One of the mantras of the left is that of monetary influence. Not just the Koch brothers: New study reveals funders behind the climate change denial effort is an example of just how ridiculous the effort can get to try to prove the point. The stimulus here is a research paper in sociology.

“A new study conducted by Drexel University’s environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement. This study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.”

A key item of suspicion is the obsession with Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. But what’s the flaw? Consider:

“To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the U.S. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service. The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.”

“118 important climate denial organizations” ? That is a big number, especially since there is no organization that has “climate denial” as its primary banner. The suggestion is a typical guilt by association effort that plays games with definitions and terms. Another consideration is the money involved. A half billion is peanuts compared to what is being spent to promote climate alarmism – it’d barely pay for the ‘research’ grants that keep a few of the key players employed.

But, this is the sort of thing that is paraded as important and meaningful in support of allegations of impropriety on the part of those who ask questions and don’t fall into lockstep with the human created climate alarmism. It shouldn’t pass the laugh test but that is of no concern to those who are desparate to find anything that they can use to rationalize their beliefs.

The example is about Why graduate medical education is failing

“When a doctor finishes medical school, he or she has been exposed to a lot of data, and has learned a few basic facts about how to be a physician. But the haven’t learned really how to work independently in a field of medicine. That takes the 3-10 extra years of training collectively known as GME to acquire that skill. It is a skill that encompasses a lot of “non-data” abilities, one of the most critical of which is the ability to make a decision independently without having to ask someone if it’s the right decision.”

But standards are being relaxed. Work hours are being forced into the standard job role. Criticism and evaluation are being tempered to avoid emotional trauma. The apprenticeship is being softened and that worries some of the masters.

There are reasons it matters and there are things you do. Bryan Preston describes 4 Reasons Why the Duck Dynasty Brouhaha Matters. The first is that the efforts of groups like GLAAD will not stop and will not be appeased as the driving force is to gain acceptance and approval of something known wrong.

“Unless GLAAD has a theological division, it’s in no place to dictate Christian values. But that won’t stop it from trying. The end game for GLAAD and its allies is among the most intolerant goals possible: They want to drive all Christians and Christian values and ideas from the public square in America. They want to persecute and oppress. They admitted as much when they supported Robertson’s suspension for saying something that they didn’t like.”

The second centers on the issue of cognitive dissonance and is sibling deceit.

“The idea, seriously offered, that we should celebrate diversity by mandating conformity is either an example of a comfortable version of cognitive dissonance, or plain old dishonesty. Cognitive dissonance is the ability to hold contradictory ideas as valid even though they cancel each other out. Whether “celebrate diversity by mandating conformity” is cognitive dissonance or dishonesty, it’s strong evidence that having a rational, reasonable discussion with liberals like Whitman is no longer possible, and liberals like Whitman are the norm.”

Third on the list is that you can’t “Rage Quit” the culture wars. ‘They’ won’t let you and it will come after you anyway.

“It’s tempting to write off everything but Duck Dynasty. But we can’t just up and quit. If we do, we are surrendering ground in the culture wars that will end up costing us ground in politics and, ultimately, our country.”

Last on the list is the Courts.

“But the courts may need to rule on where tolerance begins and ends. In recent rulings, courts have found that Christian photographers and cake bakers cannot turn down gay weddings for any reason. But A&E can suspend Robertson, effectively turning him down for doing business with the network. The photographers, cake bakers and A&E have weighed in on the culture wars — essentially on the same side, though they’re taking opposite positions on the issue at hand. The photographers, bakers and A&E assert the right to decline to do business with someone over their personal beliefs. I happen to believe that they all do have that right, but courts have ruled that the photographers and bakers do not.”

But just what can you do when you are up against people as described? What are the implications of this ideology driven behavior, the consequences? There is ample evidence in history about this type of conflict and it is not pretty.

Being rather over sensitive tends to stimulate misperceptions much the way turning the volume up too far distorts the sound. The latest example is from the LGBT community and their apologists. Thomas Lifson says Christianity on trial in Duck Dynasty controversy but the issue is a bit broader than that and one that Sarah Palin noted as well.

“Robertson spoke of homosexual behavior – i.e., acts. He took care not to characterize homosexuality per se as sinful. This is quite consistent with Christian doctrine of loving the sinner while hating the sin. That crucial point obviously eludes The Hollywood Reporter. But there is a second serious distortion in the Hollywood Reporter summation:

The only comparison involved was that both are sins.”

This is the same phenomena as noted in an earlier post. Behavior is observable and can be criticised but it is not to be extrapolated to qualities and character of the person expressing that behavior. That is the essence of hating the sin while still loving the sinner that so many seem to miss these days.

This is related to another phenomena that Steve McCann calls The Decline and Fall of Political Discourse.

“As the easily predicable disaster that is ObamaCare continues to evolve, two things are certain: one, Barack Obama and his minions will never admit failure and reverse course; and two, the vitriol emanating from the Left aimed at obliterating their political opposition will intensify during the upcoming year far beyond what has been experienced during the Obama term to date.”

Much as Perino offered a single sheet to Beckel’s common insistance that the Republicans offer nothing (Fox, The Five, 18 Dec 2013)that changed to Republicans only come up with worthless ideas, there is distortion and denial and evasion and a fundamental dishonesty that can be observed.

“The overwhelming failure of those nations that chose to go down this road is conveniently ignored or mired in blissful ignorance. Mindlessly defending American Progressivism is all that matters.

This is most evident when the proponents of this errant philosophy appear on television or the radio to debate or discuss the issues of the day.”

It is human behavior at issue and there are many whose concerns are growing about behavior that used to be considered immoral, sinful, or deceitful that is now, apparently, taken as worthy of praise and defense.

What did Jesus say? Thomas Mullen a number of parables of Jesus on economics and wonders What Bible is Pope Francis reading?.

“There is no need to address each of the pope’s arguments against free markets from a purely economic perspective. Tom Woods has already done this thoroughly during his December 6 episode of the Tom Woods Show, “Pope Francis on Capitalism.”

What is more surprising than the pope’s leftist economic ideas is his ability to ignore the overtly pro-capitalist themes in the gospels themselves. Jesus’ teaching consistently holds capitalists up as heroes. He never once even hints that the government should direct economic affairs.

The misconception that Jesus’ message is anti-capitalist probably stems from the same confusion that pervades all leftist thinking: the inability to distinguish voluntary from coerced human action. Jesus often exhorts his followers to voluntarily give to the poor. Nowhere in the gospels does he suggest that the Romans or the vassal Jewish government should be empowered to tax the wealthy to provide for the poor.

Tax collectors are de facto sinners, remember?”

The question is an important one. If a church leader can stimulate discussion about a perceived dissonance between what he espouses and his guidance, what about the rest of us? Are we suffering the same disconnect? How can this be addressed?

Professor Williams takes on the Pope with what capitalism really is. In so doing, he gives Carson in the previous post a lesson in reality. The Pope and Capitalism is a response to those who castigate others as ‘selfish and greedy’ and denounce economics based on free choice and liberty.

“Profits force entrepreneurs to find ways to please people in the most efficient ways or go out of business. Of course, they can mess up and stay in business if they can get government to bail them out or give them protection against competition. Nonprofits have an easier time of it. Public schools, for example, continue to operate whether they do a good job or not and whether they please parents or not. That’s because politicians provide their compensation through coercive property taxes. I’m sure that we’d be less satisfied with supermarkets if they, too, had the power to take our money through taxes, as opposed to being forced to find ways to get us to voluntarily give them our earnings.”

It is the ‘tugging at heart strings’ that keeps people paying taxes. That is the incentive in government and you see it any time the school systems want more money or when there is a fiscal showdown and the park service targets the public or whenever vague and abstract ideas like justice or equality are bandied about as where something must be done.

In the private sector, such come-ons tend to fade as the reality surfaces. In the public sector, they only seem to grow and fester.

CARSON: To counter coarseness, choose civility — “The many give in to media-promoted indecency” — goes finger pointing and misses reality in a telling direction.

“Prior to the severe economic downturn in 2008, a number of selfish, greedy business types, with complicity from public officials, created schemes to entice relatively inexperienced people to purchase houses that significantly ignored the old, established rule of never taking out a mortgage that was more than 2 times one’s annual salary.

These and other types of paper-pushing manipulations by a small but influential segment of Wall Street types and politicians produced enormous fortunes for many who actually produced little or nothing of value.”

Oh, those “selfish, greedy business types!” What obvious reality is missing here? It is that the old rules for mortgage qualification were overruled by government regulation. Banks were forced to make loans according to ‘diversity’ rules rather than credit rules. The government’s subsidies make a zero down payment possible. The people who should have been at risk were allowed to move that risk off to others in creative investment packaging. Carson notes the sort of pressures involved in the education arena.

“Teachers are forced into the role of political-correctness police by bureaucratic administrators who, in many cases, obviously have no sense of the psychological makeup of young children. The potential to do harm to little children by administrative acts of this level of stupidity is tremendous. If we continue down this road of absurdity, we will produce a generation of paranoid and dysfunctional individuals who will eventually be in charge of taking care of those of us who are imposing these rules of political correctness upon them today.”

Choosing villains is not in line with the civility and caring for others Carson espouses. In his “selfish, greedy” assertion, he falls into his own words.

“It is unreasonable to expect a civil and compassionate society to emerge from a culture that tolerates and often even encourages cruel and dishonest behavior from its leading commentators and leaders. I do not believe these people are capable of seeing fault within themselves. Blinded by their ideology, they are incapable of seeing things from the view of others.”

We want everyone to be able to own their homes. We want to eliminate abuse and incivility. The problem is that government separates people from their actions on such desires and that creates tragedy. Carson illuatrates the message in Matthew 7:4-5. A first step in civility is to cease making character judgments about others but rather use their behavior, the speck of impropriety we think we see in them, to learn about the flaws that may exist in each of us.

Ed Fulner says Capitalism’s carping critics don’t seem to understand that it is “A system that fosters work, saving and investing is the key to prosperity.”

“Attacking capitalism never seems to go out of style. Over the past 100 years, few institutions have been attacked so fiercely, so falsely and so foolishly.

Yet capitalism’s resilience continues. Governments based on the idea that capitalism is evil and that the state can create wealth by controlling an entire economy have risen and fallen during this period, but capitalism continues to thrive.

Today, it is no longer beyond the pale to say that capitalism has done more good for more people than any other economic arrangement ever devised by man.”

The real question is why something that has been so successful in alleviating human misery creates such an impulse to try to destroy it.

Ed Morrissey describes how the NYT notices hot new trend among sheriffs: ignore gun-control laws.

“What happens when legislatures pass unworkable or just plain stupid laws? Thanks to the innovators at the White House, who love to ignore laws in their own signature legislation when they become inconvenient (like employer mandates in ObamaCare), other executive-branch enforcement agencies have begun to follow suit.”
…
“If this imperial-executive model is good enough for the federal government, don’t expect the states to eschew it for very long for their own priorities.”

The executive may find a law difficult to understand or difficult to enforce or just plain stupid. All such results measure the quality of the law and present society of a dilemma when enforcement is misdirected, confused, or absent. An even more ominous outcome is when ideology comes up to practical reality and the executive starts to try to adjust enforcement to fit with ad hoc and random efforts.

John Timmer wonders The future of energy: Clear or cloudy? – “We can plan our future on current trends, or expect the inevitable revolution.” – at arstechnica and illustrates an ideology problem of the zero sum assumption.

“We know the future of energy usage that we want: a rapidly decreasing reliance on fossil fuels with a greater share of global energy use going to people in the developing world.”

The idea of a ‘greater share’ assumes the idea that what is being shared is fixed. It is ideology that goes from there and takes from those with more to give to those with less in order to ‘equalize’ the share of the pot of energy that is available.

Then there is the fossil fuels goal. That one is assuming that the use of fossil fuels creates evils such as global warming and pollution. The global warming isn’t well established and the pollution is a technology problem that has seen remarkable progress. That sort of uncertainty and progress is to be ignored in the need for a villain.

The essay also describes dreams of technological advancements that enable the ideologically driven fantasies and government efforts to force these fantasies. What seems ignored include what technology advances are actually doing to provide more energy at lower costs with reduced side effects. The market driven technology is what is relieving global poverty.

There are a few behaviors often seen when intellectual integrity is not a priority. The use of logical fallacies is one. The blaming of socialist government failures on not having the right people doing them is another. Pope Francis offers yet another:

“Pope Francis, responding to conservative criticisms that his economic and social ideas smack of communism, said in an Italian newspaper interview on Sunday that he is not a Marxist but that even Marxists can be good people.”[I’m no Marxist, Pope Francis tells conservative critics]

This is a classic error often found in management and parenting. It is confusing the person with that person’s behavior. Nobody said anything about the personal qualities of a person who holds left leaning ideologies but rather classified certain beliefs and behaviors as being Marxist or whatever. The Pope is diverting criticism of his behavior advocating leftist ideologies towards personal qualities. That is not being honest with those trying to tell him something. Behavior is something under the control of mortals. The qualities of a person are more particularly between that person and God. Confusing the two often leads to tragedy.

The Pope is at it again: Pope Francis attacks mega-salaries, wealth gap via Reuters.

“Pope Francis said in the first peace message of his pontificate that huge salaries and bonuses are symptoms of an economy based on greed and inequality and called again for nations to narrow the wealth gap.”

What’s the problem?

The first issue is that of the assumption that gaps in income are solely due to moral deficiencies. The second issue is that the effort is aimed at a supposed symptom – income inequality – rather than its assumed causes. A third issue is that the Church is calling for agencies outside of the Church to undertake its mission for it by force. A fourth issue is that a person with ‘moral authority’ is inciting theft or the forceable taking from some in order to give it to others. Yet a fifth issue is the matter of false witness such as asserting a “widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs,” The implication there is the poor are getting poorer and that is false due in many ways to those who have more.

“the Argentinian has several times condemned the “idolatry of money” and said it was a depressing sign of the times that a homeless person dying of exposure on the street was no longer news but a slight fall in the stock market is. “

As a matter of fact, there have been several stories about “a homeless person dying of exposure on the street” recently due to the unusual cold spell. Also as a matter of fact, the health of the stock market is fundamental to the economic health upon which the Church, the government, and other agencies depend in order to be able to provide the services and goods needed to alleviate suffering.

The fundamental truth is that most capitalist wealth is the result of building something of value to human beings. Those who are doing better at this tend to earn more and to be more wealthy than those who don’t. When the Pope condemns an “idolatry of money” what he is doing is condemning a measure of success in serving others and alleviating the suffering that is his obsession.

There is a lot of hate talk about inequality. Right now it is about inequality of income but inequality of I’net access also comes up from time to time to show how broad, deep, and ignorant such hate speech really is. The Mandela encomia is used as an example of the dilemma of intellectual integrity evident is such talk that is so prevalent in modern discussion. Bruce Thornton describes the situation in Nelson Mandela, Western Saint.

“he indulged the uncritical, crude anti-Americanism that is the rosary of the international left,  …

There is, however, more significance to Mandela’s life than the achievements noted by his encomiasts, or even his flaws. Like Gandhi before him, Mandela was a creation of the West. He was trained in the Western-modeled universities … He also had available the uniquely Western liberal-democratic ideals such as equality, human rights, non-violence, anti-racism, and democracy, precious little of which can be found elsewhere in Africa. …

Indeed, Mandela could not have succeeded against any other than a liberal-democratic Western country. His efforts would in the end have been as futile as Gandhi’s silly 1939 letter to Adolph Hitler, which begged for peace from the dictator who counseled England’s Lord Halifax, “Kill Gandhi, if that isn’t enough then kill the other leaders too, if that isn’t enough then two hundred more activists, and so on until the Indian people will give up the hope of independence.” What Mandela’s career demonstrates is the power of Western ideals which, despite the universal evils of human nature that have tarnished Western history, could transcend those brutal constants of history and effect change on the basis of principle rather than violence. From this perspective, Mandela represents the intellectual incoherence of anti-Western multiculturalism, which uses Western ideals like anti-colonialism and anti-racism to demonize the West, and ignores the unique principles of the West without which a Mandela or a Gandhi would have ended up forgotten failures.” [emphasis added]
…
“Nelson Mandela’s achievements deserve recognition. We can even accept that the darker shadows of his portrait will be ignored. But we should acknowledge that his life is a testimony not just to his own character and deeds, but to the unique goods of Western civilization that made Mandela and his achievements possible.”

Much of the attack on Western Culture, especially its most visible success, is by people who have an education, a comfortable livlihood, and perhaps even a life that sprang from that culture. These people are trying to bite the hand that feeds them. They create untold misery as Mandela’s country is now witness. One should wonder why.

The ‘money is evil’ meme shows up in a lot of arenas as an excuse. The opposition has been bought is the claim. Campaign funding is one arena where this idea has resulted in laws as well as harangue. WANG: The overstated sway of campaign funds – “Full coffers won’t save pols who defy their constituents” – takes a look at the situation.

If voters are likely to be confused by anything, it is the simplistic narrative that money is the only relevant factor in our political system. The theory fails to explain phenomena such as the recent government shutdown and why Americans routinely reject better-funded candidates and issue campaigns, and it impoverishes public understanding of the political process.

That money corrupts is a reduce to the absurd type argument that tends to align with a particular ideology that people, the voters, are stupid dupes and that money carries more weight than any other consideration in a person’s decisions. The fact is that there are other considerations. Eric Wang mentions ideology and constituents as two that matter as much as, or more than, campaign funds and provides examples to explain why these are important and funding less so.

The Mandela funeral is an opportunity to study the creation and following of icons founded on desires, fantasies, and ideologies. Daniel Greenfield’s description of South Africa in the Shadows provides a reality lesson that should tamper the enthusiasm – but doesn’t seem to make any difference.

“South Africa is just as divided by race as it was when Mandela was in prison. It is broken up into countless tiny factions protected by real and metaphorical violence. There is no trusted institution in the country that unites it. There is no trust by South Africans in each other.”
…
“In the new apartheid, the black government represses a white minority and abuses its power over the black majority in ways that Western liberals would never tolerate if it were being practiced by men with Dutch last names. Every government crime is covered up by more incitement against the white minority with each generation of activists struggling to outdo the previous generation in its anti-white racism.”

The fundamental issue is the fantasy that racism is strictly a matter of whites opressing blacks. South Africa gives lie to that fantasy by showing that racism is an endemic human characteristic. It still exists in Africa today even after the imperialist colonial opressor white races have been tossed out or overpowered. Along with the dismantling of that ‘evil’ power structure came a level of crime, racism, corruption, and self destruction that tells its own tale.

Mark J. Perry takes a look at one of the favorite targets of the left. The basic question is Why does Walmart get 38 applications for every position? and the answer is “Because it offers economic opportunity, hope and change.” As with many such targets, the reality of a simple question seems to be out of reach for the ideologs. Those seeking economic opportunity or other benefits are another class altogether.

“When Walmart is considering employee applications for its news stores, why can it be twice as selective as Harvard and three times more selective than Princeton when those elite universities consider student applications for freshman admission? In other words, why do so many people want to work at Walmart?”
…
“So, many employees must look at a Walmart job not as a dead-end, low-paying job, but as an opportunity to start at an entry-level position, with the possibility of significant career advancement if they have the talent, drive and ambition to become a salaried manager, or even executive.”

People choose employers for other reasons as well. Charles Platt is cited as noting the ‘culture’ at Walmart with a solid basis in corporate management and a basic respect for all employees.

The core issue is why some people seem to have this need to control others in such things as who they choose their boss to be or what they should be paid.

Max Boot describes the “insurgents” he “admired the most” in a commentary about The Character of Nelson Mandela

“Much more common are insurgents like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, Kim Il Sung, and (fill in the blank) who, while posturing as freedom fighters battling an evil dictatorship, swiftly become dictators in turn as soon as they seize power. The exceptions to that rule are some of the greatest figures of modern history–the likes of George Washington, Michael Collins, David Ben-Gurion, and, most recently, Nelson Mandela.”
…
“His example should dispel any illusions, so popular in the historical profession, that history is made by impersonal forces. Mandela’s example is a ringing endorsement of what is derisively known as the “great man school of history”–the notion that influential individuals make a huge difference in how events turn out. He certainly made a difference, and for the better. He will go down as one of the giants of the second half of the twentieth century along with Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.”

