THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE DISMAL SCIENCE LOOKS AT CHILD LABOR | 1999-12-11

Liberals tell us that women used to be looked at as mere child producers. What stopped this, we are told, was liberal policy.

In the real world, the reason women once had to devote most of their lives to nothing but child producing was because they had to have so many children just to keep the population from dying out. Queen Anne of England in the early eighteenth century had eighteen children, and not one of them lived to adulthood. It was not merely poverty-level women whose infants died. The Queen was not a poverty-level person. And it was not liberal sympathy for the poor which reversed this enormous infant mortality.

We are given the impression today that the only reason wages went up in the last century was because of the labor movement and the New Deal. Like most media commentary, this puts cause and effect backwards. Labor unions were only able to get wages higher because productivity went up. More important, wages had been rising steadily for centuries before the New Deal or the rise of unions to national power.

Economics has been called the Dismal Science. One of the things that makes it so dismal is the fact that serious economic analysis destroys the happy story that all you need to be rich and happy is idealistic politicians.

An international protocol has just been signed by the Clinton Administration to abolish child labor throughout the world. Sounds great. Only a student of the Dismal Science would destroy the wonderful atmosphere by asking, "So what happens to the kids?"

If you believe the standard theory that everybody is better off only because "idealists" signed idealistic papers, the banning of child labor in third world countries is just another great advance.

The assumption is that, once child labor is abolished, the children will live happily ever after. The problem is that, in the countries where child labor is being abolished, none of the TECHNICAL and ECONOMIC advances that REALLY allowed us to abolish child labor have taken place. In the countries where there is child labor, people are routinely allowed to starve to death.

This reminds me of an exchange in the old "Pogo" comic strip. One character says, "The Constitution guarantees I can say whatever I want to say." The other character replies, "Yeah, but it don't say nothin' about what happens to you AFTER you says it."

Child labor in many places will now be abolished. But what happens AFTER to the children thus freed from it? The experts and "idealists" who pushed this through feel they have done their jobs. Since they signed a paper, all the kids' problems are over.

I am certainly not saying child labor shouldn't go as soon as possible. I am just saying that when upper-income "idealists" and "experts" have their way, they tend to hurt those they think they are helping.

If we believe that all that is needed to make the world better is for idealists to sign papers, there is no problem. But that view of the world is bad history. And when bad history becomes policy, it kills people.

ONE AMERICA, TWO EUROPES | 2004-09-18

John Kerry has been saying there are two Americas. According to the 2000 electoral map, it certainly looked that way. There it was for all to see, the "red" states, which ironically were the ones that voted Republican, and the "blue" states, the ones that supported the Democrats.

The red states were a picture of old, Middle America. It included the South, the Midwest, and the West. The blue states were New England, New York, California; in other words, the Northeast and the trendy West.

But this does not represent two Americas. The electorate of the blue states have exactly the same opinions of almost every issue that Canadians have. And Canadian politics is not the slightest bit different from any other European politics.

The blue states and Europeans agree on foreign policy, they agree on gun control, they agree on socialized medicine. Is there one single item of social or political outlook in which John Kerry and his voters are not entirely European?

John Kennedy had far more personal connections in Europe than he did in the United States. If it weren't for the accent, it would be difficult to tell the difference between a professor at Oxford or a professor at Harvard.

Canada is Little Europe on the American continent. So are the blue states.

There are two Europes, not two Americas.

WORDISM: BUBBLE THINKING | nationalsalvation.net

Brutus Pulls a Shari. Brutus began his latest comment with an apology.

Shari taught me that, when a commenter says something dead on target, he or she often begins by apologizing for it. In fact, an apology is a normal beginning when a commenter is doing what BUGS is all about!

We live in a society where the one thing a person is trained NOT to do is make accurate observations that are basic, simple, and to the point. After spending decades under this suppression, our normal response is to make the observation and then apologize for it.

