Transgenerational advantage

Summary below of a particularly dumb TED talk from a New School professor. The New School is far Left from wayback so the idea presented is as dumb and impractical as you would expect of that. It's true that economic advantage tends to be passed on from father to son but why and how?  The Newschooler doesn't know.  He just knows that it is.  So he resorts to vague generalities -- which apparently sounded clever to his audience. 

That wealth is transmitted in some automatic way once you have it is absolute bunkum.  How many times have we read of people winning big in a lottery and blowing the lot in short order?  Having money does not even encourage you to keep it, let alone pass it on.

But there is no need for "cleverness" in order to explain the phenomenon that our Newschooler has noticed.  It's perfectly plain why rich men tend to have economically successful children.  It's because you have to be pretty smart to get rich (As Charles Murray showed decades ago) and IQ is highly hereditary.  Both father and son get rich because they are both  smarter than the average. 

Giving a son money will do nothing to alter the main operative factor in wealth acquisition: IQ.  If he is smart he doesn't need it and if he is dumb he will simply blow it.


Economists often point out the simple truth that having wealth makes it easier to get more wealth, which means those who have a lot of money pass on an advantage from one generation to the next.

To adjust for that, economist Darrick Hamilton, a professor at The New School in New York, recently proposed a kind of baby trust fund system. His idea is to give all kids in the US a chunk of cash when they’re born, ranging between $US500 and $US60,000 based on their family’s wealth. That would help give all of thems a fair shot at a prosperous future, he said.

“Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic security and well-being,” Hamilton told a crowd at the TED Conferences headquarters in New York in September. “It is time to get beyond the false narrative that attributes inequalities to individual personal deficits while largely ignoring the advantages of wealth.”

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Good News for Americans Who Object to Obamacare’s Contraception Mandate

Those who cherish religious liberty can celebrate a major victory this week.

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services published final rules that provide much-needed relief from one of Obamacare’s most egregious assaults on rights of conscience and religious liberty: the mandate that nearly all health insurance plans cover abortion-inducing drugs and contraception.

One rule provides an exemption for religious beliefs, and a second rule provides an exemption for moral convictions. Together, they provide meaningful relief to Americans who have long been burdened by the onerous mandate. These exemptions bring to a close a yearslong saga that never needed to happen in the first place.

Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover certain kinds of preventive services with no enrollee cost-sharing, and it gives the Department of Health and Human Services the task of specifying the types of preventive services for women that health insurance plans must cover.

According to guidelines issued by Health and Human Services following Obamacare’s enactment, insurance plans must include all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures, which include certain abortion-inducing drugs.

In other words, the statutory text of Obamacare itself does not require that plans cover contraceptives. That policy detail, among others, was left to the discretion of the executive branch. Furthermore, plans that already covered millions of women were “grandfathered” and exempted from the requirement to provide preventive services with no cost-sharing.

In the years that followed, Health and Human Services eventually included a very narrow religious exemption to the contraception mandate that effectively applied only to houses of worship. The Obama administration later extended that exemption to houses of worship and their integrated auxiliaries, such as church-run soup kitchens.

But other religious employers like hospitals, schools, social service organizations, and even businesses remained responsible for complying with the mandate, notwithstanding their sincere moral or religious objections.

The Supreme Court gave relief to closely held businesses in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and to certain other religious institutions in Zubik v. Burwell. Yet many individuals, employers, and organizations are still subject to the mandate.

In October 2017, the Trump administration issued interim final rules—very similar to the ones finalized this month—that finally provided an adequate moral and religious exemption for those who objected to the mandate. Those rules were designed to go into effect immediately, with a public comment period following, but they were blocked from being implemented in court.

The finalized rules issued this month take into account the public comments that were received since the interim final rules were issued, and the changes made are technical in nature.

The administration estimates that the exemptions should affect “no more than approximately 200 employers with religious or more objections, with many entities not being affected because they were already permitted not to cover contraception under the previous rules, or are protected by permanent court injunctions.”

The estimated number of women whose coverage may be affected is 6,400—a fraction of the 165 million women in the United States.

Many on the left are characterizing the rules as denying women access to contraception. In reality, they do no such thing. Rather, they allow those with objections to not be complicit in choices that would violate their religious or moral convictions.

Women will remain free to make their own decisions about the drugs and devices listed in the mandate, and will be able to purchase or find coverage for them without trampling on the sincere moral or religious objections of those who wish not to be implicated in subsidizing them.

