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Nov. 18, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:01
November 18, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host of this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.6% of the time.
We got a new opinion audit in from the Sullivan Group and no change.
Still documented to be almost always right 99.6% of the time.
I wasn't expecting a change.
I got to be 1,000% right for weeks, months. to move it up a tenth of a point once you're this close to perfection.
It's hard to move.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
One big exciting hour remains of Open Line Friday, hosted by me, El Rushbow.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbow at EIBNet.com.
I have here an interesting story.
And it is from CBS News.
It's about the National Football League and the Green Bay Packers.
Packers wide receiver Jordy Nelson goes by the nickname White Lightning.
With good hands, quick speed, and four touchdowns in the last four games, Jordy Nelson has earned the lightning part.
But in a recent interview, Nelson reveals that part of his secret is that too many opponents get hung up on the fact that he's, well, white.
When asked by the Green Bay Press Gazette if racial bias is a factor in his on-field success, Jordy Nelson said, honestly, I think it is.
Nelson and his teammates believe that with so few white elite receivers in the league, opposing players are likely to dismiss his abilities on the field.
It's kind of like reverse racism here.
What they're saying is that Jordy Nelson is able to sneak up on opponents because as a white guy, he's not supposed to be that fast.
He's not supposed to be able to outrun the brothers who are in CBS, CBS sports.
As receivers, we've talked about it, Jordy Nelson told the Green Bay paper.
I know that cornerback's coach Joe Witt tells me all the time, when all the rookies come in, he gives them the heads up.
Don't let Nelson fool you.
That's fine with me.
Packer teammate Greg Jennings, number 85 wide receiver.
Yep, Jordy uses that to his advantage.
It's not because he's the white guy.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that guys look at him and they say, oh, yeah, yeah, he's the white guy.
He can't be that good.
Well, he is that good.
Greg Jennings is black.
It's easy for somebody to say, oh, yeah, he's like one of those other white receivers.
He's not.
I'm sorry.
He's not.
He knows how I feel about it.
Maybe I'm a little biased because he's a teammate, but from watching him day one to right now, totally different player.
And the quarterback, Aaron Rogers, agrees with his receivers.
When you see Jordy out there, you think, oh, well, he's a white wide receiver.
He's not going to be very athletic, Rogers said in his weekly ESPN Milwaukee radio show.
I'm not sure why he keeps sneaking up on guys.
Hey, Aaron, it's just a damn good thing you didn't mention McNabb in all this.
It's a damn good thing none of you people mention McNab in this.
Eventually, opponents are going to have to dismiss the white receiver stereotype or continue to pay the consequences.
Jordy Nelson has caught 34 passes for 633 yards in the season, including seven touchdowns, making him second on the team in receptions and yardage.
His performance brings to mind another prominent white receiver, the current league leader, Wes Welker, the Patriots.
In an interview with Miami sports radio station, Welker admitted, I think even my own teammates look at me sometimes think, How the hell is this white guy doing this?
Reverse racism.
The white guy sneaking up on the brothers.
When did it happen?
I just did just this week.
This week.
Oh, oh, white guys aren't supposed to be.
It's a speed thing, Snerdly.
It's not a talent thing.
It's not a hands-eyes coordination.
It's not being able to catch the ball.
It's a speed thing.
The white guys are just supposed to not be as fast as the brothers.
And that's what they're all talking about here.
Jordy Nelson sneaked.
Well, no, no, Jimmy, Jimmy the Greek.
No, Jimmy the Greek didn't.
No, no, just no, it was the exact Jimmy the Greek wasn't talking about this.
Jimmy the Greek was no, no.
Jimmy the Greek was not talking about white wide receivers.
He was talking.
No, he, that's right.
It's not, it's not.
Jimmy the Greek did not say they were built.
Jimmy the Greek said they were bred.
That's what got Jimmy the Greek.
And it was at Duke Ziebert's restaurant, and he said that the slave owners bred them.
And you could look at their buttocks and thighs and you could see that they were bred that way and that's why they're faster and so forth.
This is Jordy Nelson and Greg Jennings and Aaron Rodgers agreeing that this is a stereotype in the league that the white guys aren't as fast and Jordy Nelson is.
He's able to sneak up on these guys because the brothers don't think that he's going to be that fast.
It's perfectly fine.
It's perfectly fine.
It doesn't work with the pun.
It's a speed thing.
It's a speed thing.
This has nothing to do with the quarterbacks.
That was a whole different thing.
Yeah, CBS published it.
Well, CBS published it.
Aaron Rodgers said it on ESPN.
They agree with these two guys.
That's right.
ESPN.
And I just, so I'm saying, if any of these people had mentioned McNabb, they didn't.
What happened was they said it to the Green Bay Press Gazette newspaper.
I don't know.
Somebody had the concept for this.
Somebody, I mean, this story just didn't pop up out of nowhere.
Somebody had to think of the premise and then go ask these guys about it.
And then they agreed.
Well, yeah, I think the Pacific Islander guys, you don't find too many of them wide receivers.
At best, you'll find them as tight ends on the offensive side of the ball.
You're not running back.
No, you're not going to get the same kind of comparison.
Well, the Hispanics is that's a whole different thing to think as well.
That was part of the story.
The story was based on the premise that you've got this white receiver who's excelling is doing really great, and he's sneaking up on people because the brothers don't think he's that fast.
And it's a story about how amused everybody is that he's able to sneak up on these guys.
Couple of stories here.
They're very interesting about Occupy Wall Street.
One of them is out of Harvard from occupyharvard.com.
It's actually an MIT.education website.
And the headline, Harvard Walks Out of Econ 101.
This is a classic story.
November 2nd, 70 Harvard students walked out of class in the middle of their introductory Econ 101 lecture to show solidarity with Occupy Boston and to protest the conservative bias they felt was present in the course at Harvard.
Two weeks later, Rachel Sandilau Ash, a Harvard freshman who organized the walkout with her classmate Gabriel Bayard, said that it sparked discussion both during class sections and outside the classroom.
Yeah, it can be easy for college students to exist in a bubble, and I believe these actions have increased discussion and debate around some of the most important issues of our time, she said.
University has not punished the students who've walked out.
Now, the students protested two main causes, the alleged bias in their economics class and increasing tuition and student debt.
The students have also accused their professor teaching the class, Nicholas M-A-N-K-I-W.
How would you pronounce that?
Manku, I guess.
Nicholas Mankiw, who is a Harvard graduate, PhD 84, of showing a conservative bias.
Sandalau Ash, the female student, believes that the professor who acted as an economic advisor to George W. Bush was a key player in creating the very economic policies that led to the current financial instability.
So the students chose to walk out of Economics 10.
It's not 101, it's Economics 10, because of problems students raised with the class, namely a bias inherent in the class, which was identified in an open letter to the professor from the students who walked out.
So the students are mad at Harvard because they are not being taught enough liberalism.
They're not being taught enough liberalism in economics.
They also went on to complain about the mathematical models.
On the other side of this, I have, there's a great post here, a piece by Gary Wolfram, who is the William Simon Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Hillsdale College.
Now, Hillsdale College, a sponsor of this program, Hillsdale College is oriented toward the Constitution.
No matter what your degree at Hillsdale, you take four years of the Constitution with everything else aimed at your major.
This is just a great post from this guy.
Occupy Wall Street Cloud, a crowd blind to the benefits of capitalism.
Whenever I watch, again, the Gary Wolfram here, whenever I watch media coverage of another Occupy Wall Street event, I'm reminded of an exchange between Jewish protesters in the 1979 Monty Python movie Life of Brian.
One of the protesters asks another what the Romans have brought to the area.
Conversation goes like this.
Question, all right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, the education, the wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Answer, brought peace?
Oh, peace.
Shut up.
The point is, the Roman institutions brought a good deal to the area that was being overlooked by the protesters.
The Wall Street protesters, in their hatred of capitalism, overlook things, including the fact that over the last 100 years, capitalism has reduced poverty more and increased life expectancy more than in the 100,000 years prior.
Now, I'm going to take a break.
I'm going to come back.
I'm going to finish this because it's as educational and informative.
It's one of greatest little lessons in basic economics.
And it's provided here by a Hillsdale College economics professor.
And one of the fascinating things is to learn just how recent market capitalism is as a player in civilization on the world stage.
Oh, yeah, little Elton John in the bumper rotation here at the EIB Network on Open Line Friday.
Okay, back here to Gary Wolfram, Hillsdale College.
The Wall Street protesters in their hatred of capitalism overlook things, including the fact that over the last 100 years, capitalism has reduced poverty more and increased life expectancy more than in the 100,000 years prior.
Every semester, I ask my students, what would you rather be?
King of England in 1263 or you?
It turns out all the students say they'd rather be themselves now.
They enjoy using their iPhone, indoor plumbing, central heating, refrigerators, electric lightning, lighting.
By the way, this goes to a question I ask frequently on this program.
And I've asked this question over and over again.
How is it that a nation of less than 250 years became the most powerful nation on earth in human history?
Outdoing nations and civilizations that have been around for thousands of years or multiple hundreds of years.
How is it that we were able to conceive ourselves out of nothing 200 plus years ago and become a power for good, an economic power unlike any the world's ever seen?
Our DNA is no different than the DNA of people in Europe or Asia.
How did this happen?
This gets to it in part.
How is it that for thousands of years, mankind made very little progress in increasing the standard of living, and yet today, half of the goods and services you use in the next week did not exist when I was born?
This is the professor talking to his students.
How is it that for thousands of years, mankind made very little progress in increasing the standard of living and yet, now think of that, thousands of years and the standard of living stayed constant and went nowhere and yet today half of the goods and services you use next week didn't exist when I was born.
It wasn't that there was some change in the DNA such that we got smarter.
The Greeks knew how to make a steam engine 3,000 years ago, but they never made one.
The difference is in how we organize our economic system.
The advent of market capitalism in the mid-18th century made all of the difference.
We don't have to rely just on historical data.
Look at cross-section evidence.
I try another experiment with my students.
I tell them that they're about to be born and they can choose whatever country in the world they'd like to be born in.
The only caveat is that they will be the poorest person in that country.
You can choose wherever.
The point of this question is, you can choose wherever you want to get born, but you're going to be born the poorest person in the country.
So you better choose a place that offers you upward mobility.
That's what he's getting at here.
Every student picks a country that is primarily organized in a market capitalist system.
Nobody picks a centrally planned state.
Nobody, none of my students have ever said, I want to be born in Cuba.
Nobody says, I want to be born in Zimbabwe.
Nobody says I want to be born in North Korea.
What does it mean to be born poor in our capitalist society that the Occupy Wall Street crowd so hates?
Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation, has several studies of those classified as poor by the U.S. Census Bureau.
And we've gone through this before.
80% of poor people in this country in 2010 had air conditioning.
75% had a car truck.
Two-thirds had satellite or cable TV.
Half of the poor had a personal computer.
More than two-thirds had at least two rooms per person.
Contrast that with what it means to be poor in Mumbai, India, a country that is moving rapidly toward market capitalism, but was burdened for decades with a socialist system.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has shown a lack of understanding of how the market capitalist system works.
And that's primarily, folks, because they haven't been taught yet.
They've been taught socialist utopia crap.
They appear to think that the cell phones they use, the food they eat, the hotels they stay in, the cars they drive, the gasoline that they use, and all the myriad goods and services they consume every day would be there under a different system.
They even think they might even be in more abundance and more fairly distributed in a different system.
But there's no evidence that this could be or ever has been the case.
The reason is that only market capitalism solves the two major problems that face any economy.
One, how to provide an incentive to innovate, and two, how to solve the problem of decentralized information.
The reason there is so much innovation in a market system compared to socialism is that profit provides the incentive for innovators to take the risk needed to come up with new products.
My mother never once complained that we didn't have access to the latest Soviet washing machine.
We never desired a Soviet car.
The socialist system relies on what Adam Smith referred to as the benevolent butcher.
And while there will undoubtedly be benevolent butchers out there, clearly a system that provides monetary rewards for innovators is much more dynamic and successful.
The profit that the Occupy Wall Street protesters decry is the reason the world has access to clean water and antiviral drugs that they need now.
The other major problem that must be solved by any economic system is how to deal with the fact that information is so decentralized.
For example, there is no way for a central planner to know how many hot dogs 300 million Americans are going to want at every moment in time.
A central planner cannot know the relative value of resources in the production of various goods and services.
Market capitalism solves that problem through the price system.
If there are too few hot dogs, the price will rise.
More hot dogs will be produced.
Too many hot dogs are produced, the price of hot dogs will fall and fewer will be produced.
There's more, be right back.
It's an interesting proposition, I think.
You have a central planner.
How many hot dogs 300 million Americans are going to want at every moment in time?
Now, the reason that that's a great example is because something has to decide.
Something has to be the arbiter of how many hot dogs 300 million Americans are going to want at any moment in time.
Take a summer day where there are a lot of baseball games being played.
Imagine if some idiot thought that he alone with his administration could plan something like that.
Obama believes that.
Obama and his people believe they should be in charge of things like that.
Imagine the mess it would be.
But how does it get solved?
How does it happen that given any day of the year you choose, you want a hot dog, it's going to be there somewhere.
There will be a hot dog.
What makes that possible?
Now, the Occupy Wall Street crowd doesn't think about this.
They've never been taught this.
They don't even think of things like this.
It's not even on their radar.
It's just there.
They're Americans.
It should be a hot dog.
The problem they have is they have to pay for it.
That's what they don't like.
But somebody has to make it possible for it to be there, some system.
And Mr. Wolfram's point here is it's capitalism.
And the price system will determine.
You would lose money.
It's like the restaurant owner.
Can you imagine if you've never owned a restaurant, you have your menu, so everything on that menu has to be available.
If you're going to stay in business, you can't tell customers, sorry, don't have the prime rib tonight.
It's got to be there.
But then how do you know how much to have?
Because you can only keep it for so long before you have to toss it out, which is a loss.
So how do you know how much to order, how much to keep, and do that for your entire inventory?
And if you sell booze, if you've got a bar, you have to do the same thing.
Then you've got to worry about theft.
You have to factor all these things in.
But you've got a menu of items in your restaurant.
It better be there.
And you have to do it in such a way that you show a profit at the end of the day, or you're going to closing down.
How does that happen?
How do you know just the right amount to have in your refrigerator or in stock, particularly when you're dealing with food?
Market capitalism is the key to the wealth of the masses.
As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1920 book, Socialism, only market capitalism can make the poor wealthy.
Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1945 paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society, showed that only the price system in capitalism can create the spontaneous order that ensures that goods will be allocated in a way that ensures consumers determine the use of resources.
Price system determines what people can afford, therefore what moves, what sells, what gets replaced, what gets manufactured to replace.
The Occupy Wall Street movement would make best use of its time and energy in protesting the encroachment of the centrally planned state that led to the disaster of the Soviet Union, fascist Germany, and dictatorial North Korea.
Now, this stuff is quite simple when it's explained to you by somebody that can make the complex understandable, but these people have never been taught it.
They just assume that stuff's there.
They probably think he's right that if they were in charge of central planners, there'd be more of it for everybody.
You just have to redistribute it better.
Everybody had as many hot dogs as they want whenever they wanted, and it wouldn't cost them anything.
Basic Econ 101.
That's probably what this guy at Harvard's trying to teach students that they're walking out on.
They probably consider anything to do with capitalism bias.
Conservative bias.
Tom or Tim in San Diego, we go back to the phones, and you're next.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I want to go quickly because I hope we'll have a few minutes at the end.
I want to tell you my little theory that I think Apple products turn their users into liberals.
But if I can, I'd like to take a stab at the elephant in the room that you mentioned regarding Jerry Sandusky.
Yeah, okay.
I think that the thing that you said everybody's afraid to mention is that we're always told that homosexuals are not pedophiles.
But in this case, he sure was.
And the same thing with Michael Jackson.
Now, is that what you had in mind?
No, not pedophiles, but I do think it's the elephant in the room that's not called a homosexual problem or scandal.
See, and the reason, there is a very powerful political gay movement, and it's oriented towards supporting the Democrat Party.
Not every, just like in every segment of society, not every gay person is a predator.
Not every man is a predator, like the feminists tried to say.
Every group of people has its own bad actors.
But because the political aspects of homosexuality, which they've got a very powerful lobby and they're liberal and they support the Democrat Party, they succeed in stifling conversation about it.
And so you don't dare mention it.
People don't mention it.
They don't want the.
It's like not mentioning showing cartoons of Muslims.
You just don't go there because they wreak havoc on you and it's the path of least resistance.
But yeah, it's not so much pedophilial, that's what this is, but it's that Sandusky has to be, he's a gay guy.
Nobody's mentioning that aspect because it's just too dangerous.
And the reason why is because of the power of the gay lobby, which is very leftist.
But I don't want to be misunderstood.
Sandusky does not represent all of homosexuality, just like the priests in the Catholic Church don't represent all of homosexuality, just like the aberrant criminals in heterosexual society don't represent all heterosexuals.
But because the gay lobby is very powerful, people don't go there.
People don't address it.
They don't talk about it.
And as such, an element of the problem never gets dealt with.
That's my only point.
No, I agree.
And what you're saying is that it's a small percentage.
Although, if it turns out that Sandusky was pimping out children to big money donors, you have a whole ring of gay pedophiles, but that doesn't fit the template.
Well, there are people alleging that, but I haven't seen it alleged officially.
I've seen it alleged by some journalists.
That's not part of a grand jury report, is it?
No, that would be a problem.
I don't think it is.
There are people alleging that Sandusky was pimping them out to donors, to big-time Penn State donors.
That is a story that's out there.
Now, I haven't mentioned it because you just did, but I haven't because it comes from fringe elements of media.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, my main point was about Occupy Wall Street.
Now that they have threatened to burn down Macy's, they have their own rape rooms.
