Jonathan Murray

Comments

Opinion: Opinion: A Reverse Wisconsin (1 hour ago)

Comment: Typical dishonest processes by unions. It is an outrageous abuse of responsibility and governance to abuse a state constitution to enshrine favored status for a portion of a state's citizens.

I objected to it when the Ohio Constitution was twisted to allow and enshrine a gambling monopoly, and I object to what unions are trying to do in Michigan. If they win, the cost of government will be permanently out of the control of citizens, and the last business in Michigan should turn out the lights on the way to Texas. 2 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Alan Colmes: How Democrats Made America Exceptional (1 hour ago)

Comment: It has to be a slow news day when The Wall Street Journals puts aside space for a propagandist like Alan Colmes. Like most leftists, he begins with the story he wants to tell, and cherry-picks information to support it.

This is consistent with the way that artists and writers see the world--not the way that empiricists like scientists and engineers see it. The world view of the former is "how it should be" and they advance their vision for that, while taking the moral high ground to assure us that their motives are pure. Then they systematically go about abridging private property rights, suppressing free speech and, in the most extreme circumstances (Cambodia, the USSR) murdering fellow citizens whom they can't coerce to see things their way.

Empiricists, on the other hand, seek first to understand how the world works, independent of their desires for it. They then devise policies and systems to channel outcomes, to the extent possible, in a desirable direction. Paul Ryan is an empiricist.

Unfortunately, a large portion of our fellow citizens are susceptible to the manipulation of propagandists, and actually believe things like Keynesian stimulus works, government drives the economy, taxes are good, and each person is "owed" a middle class life.

November is the tipping point. Vote carefully. 25 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: A Bleak Anniversary for the Arab Spring (1 day ago) Comment: Why are you writing about Christianity or Judaism? They have no relevance to the discussion I started here, unless you feel obliged, as many Westerners do, to apologize for superior religions when criticizing a clearly inferior one.

Jesus was a man of peace; Mohammed was a man of war. Jesus converted people to his beliefs through example, through words, and through deeds. Mohammed conquered, subjugated, and forcibly converted by the sword.

Etc., etc. Give up the modern narrative, and think for yourself. 19 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (1 day ago)

Comment: This is exactly what Medicare needs. For one, Krugman is wrong: the government does not pay major medical bills, your fellow citizens do. Medicare just mediates the transaction, extracting a 30% rakeoff for the bureaucracy along the way.

It has been clearly, repeatedly, and definitively proven that Medicare not only can't manage the growth in healthcare spending, it is fueling it. Ryan's plan would return market forces to the purchase of healthcare by empowering individuals to choose for themselves what to buy and at what price.

Krugman hates and distrusts markets, though, like all leftists, and is unwilling to look at the evidence to the contrary. if you take your opinions from him, you probably agree with him. Just be honest about it. 4 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: A Bleak Anniversary for the Arab Spring (2 days ago) Comment: The problem with governance in the Middle East is Islam. It is a flawed political philosophy posing as a religion. The faith elements are used to subjugate people who have opinions that do not hew to the narrow, Medieval interpretations of fundamentalists.

Fundamentalist Islam is no different than the peasant boys who sent China's urban elites to toil in the fields during the Cultural Revolution, or the African gangster warlords who cut off people's hands and impress boys into their armies.

The root problems are intolerance and fascism. These tendencies always lurked at the center off Islam, but were held in check by strong men who traded a semblance of stability for freedom and economic growth.

The natural tendencies of Islam have now been unleashed. It will likely take a century of internecine strife among Muslims to determine if Islam can be saved, or whether it will become a narrow cult of death repressed by the majority of Muslims who do not adhere to fundamentalism. 27 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (2 days ago)

Comment: Don't you know what the man did for a living? He went into companies that spent too much, brought in too little revenue, and needed structural overhauls, and he took the necessary steps to make them profitable again.

If that isn't the single best skill set for what our federal government needs, I can't think of a better.

Certainly community organizing is a poor precursor to the job. It only leads to allying the office of the President with tort lawyers to extract settlements from businesses...which is exactly what Obama has done.

So Romney won't tell you the details of his plan: big deal. You can be sure that they're going to be an improvement.

By the way, Tom, didn't you notice that "Romney won't tell us the details" is an Obama campaign talking point? They want the specifics so that they can distort and lie about them to manipulate the media and the citizenry to vote again for the Marxist occupying the White House.

Romney's too smart to play that game. 6 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Janesville President (2 days ago)

Comment: Perhaps one of Dante's circles? Recommend Opinion: Opinion: The Facebook Deficit (2 days ago)

Comment: Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately for the citizens of California, particularly the dwindling number of productive ones. They're going to have to pay for this mess. 1 Recommendation

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (2 days ago)

Comment: Those Marxist biology teachers tried to enroll my daughter in a moral crusade against human progress, masked in the language of the "green" movement. They dissect owl pellets, these days, not frogs. 6 Recommendations Opinion: Opinion: The Facebook Deficit (2 days ago)

Comment: Anything that hastens California to its day of reckoning is good news. The state budget is unsustainable. The fictions within which California legislators live are unsupportable.

The best thing that could happen to California, its citizens, and the United States would be a rapid descent in fiscal unsustainability, leading to the need to file for bankruptcy. Then a judge could throw out the legislature that has brought the state to its current insolvency, and install a receiver to right the state's fiscal ship.

Too bad that Mitt Romney will be busy for the next eight years fixing the federal fisc. He would make an excellent receiver for California. 25 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: John Cochrane: The Federal Reserve: From Central Bank to Central Planner (2 days ago)

Comment: The illusion of independence is gone. The Fed under Ben Bernanke is a political organization, striving with untested experiments to support the fiction that Keynesian economics works, and that government drives the economy.

Guess what, leftists. Federal Reserve expansion and intervention hasn't worked. It won't work. It can't work. The problem is in the legislature and executive branch. Until the federal government creates and manages to a budget, the economy cannot recover.

The encroachment of the Fed on policy is in part due to a vacuum created by the cowardly unwillingness of politicians--particularly the Democrat Party--to stand for something and to articulate what they stand for to the American people. No budget for three years? Jail time for Harry Reid, say I. That will send a message, from the people to the politicians, that won't be forgotten.

The challenge we have before us--Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have before them--is to unravel the monstrosity that the Fed has become, and to prevent the precedent that the Fed has established, under Obama and his lapdog Bernanke, from justifying future interventionist Fed policy.

The best way to do this is to cut the Fed down to size, first by repealing the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act--what a fiction!--and then by whacking headcount by half at the Fed. 24 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: George Gilder: The Real Reagan Lesson for Romney-Ryan (3 days ago)

Comment: Cutting tax rates under Reagan did increase revenues--as it did under Hoover, Kennedy, and Bush. The reason the budget wasn't balanced under Reagan was because Congressional Democrats reneged on their part of the deal: cutting spending, or at least the rate of growth in spending.

That is a fact pattern that you can check, if you have the inclination to do so.

Alternatively, if you're just reading off an Obama Campaign Fact Sheet, go away. Nobody here is buying it.

Do not mistake the fact that birds fly and you can't see air, for the presence of some mysterious force that attaches birds to the sky. That's the equivalent of your "cause and effect" analysis if the economy. 7 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (3 days ago)

Comment: Do you have kids in public schools? I have two, and each of them has brought home leftist propaganda, masked as "history," "social studies," and even "science."

From this nonsense, for which I am paying, I have to un-educate them.

Presumably, you're an adult (though you haven't yet learned manners). Are you too far gone to educate yourself? 14 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (3 days ago) Comment: Marxists believe that all fortunes are based on crimes by the "haves" against the "have-nots." If you understand that, you can understand nearly everything that comes out of Obama's mouth, and most of his administration's policies.

Obama may mask his true beliefs and intentions through lying propaganda; he may be hindered in his true intentions by our robust republican checks and balances; he may be forced by circumstances and political realities to do non-Marxist things--but make not mistake about it. He is a committed Marxist.

If you don't understand this, do some research. Read, for instance, Paul Kengor at American Thinker who has carefully documented Marxists relationships with Marxist mentors, Marxist organizations, and Marxist beliefs.

If you are unwilling to do this research, or to see Obama for what he is, you are just one of the dupes is he is counting on to have his way with us.

Game, set, and match. 15 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Janesville President (4 days ago)

Comment: The left is determined to be inflamed over something. If there isn't anything real over which they can be outraged, they'll invent some narrative for the purpose.

The reason Democrats are attacking Ryan is because they are scared of him. He stands up to their lies in a calm, educated, reasoned way, and this prevents them from the thing they desire most: preaching to us from the higher moral ground they have claimed.

Paul Ryan is for real. Democrats, watch out. You will probably be seeing him for 16 years. 73 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: George Gilder: The Real Reagan Lesson for Romney-Ryan (4 days ago)

Comment: America needs an entrepreneurial economy. This is the best way for each of us to enrich ourselves, as well as for the U.S. to outcompete other countries.

Entrepreneurial success also will provide government with the greatest revenues. Rapidly growing companies create jobs and the sales taxes, income, and other taxes that workers pay. When entrepreneurial companies are sold of go public to repay their initial investors, they produce capital gains that further enrich government.

The path we are on under Obama is to fight harder over a shrinking pie. That doesn't work, unless your true objective is to initiate class warfare. 45 Recommendations Story: Time to Get Serious on Medicare (4 days ago)

Comment: @Andrew Semeiks, some people may not be competent to make their own decisions. Here is how I would address that.

First, I would assume that most people are competent to make their own healthcare decisions. The current system and the experts in Washington assume the opposite, that we are not competent and that, therefore, experts have to decide for us. I consider this to be arrogant on their part.

Second, I would design a system that assumes that most people are competent to make their own healthcare decisions. The current system assumes the opposite, that bureaucrats in Washington should determine the number of physicians being trained in medical schools, and the price that should be paid for every one of thousands of procedures. Paul Ryan's plan is the correct design for the system, particularly if it results in each citizen having a Health Savings Account for routine care coupled with an insurance policy for extraordinary needs.

Third, I would observe how people respond to a system designed to facilitate learning and decision-making by individual consumers. I believe that the experts are wrong, and that most of us will be able to make better healthcare decisions for ourselves--in consultation with our doctors and families--than any group of experts in Washington. While we each might make errors individually, the cumulative decisions of individuals, agglomerated into markets, will ALWAYS result in better decisions and better resource allocation than any number of experts in Washington can achieve.

Fourth, I would recognize that there are people who, in any system, can't cope. That is as true of today's Medicare as it will be of the Ryan plan. I would then design mechanisms to help them--not by distorting the entire system or destroying the market we have so carefully resurrected, but by having special support for those people who need it.

A system should not be designed around the exceptions, but around the norm. The norm is that most people can make these decisions for themselves, and should be allowed to. 2 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Reagan and Obama: A Tale of Two Recoveries (4 days ago)

Comment: You're buying--or selling--Democrat Party spin. Reagan's debt was substantially less as a percentage of the American economy than Obama's.

Reagan's debt was put to use creating economic growth by rebuilding our defense; meaning, it was spent on companies making products and employing workers. The jobs were mostly in the private sector.

Obama's spending is on wealth transfer for consumption, because he is a demand-side Keynesian who believes that consumer spending drives an economy (with no concern from where that spending comes from--creating and earning or being given by the government). He has fueled only the growth of government, and a decline in employment overall in the U.S. economy.

During the Reagan years, people worked, earned, and prospered. During the Obama years, half of all Americans are receiving handouts of one kind or another from the federal government that they haven't paid for.

Reagan and Obama lived in the U.S. between 1950 and 2010. Besides that, they have nothing in common. 22 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Romney's Image Problem (4 days ago)

Comment: The GM bailout was a transfer of ownership from shareholders who invested money in the company to unions--outside of the rule of law and normal bankruptcy process. If that isn't a king's dictate, I don't know what is. The bailout was only successful if you are a member of the UAW; so far, it has cost taxpayers and shareholders a bundle. So, you see, Obama is a Marxist after all: he hates capital, capitalists, and markets, and favors unions and government-engineered transfer of wealth.

Romney didn't create the tax code. He just did what each of us does, maximize it to his own benefit. Why would he--or you or me--do anything else? You don't like the tax code, advocate for fixing it. Don't blame an honest, law-abiding citizen for optimizing his outcomes. 40 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Romney's Image Problem (4 days ago)

Comment: You take your political commentary from Rolling Stone? And you treat it as objective fact? Are you lost? 30 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (5 days ago)

Comment: Well, maybe Romney's FCC can look into the licenses of those "objective" media outlets... 42 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Reagan and Obama: A Tale of Two Recoveries (5 days ago) Comment: Nice analysis of the facts. Unfortunately, the left cares not a whit about facts. They have their own narrative, which they advance as the truth and, unfortunately, far too many people buy. It goes something like this:

- Supply-side economics is "trickle-down" economics; - Lowering marginal tax rates, even if it results in economic growth and higher government tax collections, is "tax cuts for the rich;" - Business is evil and must be controlled (ironically, by people whose skill is using the legacy media to lie to and manipulate us); - Economic growth and job creation are good, but wealth creation is evil; - (Somewhat paradoxically) Reagan was really a Keynesian, deficit-spending, tax-increasing fellow traveler.