We exercise an intellectual freedom here that is like coming out of a cave into the bright sunlight. Our seminar is really a return to the Anglo-Saxon Moot. After dealing with a lifetime of finding out what one is SUPPOSED to say and trying to fit an observation into it, it is not easy to just go ahead and SAY something because it may be TRUE.

While not worrying about whether or not it IS true.

This is VERY hard to get used to. This sudden shift leads to perfectly understandable reactions. One is the "Bob is Playing God" concept. I am lazy. I don't make the usual, "maybe I'm wrong" statements in my writings. I make my statements the way you are used to seeing them made by Professional and Authoritative Sources. So I sound like I am being a Professional and Authoritative Source.

I'm not. In this and many, many cases where commenters have demonstrated that I was dead wrong, in fact silly, my reaction is not outrage, but "Oh, OK." That is VERY hard to get used to, but that is purpose of free speech.

My first reaction was to get mad at Shari. But my long-term reaction has been a feeling of deep satisfaction. Over and over, when we go into the guts of an issue, Shari puts in a short little statement that boils it all down so well that it is hard for me to make it clear how brilliant it is.

The reason we have the only real seminar left on Planet Earth is because nothing s more condemned in a Wordist society than thinking out loud. The purpose of a Wordist society is to Learn the Truth, not to decide what truth is.

Naturally when you step out into a forum where you are left naked of the clichés and assumptions that you are taught are the purpose of "free speech", it is not a comfortable experience.

It is hard to get an animal out of cage where it has been starved and confined. I remember seeing a documentary on a "bubble boy" who had an operation under anesthesia that allowed him to be released for the first time into his mother's arms.

What was the child's reaction? He screamed in terror and agony as if he were being circumcised. His whole world, the bubble, was being taken from him and this woman was actually physically contacting him.

Coming out of the Wordist bubble is scary and alien to us. We are coming out of the bubble that, for all its enslavement, is where we have lived our whole intellectual lives.

DON'T YOU DARE FORWARD ME ANY MORE CRAP ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY! | 2004-07-10

True to its founder Bill Gates' shouted-out liberalism, Microsoft now has a special program called "mixed messages," promoting racially mixed couples

http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/mixedmessages/

Mixed couples produce ugly, unnatural children who have to live their whole lives looking like something their black daddy, who wants blonds, wouldn't look at.

So my readers keep worrying about pornography and homosexual marriage.

Homosexual couples are sterile. They are far, far more moral than the black-white heterosexual couple, no matter how many priests wave their arms over them and no matter how many holy words they babble. The Marriage at Cana was stringently limited to the marriage of two Jews. That was the one Jesus blessed.

Jesus did not criticize this stringent limitation on the marriage He blessed.

It never occurred to anybody that Jesus would comment on something like that...Marriage rules were not what He was here about.

But Sean Hannity says that Christ died on the cross for interracial dating. If it helps promote Political Correctness, what's wrong with a little blasphemy?

Bill O'Reilly has said repeatedly that the Founders meant for the government to require interracial dating because they called it "the UNITED States of America." He says it over and over and over. The government, he says, should SPONSOR interracial dances.

Alan Dershowitz is worried to death about Jews marrying non-Jews. There have been ads in the New Yorks Times from organizations dedicated to getting Jews together for marriage

"Jews, Be Jewish!"

Alan Dershowitz was on a talk show with Pat Buchanan during which he lambasted whites who objected to black guys kissing white girls on television. Buchanan sat there looking guilty. He agreed that such objections were just awful.

But our folks were not scared to object to a lesbian kiss. Conservatives gave them permission to object to that. This is the kind of moral courage the pathetic paper-hat crowd that calls itself The Greatest Generation showed..

See

LINK: June 5, 2004 -- D-Day, June 6, 1944

Conservatives and liberals push interracial pornography and the only person anybody complains to is me.

Nobody but me talks about this pornography publicly. But my readers always make me one of the mass of recipients they send forwarded messages to just to show they are part of the anti-pornography herd when it's safe.

I DESPISE people who send me that crap. I respect homos a LOT more.