both Democratic president Woodrow Wilson and Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush said virtually the same thing. This disconnect between higher tax rates and higher tax revenues is not peculiar to the United States. Iceland and India both collected more tax revenue after tax rates were cut. In Iceland the corporate tax rate was cut from 45 percent to 18 percent between 1991 and 2001 – and the revenue from corporate taxes tripled at the lower rate.

Related, this:

You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth – and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.

A point that seems to have escaped the New Statesman’s class warrior Peter Tatchell.

And Heather Mac Donald on the parallel universe of campus ‘diversity’ spending:

The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and “underrepresented minorities” can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin colour or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM PhDs enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else.

As Mac Donald noted previously, UC San Diego has to scrape by with only the most skeletal diversity apparatus, including,

The Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Centre, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Centre, and the Women’s Centre.

Clearly, that just won’t do. Catering to students’ colossal self-involvement is a full-time job. For at least 18 people. At one university.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Steven Pinker on collective delusion and dissent:

We look at these horrors retrospectively and we say, “How could everyone have been so… mad? On top of being evil, these ideas seem patently ludicrous. How can you have a collective delusion overtaking an entire society?” And it looks like one of the answers is, if dissenters are punished and can anticipate they’re going to be punished, then you might have a situation where no-one actually believes something but everyone believes that everyone else believes it, and therefore no-one is willing to be the little boy that says the emperor is naked. And this pluralistic ignorance, as it’s sometimes called, is easily implemented when you have the punishing or censoring of unpopular views.

Alan Charles Kors on speech codes, groupthink and the decline of the humanities:

I guarantee you that Reason [magazine] published on a campus would be defunded and that you’d be up on harassment charges every other week… I have always voted to hire people who think radically differently from myself, who are asking questions that I wouldn’t ask. The problem is that a lot of those people wish to clone themselves in their department and see voices that are dissident to their own orthodoxies as uncollegial… If you’re taking a course, the goal of which is to make you understand that you have false consciousness, that you don’t understand the way in which America has brainwashed and mystified your mind, and which has given us a faculty that thinks of its primary goal as the demystification of students who have been brainwashed and given false consciousness by consumer capitalist America, that is not of intellectual value. They are contributing to the very crisis of the humanities that they are bemoaning. 

And so, for instance, the Marxist pseudo-philosopher Nina Power rails against the “ideological devastation of the education system” and demands more public subsidy for Marxist pseudo-philosophers, while telling us that “everyone is equally intelligent” because, well, they just are. Of course one shouldn’t assume such people are interested in logic, reality or the testing of ideas, certainly not their own, despite all the blather about “critical thinking.” What they’re interested in – and determined to have more of – is power. Ideally expressed by making students credulous, conformist and pretentiously resentful. 

And Thomas Sowell on government interference, irrational taxes and how to create an economic crisis:  

To be a masterful politician you have to have a lot of brass. It takes an incredible amount of brass for Bill Clinton, who was the biggest factor in creating the housing boom that led to the bust that brought down the whole economy, [to blame Republicans for that crisis]. It was during the Clinton administration that the federal government forced lenders to change their lending standards, which had been in place for decades and had made real estate one of the safest investments around, to bring those standards down in order that they could get the numbers that they wanted for low income, minority mortgage applicants. Attorney General Janet Reno, under Clinton, threatened lenders with legal action from the Justice Department if their numbers – in terms of minority groups and income levels of people who were approved – didn’t fit her preconceptions. The Housing and Urban Development programme, under Clinton, made law suits against lenders, charging them with racial discrimination based solely upon statistics. The government was forcing people to lower the lending standards that had existed for years, and [afterwards] they said, “Well, the problem was greed.” You don’t satisfy greed by lending to people who can’t pay you back. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

I was coming up the escalator on the “L” when I saw these two buttons on the back of some student’s backpack. I wonder what the correlation is between having only buttons of Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky on your personal effects and the likelihood of you defaulting on your student loans? 

Via Chicago Boyz. 

Mark Steyn marvels at progressive poster girl and prodigious contraceptive user Sandra Fluke: 

Sandra Fluke… completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light bullshit in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck. So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. 

For some, being a liberated feminist apparently means being dependent on the state for as much as possible for as long as possible, even in the bedroom. And so the radical thing, the righteous thing, is to demand public subsidy of your sex life, and to do this with pride. 

Some of you may recall the bizarre racial odyssey of Elizabeth Warren, whose claims of Cherokee exoticism provided some amusement for readers with cruel, blackened hearts. Elephants Gerald steers us to these tweets by Ace of Spades, in which he poses some questions for academia’s very own Fauxcahontas: 

Here’s one. Here’s another. And a third. 

Theodore Dalrymple on Daniel Hannan’s book, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe: 

Without the European Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God – good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.

And Thomas Sowell ponders sleight-of-hand and class war economics: 

We have heard many times from President Barack Obama how he plans to raise taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” but not on the middle class. Apparently, if you don’t happen to be a millionaire or billionaire, you don’t have to worry. But the numbers say otherwise – and say so big time. The actual tax increase plans being proposed by Obama do not start with people who have an income of a million dollars a year. They start with people with incomes of $250,000 and up. According to the Internal Revenue Service, there are more than 2,700,000 people who earn $250,000 a year or more – and fewer than one-tenth of them earn a million dollars or more. So more than nine-tenths of the people who would be hit with the higher taxes supposedly aimed at “millionaires and billionaires” are neither. When businesses advertise one thing and then actually sell something else, that is called “bait and switch” advertising. That is exactly what President Obama is doing with his proposed tax increases on “millionaires and billionaires.”

As regulars will know, even taking everything those evil rich people have earned – every last dime – still wouldn’t balance the books. But then Obama has said that “fairness,” as he imagines it, is more important than optimising revenue or balancing the books. If punitive taxes on those deemed rich have counterproductive effects – say, by reducing tax revenue and job creation – an effect noted and studied by some of Obama’s own staff – this can be overlooked in the name of so-called “fairness.” And if class war rhetoric makes envious people vote for him regardless, that’s what matters. Hope and change, people. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Michael J Totten interviews the author Benjamin Kerstein. He begins with the question, “What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?”

To which Kerstein answers,

Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you’ve ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it’s quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it.

A little elaboration follows:

He is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he’s more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he’s supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.

And,

He makes people stupid. In this sense, he’s more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual… Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right… I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think… His tone is very intellectual, in that he speaks in a very quiet, measured style most of the time. But the content is clearly driven by what can only be called a species of hysteria… He seems to be at heart an extremely angry man, and I would guess that his anger is driven by something that is ultimately not political.

From then on in it gets rather critical.

See also this, by the late Christopher Hitchens. And of course this.

Update, via the comments: