THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

SIEGECRAFT: HALF WITS | nationalsalvation.net

I like to say I always wanted to be a real wit and I'm halfway there already.

The country is run by two sets of half-wits. Both sides say "Follow the money" but each follows half the money. Liberals are always talking about Big Business and Military expenditures but they never wonder about the titanic industries that taught them their own ideology.

Conservatives believe they are wiser about "the money." They talk about land, labor capital and management, but they never think of the biggest economic factor of all.

The minute you cross into Mexico you are in a place where the per capita income is, and always has been, a fraction of that of the United States. Is this land or labor or capital or management?

None of the above. It is the one thing a conservative cannot say and be respectable. I put in a book in 1982.

Mexico is poor because its population is made up of MEXICANS.

If I were to give you a choice of places to invest, and I said "The only factor you have to go on is the color of the skin of most of the population," where would you put your money?

And for all their exceptions and loud protestations that everybody is alike except for the Book they get their economic philosophy from, it will be an icy day in Hell before Forbes or any other conservative puts his money where his mouth is.

One of the basics that make our society so irrational is that both sides are frustrated that they cannot get the other half to see the half that is obvious to them.

I was on the Education and Labor Committee staff on Capitol Hill. Conservatives told stories about the absurdity of OSHA, the agency that regulates safety at work sites. They got their complaints from employers. Democrats in general got their complaints from union officials and ideologues who declared their sympathy for The Working Class.

All I knew about work sites was the places I had worked and the working people I had talked to. On OSHA, I followed a course as simple as the Mantra and damned near as heretical. I wrote an amendment for John that required a cost-benefit, real accidents report on a work site before a regulation was passed.

Workers were stunned by their naiveté, but the only choice was having no OSHA at all.

I worked on plants before the rules, and I was about the only conservative who didn't oppose OSHA on principle. But OSHA was also the products of the other set of halfwits.

Follow the money. OSHA was part of the programs Mommy Professor naturally advocates as a way for Intellectuals and Idealists like them to run industry for the benefit of The Working Class. It was staffed accordingly, with budding intellectuals, not with the poor, simple-minded working class that they tell their students about.

There were some Democrats who actually had seen real live working people. We made changes, but the whole subject is so complicated and the results so partial that, believe me, you don't want to hear about it and I was too tired to remember most of it.

But halfwits only see Capital, represented by corporation executives who come up through bureaucracy, and Labor, a bunch of people who must be protected, not least from themselves, look at all those Wallace votes!

Millions of working people voted for Wallace, and no Democrat will ever admit that what he said should be listened to.

The years it took to get Republicans to get the Wallace vote, now known as Reagan Democrats, shows that they had the same view of working people that their fellow country club members who were limousine liberals had.

A good example of the results of this kind of thing was OSHA. Either no OSHA or Mommy Professor's OSHA.

The point is that the people in charge ARE half wits. But it is high time we stopped grieving over it and looked a WHY this is the case.

WE CANNOT CRITICIZE FEDERAL COURTS ANY MORE | 2000-07-01

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that students may not have a voluntary prayer at a sports event. Please don't tell me the courts are abusing their power. They are using the power we gave them.

In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that no state could have a law against miscegenation. The Court cited the Bill of Rights and the fourteenth amendment. Every state that proposed and ratified the Bill of Rights had anti-miscegenation laws. Almost every state that proposed and ratified the fourteenth amendment had anti-miscegenation laws. The court made no pretense that its decision had anything to do with the intent of those who wrote the Constitution.

In that decision, the Warren Court set a precedent like no other in history. It would do what the members of the court felt they should do, in open defiance of the Constitution's actual meaning. They justified it by saying that if you object to the anti-miscegenation law, it makes you a racist, and nobody dares object to that.

A lot of the people I knew in 1968 were conservative Catholics.

I warned them, with a Southerner's feel for the Constitution, that this precedent would mean a disaster for everybody in the near future. They explained patiently to me that Racism was an evil, evil thing, and that to make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs. In this case, the egg was constitutional intent.

Then came the abortion decision in 1973. The same people, conservative Protestant and Catholic, were outraged. How dare the Supreme Court invent this kind of "right of privacy" in the teeth of the meaning of the Constitution!

I could have explained to them that all the Court was doing was cracking an egg it had already cracked completely in 1968. They whine and they moan and they shout and they talk about the DRED SCOTT DECISION!!

They talk about the Dred Scott Decision because that way they can sound anti-racist. It was not a Supreme Court decision in 1857 that gave the Court a license for Roe vs. Wade or for its recent decision on prayer.

What gives the court the license to decide anything it feels like deciding is the 1968 decision to which no one dared object then, and no one but me dares to object to now. In that decision, I repeat, all precedents and all the clear meaning of those who wrote the Constitution was not merely ignored, it was OPENLY DEFIED.

The simple fact of the matter is, for all the shouts about "baby killers," the life of any child takes a back seat to these so-called Christians' desperation to avoid being called "racists." Until they object to the decision they dare not criticize, all critics of the Supreme Court should shut up.

National anti-abortion spokesmen and "Christian" conservatives are happy to shout down all other conservative issues in the name of "stopping the baby killers." But they are not willing to openly take on liberal opinion where it would really hurt, and to risk the label racist for those same babies.

Which makes them absurd. Unlike the 1973 Roe decision, the outlawing of anti-miscegenation laws was not merely a STRETCH of the Constitution, it was an OPEN rejection of constitutional intent. There is no question of a question that any of the Founding Fathers or even the authors of the Fourteenth amendment intended to prohibit states from having anti-miscegenation laws. If that is valid, the Roe decision is MORE than valid.

I am sick of listening to cowards bellyache.

A GREAT ECONOMIC SECRET REVEALED | 2002-02-16

All the professors and Hollywood stars love to explain why third world workers are so poorly paid. It always comes back to White Guilt and an Evil Conspiracy. If the world economy were just turned over to the professors, they would do as good a job of distributing goods as the United Nations and the IOC do.

Please read Whitaker Online for November 7, 1998, THE BEAD BUYERS. Here I explain once again a very simple fact of life: the reason some people make very little money is because if you pay them money they will give you almost nothing for it.

Eric Hoffer was talking about an American who had immigrated from Eastern Europe years before. This naturalized American was taking a vacation back in his homeland. People there knew he was an American and they knew that American workers got paid many times what they received for an hour's work.

So this new American was watching some workers in his original country laying some pipe. One of the workers laying the pipe said, "What would we get for doing this same job in America?"

The American, who was a pipe fitter himself, took one look at their work and said, "Nothing."

I worked on a plant in the 1950s in Germany and I was appalled at how slowly they worked. In South Carolina, our workers did many times as much work and got paid two or three times as much per hour, and that was with a recession in the United States and a labor shortage in Germany.

Since then, even Europeans admit that their standard of living has shot up only because they adopted American methods and a more American pace of work. America has become easier to compete with because we have adopted leftism and our work force and voting population is more and more third world.

All this is simplistic. But it is also true. If you doubt it, do what all the liberals say, "Follow the money."

Actually, workers don't do much work in the third world, but the pace of their work is the least of it. The reason nobody will pay decent wages in Mexico is not because of the pace of the work. The reason is because Mexico is run by MEXICANS.

Foreign bureaucracies are almost invariably cheap, stupid, mindless and dishonest, just like the ones we see in the UN and the IOC.

They also have lots and lots of academic degrees. In fact, they hire largely by academic degrees in high jobs in most bureaucracies around the world. "Doctor" Albierto de Whatever in South America does as good a job running his country's economy as the Doctors this and that here do running American education.

Think, for a moment, about American "intellectuals" trying to run any serious business.

This should give you a whole new insight into those International Institutions that are supposed to be so "sophisticated."

ALL OUR "ALLIES " LOVE US - -FOR THE MOMENT | 2001-09-14

In Vietnam, our European "allies" -- the ones declaring their undying love for us right now -- turned against us as soon as the first excitement died down (See April 14, 2001 - THE "ALLIES" GAMBIT).

Today we are grateful to the Europeans for their sympathy for American dead in New York and Washington.

We think that sympathy means lasting European support. We are not remembering the last time we actually staged reprisals against an Arab country for its support of terrorists.

You have to go back to Reagan's bombing of Libya to find an example of a military action we took entirely as a response to terrorist acts. We proved that Libya had sponsored bombings that took American lives in Western Europe -- on the very soil of our "allies." So Reagan ordered that country bombed.

Nobody in continental Europe would let our British-based bombers fly in "allied" air space to attack Libya. They had to fly west of Portugal over open ocean and it probably cost American lives.

Europe is a lot like Clinton. When it's just a matter of sympathy, they feel our pain. But they will cheer us on as we get in, and they will desert us as soon as the novelty wears off.