When You Voted for Obama You Thought You'd Get Something for Nothing...Instead You Got Nothing for Something

I just sent this email to Congressman Chris Gibson:

My wife’s dental surgeon in Kingston just told me about the Obama administration’s confiscation of phone records of the Associated Press. I think of AP as a pro-Obama propaganda enterprise, so this was akin to a Stalinist purge. It comes on the heels of revelations of illegal IRS harassment of Tea Parties.  The Institute for Justice (see below) is now saying that the abuses go to higher levels than have been revealed in the pro-Obama media (including AP).  Mike Huckabee has called for an impeachment hearing with respect to Obama’sBenghazi embassy cover-up.  The targeting of dissenters for IRS harassment strikes me to have been as serious as the administration's cover-up of Obama's allowing our ambassador and his staff to be killed.

It is time for a Congressional call for an investigation and an impeachment hearing.  Obama’s ongoing abuses are akin to the early stages of Hitler’s Nazi regime.  

After years of the media's demonization of the Tea Party, it turns out that the real terrorist is in the White House.  For instance, a few years ago Mike Bloomberg claimed that a bomb found in the Times Square area had been placed by a Tea Party member.  It turned out that it hadn't been.  Similarly, a colleague who comes from the left recently said that he had heard that the Boston Marathon bombing had been done by a Tea Party member. The lies about and demonization of the Tea Party in the American media are evidence that the Tea Party was threatening to the Wall Street-big government establishment in a way that only the most extreme left-wing movements are.  Nevertheless, the Tea Party was never an extremist movement.  Unlike the lies in the HBO show The Newsroom, it was never funded by wealthy donors, including the Koch family. It was always a moderate, middle class movement whose ranks included ordinary homeowners and taxpayers. We live in a nation where moderate protest is viewed as an extremist threat, and an extremist, narcissistic president who uses the IRS to target the protestors is called a savior.  

The media has lied consistently and thoroughly about both Obama and the Tea Party. The media is serving as a Wall Street-big government propaganda agency, not as an information source. Focusing on current events is a waste of time because impartial, accurate information is impossible to acquire.

Recently, I was in Nashville, where I feel much more at home than in the North.  When I hang out in a bar in Port Authority on the way home from Brooklyn to upstate New York, I disagree with three quarters of the crowd.  When I hung out in a bar in Nashville,  I agreed with three quarters of the crowd.  If I could do it over again, I would have gone to college and relocated in Tennessee.  Because of northern prejudices, though, I wouldn't have considered doing that in the 1970s and '80s. Pretty much everything I learned as a child has been wrong. 

While conversing with a few guys at the bar, someone agreed almost completely with the libertarian point of view, but he said, "I don't want to be an extremist like John Stossel; I want to be a moderate like Bill O'Reilly."   The individual has been brainwashed. O'Reilly is not a moderate. Just because he says he wants to find a middle path between the Democrats and Republicans doesn't make him a moderate.  He's a big government extremist. The Democrats and Republicans are two fascist-style, big government parties that support America's vampire economy.

Stossel is the moderate. He is in support of a level of government spending that was characteristic of the United States during the halcyon 1950s.  The country started collapsing and the real hourly wage started stagnating in the late 1960s, almost immediately following LBJ's expansion of government.

From the Institute for Justice

 >We have documented how severe the IRS abuse of power is – making unconstitutionally invasive demands of citizen-led groups.

We have detailed how this intentional targeting of conservative groups is still ongoing – 10 of our clients are still tied up in admittedly improper, onerous IRS inquiries.

Congress, and now the Justice Department, are investigating the draconian actions of the Obama Administration's IRS.

Join tens of thousands of Americans in demanding the IRS end its unconstitutional abuse today. Add your name before Friday's congressional hearing.

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Sharad Karkhanis Book Fund

John Drobnicki sent me the following announcement:

The Office of College Advancement at Kingsborough Community College has established the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund in memory of its namesake, Sharad Karkhanis, who was a library faculty member there from 1964 until his retirement in 2003.  He passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78. Dr. Karkhanis, who also taught Political Science classes, was President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969.  He was also one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, serving as that organization's very first President from 1980-1982.

Contributors should make their checks payable to the Prof. Sharad Karkhanis Fund and send to:

Office for College Advancement

Kingsborough  Community College Foundation, Inc.

2001 Oriental Boulevard

Brooklyn, NY 11235-9978

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, Professor Emeritus at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, who served as President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) from 1967-1969, passed away on March 28, 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida at the age of 78.  Sharad was born in Khopoli, India, on March 8, 1935, and came to the US in 1959.  He worked as a librarian trainee in NJ while attending Rutgers (MLS, 1962), and then worked briefly at Brooklyn College/CUNY (1963-64) before being hired in 1964 by Kingsborough, where he remained as a librarian until his retirement in 2003.  Aside from his duties as a librarian, Karkhanis also taught political science classes at Kingsborough, holding both an M.A. in Political Science & International Relations (Brooklyn College/CUNY, 1967) and a Ph.D. in Political Science & American Government (NYU, 1978).  He was one of the founders of APALA, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and was that organization's first president from 1980-1982.

Karkhanis was the author/editor of:  New Directions for the City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1968); A New College Student: The Challenge to City University Libraries (LACUNY, 1969); Open Admissions: A Bibliography, 1968-1973 (CUNY, 1974); Indian Politics and the Role of the Press (Asia Book Corp., 1981); A Select Bibliography on Retention (CUNY, 1981); Jewish Heritage in America: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1988); How to Avoid Dead End in Your Career, an Asian American Perspective; and, Library Services for the Asian American Community: Papers of the 1987 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, June 1987, San Francisco, California (APALA, 1988); and Educational Excellence of Asian Americans, Myth or Reality?: Papers of the 1988 Program of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, July 1988, New Orleans, Louisiana (APALA, 1989).  Karkhanis served for many years as a university-wide officer in the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, when Irwin Polishook was President.  Much of his time in his later years was devoted to publishing a newsletter, first in print and then online - called The Patriot Returns.  In 2008, Karkhanis was honored as the Educator of the Year by the Queens Village Republican Club.

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Narcissism and the Barack Obama Show

In 2009 Jeane M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell wrote an important, useful, and interesting book on narcissism,  Living in the Age of Entitlement: The Narcissism Epidemic (The Free Press, 2009).  The book veers into discussions of popular culture (for instance, the personalities of rock stars and actors) that increase the book's marketability, but the statistical information presented in the early part of the book is especially useful.

In 2008 many bloggers noticed Barack Obama's narcissism.  The book inadvertently clarifies his wide and continuing appeal:  America has become a nation of narcissists.  It is not a long step from Survivor, American Idol, and the Jerry Springer Show to the Barack Obama Show.  The American left's moral exhibitionism, its claim that its self-serving political views reflect its morally superior "conscience," the conscience of specially trained intellects, is itself a version of narcissism, and the narcissistic political correctness in which the academic left and the education establishment have indoctrinated America's young came to flower in 2008.  (Arguably, George W. Bush is equally narcissistic, and I do not doubt that the conservative movement led by celebrities like Rush Limbaugh is so.)  

I have two points of difference with Twenge and Campbell.  First, as psychologists they see economic phenomena as symptomatic of psychological phenomena.  It is the reverse.  Narcissism came to flower following the expansion of government regulation in the 1960s and the concomitant abolition of the gold standard in 1971.  Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979.  The phenomena that Twenge and Campbell  describe cannot thrive in a free economy because someone must pay the bill for large homes, self-esteem-based education systems, and self-indulgent debt. The Fed's monetary creation powers allow the public to defer choices by borrowing; borrowing to build big houses, which the authors see as a key symptom of narcissism, is impossible without the Fed's counterfeit powers.  Construction of school systems that do not educate is too.  Free America depended on a gold standard, a rigid monetary system to allocate resources.  The inflationary Federal Reserve system allows unending misallocation of resources and indulgence of selfish fantasies. Eventually the system will crumble, leaving future generations worse off.

Second, the authors do not place the kind of phenomena they describe into historical context. Have there been other eras when narcissism took hold?  I would answer yes, and they have all been periods of monetary expansion.  Post-republican Rome in the times of Caesar,  Diocletian, and later,  post-Columbian Spain, Tulipmania in Holland, the Mississippi Bubble in France, the South Sea Bubble in England, and Weimar Germany also may have been associated with narcissism.

Narcissism began to increase in America before the 1970s, the era that the authors emphasize.  The Roaring Twenties, for example, were more narcissistic than any earlier era in American history;  the crash of the 1930s led to a two-decade decline, but the 1950s and 1960s saw the advent of suburban living, Playboy, and hysteria over rock stars like Elvis Presley and movie stars like Marilyn Monroe.   Easy money and narcissism go hand in hand; as well, the decline of religion in the face of Progressivism and progressive education, which paralleled monetary expansion (Progressivism resulted in both monetary expansion and the decline in religious faith) were antecedents to narcissism.

The authors seem to advocate a superficial, collectivist political viewpoint, but the process of making the American culture more narcissistic paralleled its increasing emphasis on collectivism from the Mugwump period onward.  The Mugwumps may have been the first narcissistic political movement. The authors get it right when, at several points in the book, they empahsize the sober freedom and democracy that the Founding Fathers advocated and the sharp difference between America's 19th century political ideology, which still resides in many Americans today, and narcissism.

