Milton Friedman – The Pencil. Simply Complex

A caller to the Mark Levin show mentioned this video today:

This is amazingly simple and should explain to anyone who doesn’t understand why the central government has no place in the building of cars, pencils or the production of any goods.

Mark Steyn on Molly Norris and the loss of the First Amendment

When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

. . .

On the advice of the FBI, she’s [Molly Norris] been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Read entire column here.

~~~ooOoo~~~

The non-liberal press, i.e. Mark Steyn (NJR), James Taranto (WSJ) and Diana West seem to be the only journalists questioning this double standard in our society and speaking out on this atrocity visited on Molly Norris.

Liberals or not, thank God, someone is.

A nation of peasants? – Victor Davis Hanson

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.

Read entire article here.

Obama’s Recovery Summer Vacation

From the Heritage Foundation: