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<http://www.tiadaily.com/images/dailyLogo.gif> TIA Daily • March 21, 2012 The Not-Santorum Now that Santorum is the Not-Romney, Romney is the Not-Santorum. ________________________________ Top News Stories The Not-Santorum The Law of Intended Consequences, Part 1 The Law of Intended Consequences, Part 2 Fake But Accurate, Part 1 Fake But Accurate, Part 2 The Obama Rate of Growth ________________________________ Submit articles, interesting links, letters to editor, or comments to [email protected]. ________________________________ Top News Stories Commentary by Robert Tracinski 1. The Not-Santorum Mitt Romney won yesterday's Illinois primary by a wide margin. The turnout was low, which may indicate a lack of interest in Romney. But of course it also indicates a lack of interest in Rick Santorum. If turnout was low, then his supporters did not go to the polls in droves to drive back the Romney machine. So yesterday's result makes a Santorum candidacy look like an even more remote possibility. Romney now has about 550 delegates for the Republican convention, about half of what he needs to claim the nomination outright and about twice what Santorum has. Talk earlier this year about a "brokered convention" centered around the possibility that there could be as many as four candidates who had more than 400 delegates, but no one with the 1144 needed for a majority. Now it looks like Santorum will have difficulty getting to 400, and nobody else will even get close. So I suppose Romney is "inevitable" again. I can't say I'm upset about this, because Santorum keeps getting worse as a candidate. I've tried to see his good side, honest I have. For example, I loved in the debates how his role was to shoot down Ron Paul whenever he started spouting the pacifist, blame-America-first line in foreign policy. But then on the campaign trail, Santorum can't stop himself from saying things like...well, here's the latest. Just in the past few days, two videos have surfaced. In the first video, Santorum is seen clapping approvingly at an event just a few days ago, as an Evangelical preacher in Louisiana declares, "If you don't love America, and you don't like the way we do things, I've got one thing to say, get out! We don't worship Buddha, we don't worship Mohammed, we don't worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God's son Jesus Christ." In other words, if you're not a Christian, you don't belong in America. This will stick to Santorum because it is very consistent with his own past sectarian rhetoric on religion, particularly his 2008 speech to a Catholic university in which he declared that mainstream Protestants aren't real Christians. The second video, from 2008, shows Santorum rejecting the legacy of one of the godfathers of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater. It has often been said that Goldwater lost his 1964 presidential campaign but won the future. His campaign energized a new, bolder conservative movement, and it was the starting point in national politics for everyone from Ronald Reagan to former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. So to repudiate Goldwater is to repudiate much of modern conservatism—and the best part of conservatism, since Goldwater stood, above all else, for limited government. Santorum knows this, and that is why he opposes Goldwater: "Republicans, I think to our credit, have sort of morphed away from the Goldwater idea that government needs to be smaller, it needs to do less, it needs to be doing nothing except what its core functions are." So here we have a candidate who is a principled and explicit opponent of individualism and a principled and explicit opponent of small government, who is not merely religious but religious in a way that is sectarian, intolerant, and intrusive. In short, he is the candidate who will speak out against contraception, but who won't speak out for small government. And here's the other thing. These statements are not any kind of calculated positioning on Santorum's part. To the contrary, if he thought them out as a matter of campaign strategy, he wouldn't say them. But these are his real, true beliefs, so he can't help himself. And if he can't keep from saying these things in the campaign, imagine what he would say and do as president. I wonder to what extent these revelations about Santorum will help Romney. Santorum has finally become the leading Not-Romney. But how many people will now rally behind Romney because he is the Not-Santorum? back to top 2. The Law of Intended Consequences, Part 1 A lot of the evils of government intervention can be explained by the Law of Intended Consequences. That's not the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is a favorite of conservatives. Yes, it's true that seemingly well-meaning regulations can have bad unforeseen consequences. But what is really destroying us is the consequences that were intended all along. Take the price of gasoline, for example. Republicans have been using the price of gasoline as an argument against the Obama administration, while Democrats have been arguing that, gosh, really, the president has no influence whatsoever on gasoline prices—based on economic principles they suddenly discovered when George Bush left office. This could be a whole column on its own, and it probably will be. But suffice to say that it is not an explanation to say that the price of oil is determined by supply and demand on the world market, because America is an increasingly important player in that world market. Our oil production is in the same league as Russia and Saudi Arabia, the only difference being that our economy is so much larger that we consume all of our domestic production. But we are a big enough oil producer that as we increase our production, particularly to the point that we begin to export energy (as we are soon about to do), we would have a significant impact on the market. Let's put it this way: if the price of oil is determined by supply and demand on the world market, we are one of the biggest suppliers and one of the biggest demanders. Moreover, don't forget the impact of the Fed's massive money-creation and its weakening of the value of the dollar, which increases the price of all imports. All other things being equal, a cheap dollar means expensive oil. (See Larry Kudlow on this issue.) But Obama isn't going to push for a strong dollar, partly because a weak dollar is a form of indirect handout to domestic manufacturers. By debasing the value of money for the rest of us, the Fed makes their products cheaper to sell overseas, while making competing foreign imports more expensive. See what I mean about intended consequences? There are two other things that make the oil charge against Obama stick. The first is that he has consistently opposed and discouraged production and distribution, from his dismissal of the shale oil boom, to his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, to his obstruction of offshore oil drilling after the Deepwater Horizon accident two years ago. Obama boasts that US oil production has increased under his administration. But it has increased on private lands, outside his direct control, while decreasing on public lands. The second is the fact that expensive oil and gasoline was a stated goal of the administration's top officials. Mitt Romney has latched onto this by campaigning against Obama's "gas hike trio": Secretary Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. In a quote that you should expect to hear recited to you in an endless loop during the general election campaign, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal in 2008 that "we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Remember that these are the people who think that the consumption of oil is producing catastrophic global warming. So they want high energy prices, for two reasons: to reduce consumption of oil and to subsidize "alternative energy" schemes. After all, if solar and wind-power companies are already going bankrupt now, they could never hope to compete with cheap, abundant oil. Secretary Chu wanted European prices for gasoline. The price of gas in Europe is about $8 per gallon. So as US gasoline goes to $4 and above, the Obama administration can pat itself on the back for making progress toward the intended consequences of its policies. back to top 3. The Law of Intended Consequences, Part 2 I get some heat from a few subscribers every time I refer to Social Security as an "entitlement." They don't like being told that they're dependent on handouts. I'll have more to say on this in the future, especially about how this diabolical system takes the self-supporting, proudly independent middle class and converts them into shock troops for the welfare state. But in the meantime, please don't be mad at me for saying that Social Security is an entitlement program, because I'm just the messenger. As a matter of law, economics, and accounting, it just is an entitlement. So get mad at anyone who ever told you otherwise. I say this as an introduction for even more bracing comments from Jack Wakeland, in response to this link in Monday's edition of TIA Daily. "I don't believe that there is any 'mystery' in a falling unemployment rate (from 9.0% to 8.2% over the past year) while the total number of workers has barely increased at all. The obvious cause is the aging of America's baby boomers. The demographic wave of retirement-age people that federal budget commentators have long been warning us about has begun. People born in 1946, 1947, and 1948 are turning 64, 65, and 66 today. "Despite the epic erosion of personal net worth over the past four years, very few retirements are being postponed. In America—and throughout the Western World—retirement is viewed as the land of milk and honey, the best time of life when one sits back and drinks from the cup of plenty and does nothing at all, all day, every day, forever. "Government subsidization of retirement (including health care) and the ideal of spending one or two decades in a state of purposeless drift and consumption is the invention of Otto von Bismarck. Spending the last twenty years of one's life in the supposedly blissful state of purposeless dependency is, in fact, the core concept of the modern welfare state. It is what the majority of the population often visualizes themselves working hard to obtain by their own means, and what a majority expect to be subsidized to more fully achieve. "Ayn Rand taught us that power mongers always offer a fraudulent profit to be earned by self-sacrifice. For the religious mystic, it is self-sacrifice during life on earth for the sake of a better afterlife. For the secular mystic, it is the unearned bounty of luxury and leisure to be given to future generations here on earth. Well, for the secular welfare statist, the carrot to urge the masses on to sacrifice is retirement: heaven on earth. "The purpose of Otto von Bismarck's modern welfare state—and ours—was to incrementally turn productive workers into a swarm of locusts who, as they age and learn how the system works, are taught to organize and outvote the planters in free elections; and then, commanding the majority, to pass laws which require the fields be planted for the stripping. "If that is our system, well, the locusts are here. "The fraction of the population over the age of 65 is rapidly increasing right now. We're in the midst of going from approximately 23% over 65 in 2010 to approximately 31% over 65 in 2020. "In the dry words of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the labor participation rate is falling. "So, no, there is no mystery. The reason why the unemployment rate is going down is that everyone over the age of 65 is quitting work and sitting down to eat the dinners that we're going to be serving them for the next 10 or 20 years of their lives." Think of this as another example of the Law of Intended Consequences. The goal of Social Security was never to be a retirement savings program. Its goal was to carve out an island of socialism within a capitalist society, and then to expand that island. Like public-sector employment, it is a miniature worker's paradise—or in this case, an ex-worker's paradise—meant to serve as a model of the socialist ideal. back to top 4. Fake But Accurate, Part 1 I pointed out recently how environmentalists have defended fraud and deception in the Fakegate case. It's OK to lie, they believe, in order to promote the global-warming cause. But this isn't limited to global warming. It is a widespread trend on the left, and here is another example. Amidst all of the public encomiums to Steve Jobs last year, you might also have heard some references to Apple's "dark side": its supposed exploitation of workers in the Chinese factories where Apple products are manufactured. A major sour -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. 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