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How Universities Induce Bad Ethics

The mass murder that anti-capitalist, socialist states have engaged in since the days of Lenin pose a much greater threat to ethics than profit making. Since the anti-profit, socialist mentality has turned out to result in serial mass murder (China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Nazi Germany), the anti-profit camp needs to address its own moral bankruptcy. That opponents of profit making are in charge of and predominant in education, including in business schools, has led to a confusion between ethics and opposition to capitalism. Since opposition to capitalism has resulted in the world's worst crimes, and universities have led the opposition, universities have created a moral vacuum. Positivism reflects this vacuum. An example is finance theory, which holds that meaningful action is impossible because the market already anticipates all knowledge (rational expectations). For a good description of the workings of socialism in the Nazi (National Socialist) regime in Germany, see Gunter Reiman's Vampire Economy. Because universities are still wedded to primitive, 20th century opposition to profit, they induce bad ethics.

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The Higher Education Bubble

A colleague from a public, western university told me that for an economics final exam he asked an exam question that required basic arithmetic. Unable to do the arithmetic, a student wrote in the allotted answer space: "Millennials don't do math."  Another colleague from an East Coast community college wrote this in a recent email:

Unfortunately, the whole enterprise has become a mockery. At my community college this semester, over 85% of our entering freshmen need math remediation -- that's 85 percent! Many do not know the multiuplication tables!

I recently met a philanthropist who told me that she thinks it's a waste of money for students who are unable to do college level work  to attend college. Even the mouthpiece of Progressivism, The New York Times, admits that the majority of high school seniors are not college ready:


In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.

The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.

The situtation is just as bleak with respect to performance in college.  According to The Chicago Tribune:

Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: 'I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.'


According to Sandra Stosky and Ze'ev Wurman in Minding the Campus:

Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

Except for the top 10 percent of students, college spending misallocates wealth.  There is no evidence that increased college attendance makes economies more productive.  America was a more innovative country when less than five percent of its population attended college.  For instance, Thomas Edison had three months of schooling. In 2012 66.2 percent of high school seniors enrolled in college.

Despite the absence of gains in academic achievement since 1970, K-12 education has, since 1970, tripled in inflation-adjusted cost.  I copied the following chart from Intellectual Takeout.org, which got it from the Cato Institute:

There also has been a higher education cost increase.  According to the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas N. Harris:

 Since the early 1990s, real expenditures on higher education have grown by more than 25 percent, now amounting to 2.9 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)—greater than the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in almost any of the other developed countries.  But while the proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has risen dramatically, the percentage of entering college students finishing a bachelor’s degree has at best increased only slightly or, at worst, has declined.

I disagree with Harris that the flunkout rate indicates a productivity gap.  Colleges that make their courses easier graduate more students, but the result is not higher productivity.  Rather, attendance of students who cannot graduate at the current watered down level diverts resources from more productive uses.

There is no evidence that college increases the ability to think coherently, to come up with creative solutions to human needs, to become a better citizen, or to become more productive economically.

On the other hand, there is evidence that colleges are politically biased and that they serve to indoctrinate students in left-wing, Progressive,  and big-government ideology.  Although college degrees in fields like engineering, business, and health raise salaries, there is no evidence that a more targeted or online education cannot equally prepare students for careers in those fields.  A large share of the Forbes 400, for instance, does not have a college degree, and that is especially true of the self-made portion that has engaged in areas other than finance.

Research that shows that college education contributes to human capital is tautological and does not control for alternative explanations.  It observes increases in pay from college, then it concludes that the pay is a return to human capital.  One alternative explanation is signaling: The college degree signals personal and intellectual abilities, but its content may be irrelevant to the job.  In that case an IQ test combined with four years in the military or the Peace Corps could be used in its place--and those might more accurate measures. Another explanation is that firms find college to be an easy way to screen job applicants: It is cheap to employers because the job applicants pay; parents are eager to see their children have prestigious or professional careers, and they are willing to foot the bill. 

On their part colleges and their faculties function as special interest groups, pushing for ever greater subsidies, expansion of programs, and licensure requirements in fields like medicine and law. Licensure requirements force the public to subsidize higher education.   Moreover, colleges have succeeded in gaining tax exempt status despite their routine violation of the Section 501 (c) (3) requirement that tax exempt organizations not engage in political indoctrination.  Universities, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and bogus sciences like environmental studies, routinely engage in political propagandizing, and they do so unabashedly.

There is an additional explanation for the higher education bubble:  Federal Reserve Bank counterfeit money that has been allocated to student loans. Without student loans the growth in the number of students attending college, hence wasting public resources and being indoctrinated in Progressive ideology, would be much smaller.  Conversely, firms would not be able to require irrelevant college degrees in fields like retail.  College can be viewed as a Fed-generated economic bubble, much like the tech bubble, the Internet bubble, and the sub-prime housing bubble.

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