They walk around terrorizing school children, carrying AK-47s to shoot up the home of dear leader, they have, in my mind, officially crossed the line into being a domestic terrorist group.
And I think that is why Barack Obama says he feels sympathy for their goals.
I think if they really want to make this a better country, they should occupy Walmart.
Go in there, spend a few dollars, or occupy Walgreens or Wally World.
What matters is just spend some money, and they'll do a lot more good than sitting around whining.
Because as Bill Clinton might say, occupying Wall Street never said a human being.
You know what has been learned?
Daily Caller and some other people have gotten the arrest records of some of the Occupy people who've been arrested and found where their parents live, where they live.
And they've found surprisingly, they think, surprising number of really rich white kids who make up this group.
It's sort of like the same bunch of rich white people over in Europe who went nuts when they were talking about raising tuition over there.
They were all rich kids, idle, rich, spoiled brat kids joining the protest march for some fun.
And that's not all of Occupy, but a surprisingly large percentage of them come from very upper scale, upper class backgrounds.
And they're just rebelling against their parents.
Some of them have guilt over how wealthy their parents are, and they're trying to assuage it, so forth.
It's a psychological mess.
But what it is more than anything else is a political movement that is orchestrated out of the White House via the Service Employees International Union and some other satellite unions.
That's primarily what it is.
It's Obama effort to create chaos.
It's all part of his reelection effort, and it's to further the notion, counterbalance the Tea Party.
The purpose of this was to have it hopefully look like it was big, a national movement that represented a majority opinion that hated the same people Obama hates.
That Obama says he hates.
He actually doesn't hate Wall Street.
He's in bed with them, practically.
Now, what's your point about Apple products turning people into leftists?
Well, the last time I talked with you, I mentioned that I used a PC, and your response was to say, piece of junk.
Now, I don't know what it is about Apple products that turn them into the users into elitists, but I've been dealing with Apple users for 20 years, and they all feel perfectly free to insult PC users.
Now, you have a point.
In the early days of Apple, it was.
The users were a cult.
They were a small bunch of people, small group of people, who did think that they were using something superior to the masses, to everybody else.
Apple's kind of grown beyond that now.
Can't really say that Apple's customers are a cult anymore.
But it's not that PCs are known crap.
Did I say that?
I learned on Mac.
I have parallels.
I have to have, there's some programs that I need that only run Windows.
And it's just, it's obvious Windows is an imitation.
It's a copy.
I find it more difficult to use than Macintosh or than the Mac OS, but I don't feel superior to anybody because of it.
Now, I think some of the Mac people do.
Some of the Apple early adopters.
Yeah, it was a cult.
It was so tiny.
Group of people and you had the cult leader jobs.
Well yeah, i'm not gonna say that Snerdly.
I mean you, you get your own show and you can tell people what you think of Pcs.
Uh, you think Pcs are that, or do you think Windows is that?
Okay okay, all right, all right fine, and dandy, I don't know, a Pc is a Pc right, and they.
I mean, it doesn't matter what Pc you buy.
I don't really know, because the software is what matters.
No, I don't care what Pc you buy if you you got to put Windows on it and so they're all the same depends on the software.
So how do you say that one Pc is better than another?
It's, it's all.
You know what they look like.
You like the lines, like a lot of people, like the Sony Vio or Veo or what have you, but it's still a Pc, it runs Windows anyway.
Uh great, call out there.
Glad you took the time.
I got to take a brief time out here.
Folks sit tight, we'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
Now there's uh, there's this elephant in the room business with uh PENN State and about our, our recent caller.
Some people in the media are trying to turn this around and and what they're saying is that the homosexual aspect of Sand Dusky was covered up because otherwise people would have to admit that a football coach was gay, and that won't do.
You can't have that, can't have that big macho football department of penn state being so that cover it up.
In other words, the point is that a lot of people on both sides of this are trying to cover up the gorilla in the room for fear of what it says.
So, in other words, if it weren't because of our homosexual bias, all of this would have been reported and stopped earlier.
This is what some people are saying, is that you know if the Sandusky would have been shut down years ago if it weren't because of our homosexual bias?
There's all kinds of talk about this, but it's whispered and and that's that's because it'll bring politics into it from the left.
Gay lobby, very liberal and very politically active and connected.
It's one of those things that frightens a lot of people.
House of Representatives just failed to pass the balanced budget amendment 261 to 165, 23 short of the two-thirds majority needed.
And they had stripped out.
the cut and the cap.
It was cut, cap, balanced.
This was just the balanced budget amendment.
And four Republicans voted with the Democrats on this.
Still a long way to go.
Great weekend, folks.
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