The restraint in position of power is a theme that has appeared in several commentaries. Just how much this was the man and how much the circumstance is something for time to tell.

It sometimes seems that death can whitewash life, especially when it is a hero of the left. David Horowitz offers a reminder of reality about Nelson Mandela 1918-2013.

if a leader should be judged by his works, the country Mandela left behind is an indictment of his political career, not an achievement worthy of praise – let alone the unhinged adoration he is currently receiving across the political spectrum.

South Africa today is the murder capital of the world, a nation where a woman is raped every 30 seconds, often by AIDs carriers who go unpunished, and where whites are anything but the citizens of a democratic country which honors the principles of equality and freedom.

Liberated South Africa is one of those epic messes the Left created and promptly forgot about.

Bill O’Reilly gets a lot of flack because he reminds: Nelson Mandela ‘was a communist’. The hagiographies are abundant in the news. He was a ‘freedom fighter’ who righted a terrible injustice (but let’s forget the fact that the result might be considered an even bigger injustice)

“They celebrated the life of a man whose fight against South African’s apartheid regime made him an international icon and helped him become the nation’s first black president.” [Washington Times]

It is a case where a fight against racism yielded economic and social misery. For today’s sensibilities, it isn’t the economic and social well being that counts but rather the efforts in the fight against a first order bogey man. History is repleat with the reverence for leaders of the left despite the misery that was their legacy. Results and reality take second place to the appearance of a fight against a perceived injustice that is often only a small corner of the overall picture.

Then there’s what he did do:

“Miraculously, Mandela found a way to thread the needle. He did it through words and simple gestures, and through the force of his own outsize personality. Each time the country seemed inescapably hurtling toward a violent cataclysm, Mandela almost single-handedly found a way to pull it back.”

Appreciation: Nelson Mandela averted what many expected — an all-out civil war described at the Washington Post.

Harvey Klehr talks about Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight after looking at Soviet archives. The real point of the effort, though, is the problem with the academic elite parading is history professors.

“One of the oddest phenomena in the academic world is the nostalgia so many professor display for communism. The human costs of that ideology, we now know, run upwards of 100 million dead in the former Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, eastern Europe and North Korea. In light of archival evidence that during the Great Purges of the 1930s, the USSR was executing almost 1000 political prisoners a day,
…
The collapse of the Soviet Union dismayed a number of historians who have lamented the sense of “triumphalism” among those who applaud its end.
…
Most disturbing has been the willingness of many historians to blind themselves to historical evidence.
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Confronted by explicit evidence that such people as Lauchlin Currie or Harry Dexter White were spies, their defenders have invented scenarios so implausible that I am tempted to say that only an academic could credit them.
…
historians have concluded that the weight of the evidence of Soviet espionage is so overwhelming that it can no longer be denied. Instead, they have decided to justify it.
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If espionage on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s Russia is simply an untraditional form of patriotism, then words like loyalty and patriotism have lost any meaning.
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Facts do matter. And it should be a matter of concern to all of us when historians distort facts.”

For years, history has been rewritten to accomodate the political beliefs and ideologies of the academics who purport to study it. When the Soviet Union collapsed and some of its records exposed the reality and that reality did not jive with the ideology, dissonance occurred. The resulting behaviors are described and worth noting.

Nita Ghei describes how government is Shutting down the engines of innovation and how Hubris drives regulators to expand their domain

“Caught between a rock and a hard place, businesses close, or decline to open in the first place, and the jobs are lost or never created. Nonetheless, the agencies continue issuing regulations unchecked, and regulators remain serenely unconcerned about their hubris, convinced they know better than the rest of us what is good for us.”

…

“Buckyballs are gone. 23andMe will probably either shut down or move offshore. In either case, regulators effectively clamp down on jobs and innovation. It doesn’t stop here.”
…
“Each regulatory excess stifles industry growth. When regulators try to fit round pegs into square holes, as is the case with 23andMe, we see innovative companies disappear. The United States has carefully cultivated a legal regime that encourages innovation over much of its existence. It would be a great pity if regulatory overreach destroyed that advantage.”

It’s like that fable about how to boil a frog.