Moreover, these rules leave untouched the multitude of programs that subsidize contraception for women at the federal, state, and local levels.

The rules simply mean that groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns committed to serving the elderly poor and who operate 30 homes in the United States, will not be forced to be involved in the provision of employee health insurance that covers drugs and devices that directly contradict their religious convictions.

You don’t have to share the beliefs of people like the Little Sisters to recognize that the government should not be able to force Americans to set aside their moral and religious convictions when they serve the poor, heal the sick, or educate the next generation outside the four walls of a church.

America has a proud tradition of respecting the rights of conscience, which enable us to act in harmony with our sincerely held beliefs in the public square. The final rules issued by the Trump administration recognize this foundational principle and give much-needed, meaningful relief from an unnecessary assault on the rights of conscience.

SOURCE






White Women Don't Need Saving by arrogant feminists

Allie Stuckey

Republicans foiled Democrats’ dreams of a Senator O’Rourke, a Governor Gillum and a Governor Abrams, and, apparently, white women are to blame for it.

One Twitter warrior deemed white women “footsoldiers of the patriarchy” for voting Republican, claiming that their decision is based on a desire to submit to their husbands. Jemele Hill, staff writer for The Atlantic, argued that white women are not “the face of feminism,” because they voted for Ted Cruz and, in 2016, for Donald Trump. A viral tweet listed Republicans for which white women voted in the midterms and concluded, “white women gonna white.”

Don’t worry, though. The Women’s March is here to help us out: “There’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing. We want to do it with you.”

Phew! For a second there I thought we were going to have to continue navigating these scary political waters on our own. I’m so relieved to know that, instead of thinking for ourselves, we’ll have obscure liberal Twitter activists and Linda Sarsour guiding us. I’m hoping my tyrannical husband won’t be too upset with me for going against his commands. Last week he gave me an extra fifty cents in my allowance and told me to “buy something pretty,” so maybe he’ll be just as gracious when I tell him I’ve started forming my own opinions.

The irony is, of course, rich. Leftist feminists, long-asserting the strength and independence of women, now argue that some women are so weak that they need to depend on liberals to tell them how to vote. They cannot fathom that we Republican “white women” may actually have different values than they do. It must be because we are “foot soldiers of the patriarchy.” (That’s newspeak for “self-hating idiots.”)

When certain demographics vote majoritively for Democrats, those people are smart, brave, strong, important. Ninety-seven percent of black women voting for Abrams has nothing to do with identity politics or the belief in the false narrative that big government policies will benefit them. No, they’re wise. White women who vote for Republicans, though—they’re idiots.

So much for judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin or their sex. I’m old enough to remember when this was considered racism and sexism. Today, on the left, it’s considered thoughtful analysis.

The claim is that we are voting against our own interests. But this assumes our interests are liberal interests—abortion, closing the “gender pay gap,” gun control, etc. And they’re just not. We women who vote Republican do so because, in general, we believe in things like the Second Amendment, lower taxes and restrictions on killing the unborn. We are not oppressed. We’re just not progressive.

For as much as feminists say they hate the patriarchy, they do a darn good job of patronizing women with whom they disagree. They are demeaning, self-righteous and condescending. They deemed women who supported Kavanaugh “gender traitors.” They called Susan Collins and other senators who voted “yes” on the now-justice “rape apologists.” They claimed women who voted for Trump did so because of “internal misogyny.” They think we’re pro-life because we want to set women back. They think, simply because we don’t align with their agenda, we’re controlled by men.

These are the same people who completely ignore successful conservative women like Nikki Haley, Condoleezza Rice, or Carly Fiorina–not to mention the Republicans who ran in the midterms. Martha McSally, colonel in the Air Force, congresswoman and Arizona senatorial candidate certainly isn’t trying to repress women. The first female governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, doesn’t seem to be relegating women to the kitchen. Young Kim, Congress’s first Korean-American representative, isn’t exactly a slave to the patriarchy. These women, though, just don’t fit the narrative.

Progressive feminists fancy themselves rebellious disruptors, but it’s a fantasy. They’re mainstream, their platform is tired, their hypocrisy is predictable and their constant bullying of women on the other side of the aisle is nauseatingly unattractive. It is obviously the underrepresented, constantly shoved-aside conservative women who are really countercultural. It takes much more fortitude to stick to your values despite being condescended than it does to acquiesce to emotional manipulation and the leftist politics of guilt.

