Thomas Sowell, from Natonal Review

Obama’s Iran ‘Agreement’ Is a Charade

No such agreement exists, and even if it did, we couldn’t trust the mullahs to submit to inspections.

By Thomas Sowell — April 7, 2015

By abandoning virtually all its demands for serious restrictions on Iran’s nuclear-bomb program, the Obama administration has apparently achieved the semblance of a preliminary introduction to the beginning of a tentative framework for a possible hope of an eventual agreement with Iran.

But even this hazy “achievement” may vanish like a mirage. It takes two to agree — and Iran has already publicly disputed and even mocked what President Obama says is the nature of that framework.
Had Iran wholeheartedly agreed with everything the Obama administration said, that agreement would still have been worthless, since Iran has already blocked international inspectors from its nuclear facilities at unpredictable times. The appearance of international control is more dangerous than a frank admission that we don’t really know what they are doing.
RELATED: Surrender to Tehran
Why then all these negotiations? Because these charades protect Barack Obama politically, no matter how much danger they create for America and the world. The latest public-opinion polls show Obama’s approval rating rising. In political terms — the only terms that matter to him — his foreign policy has been a success.
If you look back through history, you will be hard pressed to find a leader of any democratic nation so universally popular — hailed enthusiastically by opposition parties as well as his own — as was British prime minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich in 1938, waving an agreement with Hitler’s signature on it, and proclaiming “Peace for our time.”

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Thomas Sowell: Obama’s Iran ‘Agreement’ Is A Charade

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Who cared that he had thrown a small country to the Nazi wolves in order to get a worthless agreement with Hitler? It looked great at the time because it had apparently avoided war.
Now Barack Obama seems ready to repeat that political triumph by throwing another small country — Israel this time — to the wolves, for the sake of another worthless agreement.
RELATED: The Shadow of Munich Haunts the Iran Negotiations
Back in 1938, Winston Churchill was one of the very few critics who tried to warn Chamberlain and the British public. Churchill said: “The idea that safety can be purchased by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”
After the ruinous agreement was made with Hitler, he said: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Chamberlain’s “Peace for our time” lasted just under a year.
Comparing Obama to Chamberlain is unfair — to Chamberlain. There is no question that the British prime minister loved his country and pursued its best interests as he saw it. He was not a “citizen of the world,” or worse. Chamberlain was building up his country’s military forces, not tearing them down, as Barack Obama has been doing with American military forces.
Secretary of State John Kerry and other members of the Obama administration are saying that the alternative to an agreement with Iran is war. But when Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactors, back in 1981, Iraq did not declare war on Israel. It would have been suicidal to do so, since Israel already had nuclear bombs.
RELATED: There’s No Deterring an Apocalyptic Nuclear Iran
There was a time when either Israel or the United States could have destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities, with far less risk of war than there will be after Iran already has its own stockpile of nuclear bombs. Indeed, the choice then will no longer be between a nuclear Iran and war. The choice may be between surrender to Iran and nuclear devastation.
Barack Obama dismissed the thought of America being vulnerable to “a small country” like Iran. Iran is in fact larger than Japan was when it attacked Pearl Harbor, and Iran has a larger population. If Japan had nuclear bombs, World War II could have turned out very differently.
If anyone examines the hard, cold facts about the Obama administration’s actions and inactions in the Middle East from the beginning, it is far more difficult to reconcile those actions and inactions with a belief that Obama was trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons than it is to reconcile those facts with his trying to stop Israel from stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
This latest “agreement” with Iran — with which Iran has publicly and loudly disagreed — is only the latest episode in that political charade.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is www.tsowell.com. © 2015 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Thomas Sowell, Mascots of the Self-Congratulatory Elites

Mascots of the Self-Congratulatory Elites

By Thomas Sowell - January 30, 2011

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's quietly chilling article, "Two Californias," in National Review Online, ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere-- and is a slow poison that is being largely ignored.
Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California's predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today-- and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.

In Hanson's own words: "Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards."
This is a Third World culture, transplanted from Mexico, and living largely outside the scope of American law, state or federal.
Ironically, this is happening in a state notorious for its pervasive and intrusive regulation of the minute details of people's lives, homes, and businesses. But not out in the Third World enclaves in the Central Valley, where garbage is strewn with impunity and unlicensed swarms of peddlers come and go, selling for cash and with no sales tax.
While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one in line who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries and other parts of what he calls "the technological veneer of the middle class."
Sadly-- and, in the long run, tragically-- this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States. It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.
In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments of the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.
The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional.
What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as mascots of the self-congratulatory elites.
These elites are able to indulge themselves in non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others.
The effect of all this on the mascots themselves is not a big concern of the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others. The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed benefactors.
So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize self-destructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their own children to private schools, they needn't worry about what happens to the children of the mascots in the public schools.
Other people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools can simply be called "racists" for objecting to what the indulgence of the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to other children trapped in the same schools with them.
A hundred years ago, groups who are now indulged as mascots were targets and scapegoats of Progressive era elites, treated like dirt and targeted for eradication in the name of "eugenics."
There are no permanent mascots. As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of tomorrow. But who thinks ahead any more?

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Copyright 2011, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/30/mascot_politics_108420.html at February 16, 2014 - 07:09:09 AM CST

Thomas Sowell on Poverty

Thomas Sowell

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Good intentions, few results.

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Thomas Sowell

The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?
Leaders of the Left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?
If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much of a relationship to reality?
“Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare-state spending.

