Very powerful view from Libya
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Jean-Jacques Jihad - Andrew C. McCarthy -
"The one thing that absolutely could not be tolerated was true freedom, the liberty of the individual. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “social compact” would otherwise be “an empty formula.” The irreducible core of the utopia he envisioned, the “undertaking which alone can give force to the rest,” was quite simply this: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.”
Ah, yes, the “general will.” For this, every modern totalitarian movement is indebted to the 18th-century Genevan philosopher who claimed, in The Social Contract, that a man’s compulsory servitude to the state — the embodiment of this general will — “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Rousseau was what we today call “Orwellian” long before there was an Orwell. “Freedom” was nothing more than submission."
The February Jobs Report: Solid but Not Stellar
The February jobs report was a solid report — not quite a champagne-popping event, merely one more indicator that the recovery is on firm ground and job gains will continue in future reports. While a decline of 0.1 in the unemployment rate is statistically insignificant, it indicates that the rather sharp declines of 0.4 in both December and January were more than just a statistical blip. It is still likely that the unemployment rate will rise slightly as workers re-enter the labor force, but it would be surprising to see the rate leaping back over 9.5 percent.
There are indications that some of the anemic payroll-survey numbers from January were weather-related. The job gains in construction and transportation are more likely due to a bounce back from the weather rather than attributable to true growth.
While the February job gains of 222,000 is a good start, job growth needs to be much stronger to make up for the labor slack since December 2007. Hopefully, future reports will show over 300,000 new private-sector workers. The household survey shows that the number of employed workers is about 10 million below where it should be to return to the same level of employment before the recession began. At the rate of last month’s job growth, it would take seven years for the labor market to fully recover, a time period that is simply too long.
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