Iron Lady: the Ultimate Women's Libber?

That's the argument leading historian Amanda Foreman makes about Lady Margaret Thatcher, saying her achievements should be celebrated rather than sniped at by feminists. Read the full article.

Will: Liberals' Rendezvous with Regret

Liberals' "largest achievement is today's redistributionist government," writes George Will. "But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself. Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage."

Rather than producing "social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth," the Left's redistributive policies increase social strife, increase wealth disparity among citizens, and increase governments at the expense of the people--utterly destroying any hope of achieving its stated mission.

Beware Soft Authoritarianism

"Today's progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians," write Fred Siegel and Joe Kotkin in the City Journal. "Rather they resemble the medieval clerical class ... as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah." The see citizens as a "nation of dodos" "too dumb to thrive" without government direction. 

Soft authoritarian progressivism is at odds with democratic, pluralistic traditions and presents a growing potential for a constitutional crisis "pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated" nation of the "'dodos' who make up the majority of Americans ..."

Skirting the Constitution

The recess appointments of Richard Cordray and 3 others, in the words of conservatives, were "the first of their kind by any president," "are symptoms of a larger constitutional problem," and project a soft "authoritarianism ... reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both the right and left looked favorably at either Stalin's Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialism rivals."

Grasping at Employment Straws

Despite MSM cheer leading, "last Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation report," writes Louis Woodhill at RealClearMarkets, "was actually terrible."

BLS uses Payroll Employment numbers to conclude there was an increase of 200,000 jobs from Nov to Dec 2011. But, notes the author, BLS's Household Survey—"which is a more accurate picture of labor market conditions"— shows:

• the civilian labor force fell by 50,000 in December, following a 120,000 decline in November
• for all of 2011, the labor force rose only by 274,000
• during the first 3 years of Obama's presidency, the labor force fell by 0.7 million overall.

"December marked the 30th month of Obama's economic recovery. During this time, the reported unemployment rate fell from 9.5 percent to 8.5 percent. However, this 'improvement' was entirely an artifact of workers giving up and dropping out of the labor force. In fact, if labor force participation had remained constant at the 67.5 percent level that obtained at the end of the recession (June 2009), December's unemployment rate would have been reported at 10.9 percent."

Read the entire article here.

U.S. Debt Now Equal to Economy (USAToday)

"The soaring national debt has reached a symbolic tipping point," reports USA Today. "It's now as big as the entire U.S. economy."

"The amount of money the federal government owes to its creditors, combined with IOUs to government retirement and other programs, now tops $15.23 trillion."

"The total national debt topped the size of the economy for three years during and after World War II. It dropped to 32.5% of the economy by 1981, then began a steady climb under President Reagan, doubling over the next 12 years. The combination of recession and stimulus spending caused it to soar again under Obama."

Hayward: The Dirty Little Secret of "Income Inequality"

One of the most basic problems with the whole 'income inequality' topic, writes John Hayward at Human Events, "is that people don't really understand what 'income' means any more. Do you really know what your precise weekly income is?" If you say either the 'net payable amount' or 'gross pay total' on your paycheck stub, you'd be wrong.

Citing numbers crunched by CATO Institute, Hayward notes that "much of the 'income inequality' battered about in the media is actually due to a rising share of income being delivered in the form of increasingly expensive health care benefits." As CATO's research reveals, the real problem isn't 'income inequality'—"the rich are getting richer slower than the rest of us are getting richer."

The problem is the government's stealth 'income diversion' from our paychecks:

[T]he whole idea behind paycheck withholding [is] grab those taxes before people even realize the money is gone. Very few of us have a clear idea of just how much of our money is “going,” or where it goes.