They may never realize that it’s this very attitude repelling the women they so desperately want to “help.” Oh well. Better for us.

SOURCE





Australia's little socialist republic in Canberra goes rogue on religion

This week the ACT has proved yet again that Canberrans are living in a world of their own.

Our little socialist republic has gone ahead and passed a bill aimed at eliminating the legal exemptions to the anti-discrimination laws pertaining to freedom of religion aimed at schools and other religious institutions.

The exemptions have been branded by the Barr government as “loopholes” although they were deliberately included in the original anti-discrimination legislation to give religious institutions freedom to run the institutions on religious principles. What is more, the ACT has gone its own way, despite the commonwealth government having yet to respond to the Ruddock review, pre-­empting any changes the commonwealth may make.

It has always been the stated aim of the Greens and the left of Labor to get rid of the exemptions to anti-discrimination law. The last thing Mark Dreyfus did as­ ­attorney-general was to eliminate the never-used exemptions in religious aged care. That was a warning for Labor’s future conduct.

The timely leaking of parts of the Ruddock review and the “who knew?” outrage that accompanied the leak were deliberately engineered and have given the green-Left the impetus it was seeking to eliminate the exemptions.

In Canberra, where 40 per cent of children are in independent schools, it will have the effect of restricting the freedom of parents in the choice of school, accomplished under the mantle of eliminating “discrimination” and encouraging “diversity”. It limits parents’ right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, all of which are part of the international covenants to which Australia is a signatory.

This was blatantly admitted in an accompanying speech by Shane Rattenbury, who sponsored the bill: “The amendments will engage and limit the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. They engage and potentially limit the right of parents to ensure the religious and moral education of a child in conformity with their convictions. However, in the context of the scheme of the Discrimination Act as a whole, these limitations are reasonable and proportionate in accordance with s28 of the Human Rights Act.”

This is Rattenbury’s interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

No one should forget what happened to Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous, who was hauled up to a human rights board for disseminating Catholic doctrine on marriage. The archbishop was a victim of the human rights apparatus that has redefined and limited our rights. Advocates of human rights, and especially advocates on human rights commissions, are very keen to talk about “balance”.

However, the real problem is that the human rights apparatus, encompassing all the various commissions and boards, has been allowed to override fundamental human rights in favour of the rights of special interest groups. The Porteous case was the most blatant example of this.

All rights are important — religion, speech and right of minorities not to suffer discrimination — but the legal structure is skewed in favour of rights that appeal to identified groups (24 in fact), not the broader community. We have given priority to a handful of rights while ignoring the impact on rights that are just as important. Hence, the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their moral and religious views is potentially compromised by the palaver about “balance” in the ACT legislation.

Freedom of religion is one of our foundation constitutional principles. Despite talk of the “private” practice of religion and those whingers of the freedom-from-­religion camp, the manifest practice of religion cannot be separated from freedom to “private” practice of religion. One must accept religion is not something separate from daily life. Belief must be manifest in thought, in conscience, which guides morality, and in speech.

Silencing religion in the public square is not just about silencing bishops; it is about silencing lay men and women. Governments have already begun to interfere in individual conscience in ways acceptable only in the worst totalitarian regimes. Victoria has overridden the right to freedom of conscience by requiring doctors to refer patients for abortion.

Religious bodies should not be subject to legislation that affects their foundation principles but, then, religious bodies should not have to rely on exemptions. The anti-religion activists have been allowed to set the terms of the debate by accepting the outrageous assertion that manifestations of religious freedom are, at law, mere incidents of discrimination that are permissible only because of exemptions in the law. Once they fell into that error, a bad outcome for religious freedom was assured.

The starting point for the debate must be that religious freedom is a fundamental human right — the position in international law. If this right is given only lukewarm recognition, the inroads on religious freedom will get only worse. Using the interpretative clauses in anti-discrimination laws to refer to the importance of religion is much weaker than a stand-alone act that asserts that everyone has the right to privateand public manifestations of religious belief.

This would change the debate as manifestations of religion would no longer be an exemption from laws against discrimination but a manifestation of a right accepted by federal law. Schools would no longer be allowed to “discriminate” but would be allowed to exercise a right to religious freedom.

The leaking of the Ruddock review was part of a campaign to scare the government in advance of the report’s full release. There seems little appetite to declare freedom of religion as a full right. However, those who fear such a law as the harbinger of a bill of rights should think again. There is a greater fear we will have a half-hearted ­response to the issue and lose a vital part of our freedom.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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