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Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air conditioning and television and own a motor vehicle; and, far from being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’ money.This kind of “poverty” can easily become a way of life, not only for today’s “poor,” but for their children and grandchildren.
Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare-state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire.
If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?
In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the Left’s agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted are by no means the worst of it.
If our goal is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries around the world.
Millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard, dirty, and sometimes dangerous jobs.
Even though the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it that their children got the education that they themselves often lacked.
By 1994, the 57 million overseas Chinese had created as much wealth as the one billion people living in China.
Variations on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese, and other emigrants who settled in many countries around the world — initially poor, but rising over the generations to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually avoided politics on their way up.
Such groups concentrated on developing what economists call “human capital” — their skills, talents, knowledge, and self-discipline. Their success has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the Left seldom uses in polite society: “work.”
There are individuals in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty of the groups as a whole.
The agenda of the Left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.
This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the Left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT

Obama Plays Chicken By Thomas Sowell December 5, 2012 12:00 A.M. One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays “chicken” with congressional Republicans along the “fiscal cliff,” is that he is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be exposed by the mainstream media — nor, apparently, by the Republicans. A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich” cost the government so much tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit — so that the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax rates continue for “the rich.” It sounds very plausible, and constant repetition without a challenge may well be enough to convince the voting public that, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives does not go along with Barack Obama’s demands for more spending and higher tax rates on the top 2 percent, it just shows that they care more for “the rich” than for the other 98 percent. What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama’s argument is. That also makes it completely inexplicable why the Republicans have not done so. The official statistics that show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is can be found in his own “Economic Report of the President” for 2012, on page 411. You can look it up. You may be able to find a copy of the “Economic Report of the President” for 2012 at your local public library. Or you can buy a hard copy from the Government Printing Office or download an electronic version from the Internet. Those who find that “a picture is worth a thousand words” need only see the graphs published in the November 30 issue of Investor’s Business Daily. What both the statistical tables in the “Economic Report of the President” and the graphs in Investor’s Business Daily show is that: (1) Tax revenues went up — not down — after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cuts in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit. Indeed, the New York Times reported in 2006: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.” While the New York Times may not have expected this, there is nothing unprecedented about lower tax rates’ leading to higher tax revenues, despite assumptions by many in the media and elsewhere that tax rates and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction. They do not. The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction. This has happened as recently as the George W. Bush administration and as far back as the Reagan administration. Moreover, tax revenues went up when tax rates went down as far back as the Coolidge administration, before there was a Congressional Budget Office to make false predictions. The bottom line is that Barack Obama’s blaming increased budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts is demonstrably false. What caused the decreasing budget deficits after the Bush tax cuts to suddenly reverse and start increasing was the mortgage crisis. The deficit increased in 2008, followed by a huge increase in 2009. So it is sheer hogwash that “tax cuts for the rich” caused the government to lose tax revenues. The government gained tax revenues; it did not lose them. Moreover, “the rich” paid a larger amount of taxes, and a larger share of all taxes, after the tax rates were cut. That is because people change their economic behavior when tax rates are changed, contrary to what the Congressional Budget Office and others seem to assume, and this can stimulate the economy more than a government “stimulus” has done under either Bush or Obama. Yet there is no need to assume that Barack Obama is mistaken about the way to get the economy out of the doldrums. His top priority has always been increasing the size and scope of government. If that means sacrificing the economy or the truth, it’s no deterrent to Obama. That is why he is willing to play chicken with Republicans along the fiscal cliff. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Permalink

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Thomas Sowell

By Thomas Sowell on 11.15.12 @ 6:05AM

If Republicans can't expose Democrats' lies, how are they to compete?

The most successful Republican presidential candidate of the past half century -- Ronald Reagan, who was elected and reelected with landslide victories -- bore little resemblance to the moderate candidates that Republican conventional wisdom depicts as the key to victory, even though most of these moderate candidates have in fact gone down to defeat.
One of the biggest differences between Reagan and these latter-day losers was that Reagan paid great attention to explaining his policies and values. He was called "the great communicator," but much more than a gift for words was involved. The issues that defined Reagan's vision were things he had thought about, written about and debated for years before he reached the White House.
Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.
Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.
That sounds fine. But the cold fact is that minimum wage laws create massive unemployment among black teenagers. Conversely, one of the lowest rates of unemployment among black teenagers occurred in the 1940s, when inflation virtually repealed the minimum wage law passed in 1938, since even unskilled labor was paid more in inflated dollars than the minimum wage law required.
Even during the recession year of 1949, black teenage unemployment was a fraction of what it would be in the most prosperous later years, after the minimum wage rate was raised repeatedly to keep pace with inflation. One of the few benefits of inflation is that it can in effect repeal minimum wage laws, which politicians can do directly only by risking their reelection.
Conservative opposition to minimum wage laws is just one of the ways that conservative principles often work out to benefit those with lower incomes, more so than liberal principles that sound so much better as political rhetoric.
It seems unlikely that Governor Romney had time to learn about such things during this year's busy election campaign. He was like a rookie quarterback with just a few seconds to try to figure out the opposing team's complex formations before the ball is snapped.
One of the secrets of Barack Obama's success is his ability to say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.
Since most of the media will never expose Obama's fallacies and falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.
Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.
For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm, and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are readily available from a number of sources.
A committee on the counterproductive effects of liberal policies such as minimum wage laws on minorities could be headed by someone like economist Walter Williams. Here too, there are many writings in plain English that could expose the huge harm done to minorities by liberal policies that claim to be helping them.
It is not necessary to explode every single lie put out by liberal Democrats. All that is necessary is to thoroughly discredit a few of their key claims, exposing them as liars.
What is even more necessary is for Republicans themselves to understand the urgent need to do so, for their own sake and -- more important -- for the country's sake.
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