This narrative can be assembled from listening to a half-dozen Obama speeches, reading a couple of columns by Paul Krugman, or by listening to the cynical Marxist puppeteer David Axelrod and his disciple Robert Gibbs spin the GOP convention. 27 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: Romney's Image Problem (5 days ago)

Comment: The President is not our leader; he is our employee. I think Mitt Romney understands this, but Barack Obama does not.

The Marxist in the White House thinks that he is our king and that his appointees are his court. He is, at heart, a European politician who wants to control business and the economy, and award perks to the ruling elite whom he represents and to those businesses who supplicate before him and his court.

Mitt Romney will be a competent President. He may not be an inspirational speaker, but look where electing a preacher has gotten us--moralizing, finger-wagging lectures and a dismal economy. 59 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: What If Obama Had Turned to the Middle? (5 days ago)

Comment: Obama's idea of moving to the middle is to move the middle by getting everybody to his right to accept a leftward drift. He's less interested in adjusting his positions than in forcing his opponents to accept his.

This is what has happened in Europe, where in most countries the most conservative candidate with a chance to win would be regarded as middle-of-the-road here.

"Elections have consequences," the Marxist-in-Chief famously pontificated when justifying his use of force. Well, so does coercion, and one of the consequences of government coercion is rebellion. That's what the voters did in 2010, and are going to do in November.

Time to downsize Washington, starting at 25%. 31 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: A Downgrade for Illinois (5 days ago)

Comment: Maybe once Obama is done ruining the national economy, Illinois will welcome him back as governor to repeat the failed Keynesian experiment there...oh, I forgot, Illinois can't browbeat Gentle Ben Bernanke into printing currency to paper over government overspending. I guess it's out of Obama's control.

What is happening in Illinois, California, and New York is a shame. They're all great states, with great cities, that are voluntarily bankrupting themselves by letting the political class run the electorate--instead of the way it should be.

These states are failing, and based on the path they insist on sticking to, they will fail. Only then, perhaps, will the public unions and their allies in politics be swept away and reform come to these states.

I feel like I'm watching, in slow motion, the Titanic approach the ice berg, but helpless to do anything about it. I love California, Chicago, and parts of New York. But I wouldn't live in any of those places, or take my family there. 66 Recommendations

Opinion: Opinion: The Ryan Difference (5 days ago)

Comment: Paul Ryan treats citizens like adults to be reasoned with, instead of dupes to be manipulated. That approach, more than anything else, distinguishes him from the lying, manipulating, divisive Marxist in the White House, and his entire support base.

Unfortunately, after 40 years of the "drip-drip" of leftist propaganda in schools, in the legacy media, and in Washington, all too many of our citizens are susceptible to being manipulated, and have delegated their powers of reasoning to people they falsely call their "leaders," but who are in fact our "employees."

It's time to call out the left for advancing false narratives; the media for unthinkingly repeating them; and the Democrat Party for allowing itself to be taken over by Marxists, and for abjuring the values on which these United States are based in favor of some wifty leftist social theory about how to get government to take care of everything for us.

We are a people who want to do for ourselves what Obama wants government to do for us. We need to push Washington out of the way. 272 Recommendations

Story: Time to Get Serious on Medicare (5 days ago)

Comment: Precisely right. The healthcare market isn't the problem, because their isn't really a market. Government and its rules and fakokta price schema has so distorted the market that common sense no longer prevails. 5 Recommendations Story: Time to Get Serious on Medicare (5 days ago)

Comment: Better yet, do completely away with the Medicare price schedule, and let market forces set prices instead of bureaucrats. If patients buy their own plans, as under the Ryan proposal, and have to shop for their own services, prices and results will have to be provided, and consumers can then decide if they would rather pay 2.5 times as much for proton therapy as IMRT.

The collective wisdom of consumers, acting in their own self-interest, agglomerated into markets, is always better at allocating resources than the schemes of self-anointed experts.

Your answer illustrates one of the challenges in dealing with entitlements like Medicare: the program and its mechanisms are so deeply embedded in your practice, that you can envision ways to tweak it, but not to break away from it. 6 Recommendations

Opinion: Charlie Crist's Non-Shocker (5 days ago)

Comment: Out of the closet in more ways than one. At least he's finally being honest with himself. The public saw through him some time ago. 3 Recommendations