It’s Friday, January 13th, 2012….and before we begin, for those who didn’t catch it on our home page yesterday, here’s the latest must-see video from the great Bill Whittle, courtesy of Steve Boss:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last edition of the week, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute correctly argues….

The Value Of Free Enterprise Has Nothing To Do With Money Or Wealth

There’s no doubt it’s been a rough few years for free enterprise in the United States. The financial crisis that began in 2007 is still a drag on the economy, and for every sign of recovery there’s another dark cloud on the horizon. Entrepreneurs are unsure about the future and skittish about investing their time, treasure, and talent in growing their businesses, much less starting new ones. President Obama’s stimulus package was a dud, and the unemployment rate today is 50 percent higher than what he promised would be the worst-case scenario.

It’s easy to get discouraged. But we cannot afford to be defeatist—or be defeated. Principled advocates of free enterprise have to redouble our efforts to make the case for free enterprise and confront its detractors with the truth. This means we have to explain in clear and unambiguous terms why free enterprise matters to the United States.

It might seem that the best case for free enterprise is the material one. Free enterprise lets people make more money, buy more and nicer stuff, and have a greater degree of comfort. The freer our economy is, the more competitive the US economy is vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And so on.

But these aren’t our best arguments. There is another reason, a transcendent reason, for which free enterprise matters most—and this is the case we all must be able to make today.

We all learned early on in school that the Declaration of Independence claimed for each of us the unalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Note that the founders didn’t assert a right to be happy; such is the domain of tinpots and crackpots, (Including the current Administration) of 1984’s “Ministry of Plenty” and Josef Stalin’s aggrandizing self-description as the Soviet Union’s “Constructor of Happiness.” So what, in practice, does this right to pursue happiness mean?

It means the right to define and earn our happiness through our ideas, hard work, and gumption, to earn our success by creating value honestly, in our own lives and in the lives of others. It doesn’t mean the pursuit of a big lottery win or an inheritance. Those bring money, but not happiness. And a mountain of evidence shows that after a fairly low threshold, more money doesn’t make us happier. The best case for free enterprise has nothing at all to do with money or material goods or wealth. Those are just icing on the cake. We must stop talking about free enterprise as just an engine of wealth creation. It’s much more than that.

In short, the secret to the pursuit of happiness is earning our own success; creating value with our lives and in the lives of others. This earned success is the fruit of hard work and just rewards in a system built on merit. Only in a free enterprise system is effort and innovation rewarded over connections and predation. (And this means that we have to draw a distinction between free enterprise, which is based on opportunity and competition between ideas, and corporate cronyism, which is just another form of statism masquerading as free enterprise.)

Of course, none of this is new to free enterprise advocates. Most of us have known our whole adult lives that an enterprise society provides the greatest freedom and opportunity for people, not just in material ways, but by allowing us to give our lives meaning and purpose. Yet we’ve shelved transcendent arguments and devoted far too much time and effort to making arguments about efficiency—arguments our opponents largely accepted (or at least stopped trying to refute) over a decade ago.

Instead, we have allowed the enemies of free enterprise—the statists, the redistributionists, the folks for whom every problem is a government program waiting to be enacted—to claim the mantle of fairness and the moral high ground for their discredited ideas. That needs to change. After all, Adam Smith wrote his Theory of Moral Sentiments two decades before The Wealth of Nations. Efficiency came after morality, not vice versa.

It is time to contest the moral high ground. In order to win the fight for free enterprise against its opponents who are once again beating the drum to turn America into some sort of Anglophone Sweden (or Greece), we have to follow Smith’s lead. We have to make the case for free enterprise and economic growth from a moral perspective, using language about opportunity and happiness and living a meaningful life. We have to explain how the pursuit of happiness requires the opportunity to earn our success, and how earned success comes only when we succeed on our own terms.

The statists preach a crass, shallow gospel of materialism. We cannot defeat them by merely responding with claims about economic efficiency. We can win the battle for free enterprise in the United States. But we have to say what is written on our hearts, not just on our bank statements.

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Stephen Moore offers his thoughts on a man who, from what we’ve seen, not only speaks from his wallet, but often without bothering to engage his brain:

Will Newt Stand Down?

The buzz is getting stronger that GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will pull back on his planned $3 million ad campaign against Mitt Romney.

The buzz is getting stronger that GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will pull back on his planned $3 million ad campaign that accuses rival Mitt Romney of “looting” companies and ruining workers’ lives when he headed Bain Capital.

I’m hearing from Gingrich insiders that several top campaign brass want the former speaker of the House to withdraw the 28 minute ad — which has been universally panned by conservative leaders in recent days. Even Mr. Gingrich himself is said to be having reservations. But other senior advisors of the Gingrich Super PAC, Winning Our Future, want to continue full speed ahead. They dismiss complaints that the ad should be withdrawn and say doing so would only help the Romney campaign.

Radio talk show host Mark Levin reported Wednesday that Mr. Gingrich will pull back the ads, but the Gingrich campaign has denied that. I’ve talked to several major Gingrich donors who say they are disgusted by the class-warfare tactic. Rush Limbaugh likened Newt Gingrich’s attacks to Barack Obama’s assaults on free-market capitalism and rich people.

Some Gingrich advisors want to change tactics and use the Super PAC money — mostly donated by Las Vegas casino hotel owner Sheldon Adelson — to run positive TV ads on Mr. Gingrich’s economic growth ideas or to criticize Mr. Romney on issues such as healthcare and gay marriage.

Mr. Gingrich probably can’t win the race for the nomination. The only question is whether he will lose with any dignity. With Mr. Gingrich, you never know whether common sense will prevail. That may explain why a campaign that looked so promising one month ago has crash landed.

And Newt’s aberrant behavior comes….

….as a surprise?!?

Next up, Victor Davis Hanson and an observation regarding Defense spending we’ve often offered in the past:

Defense Spending Is a Shovel Ready Investment

President Obama just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.

Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement a now familiar stereotype of Obama’s desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bowing to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America’s historically exceptional world role as are they.

In contrast, a robust military keeps the peace by deterring aggressors through the appearance of overwhelming force. We often forget that the appearance of strength in peace is almost as important as the reality of strength in war. When wars end, we scale back (think 1919 or 1946) — only to kick ourselves once tensions arise again out of nowhere, and we must scramble to catch up and rearm for an unimagined World War II or Cold War.

America’s armed forces spend about 80 percent of their budgets not on bullets and bombs but on training and compensating soldiers. Often, they do a far better job shaping the minds and character of our youth than do our colleges. Somehow the military can take an 18-year old and teach him to park a $100 million fighter across a carrier deck, but our colleges cannot ensure that his civilian counterpart will show up regularly for classes. Young men and women leave the service debt-free and with skills. Too many of our college students pile up debt and become increasingly angry that by their mid-20s they still have received neither competitive skills nor real education.

The reason why our deficit is more than $1 trillion is not just that we have multimillion-dollar jet fighters or tens of thousands of Marines. Defense outlay currently represents only about 20 percent of federal budget expenditures and is below 5 percent of our gross national product. Those percentages are roughly average costs for recent years — despite an ongoing deployment in Afghanistan. In contrast, over the last three years we have borrowed a record near-$5 trillion for vast unfunded entitlements — from a spiraling Social Security and Medicare to expanding the food stamp program to include one-seventh of America. Yet many Americans would probably prefer a new frigate manned by highly trained youth to discourage our enemies, rather than another Solyndra-like investment or a near-$1 trillion stimulus aimed at creating “shovel-ready” jobs.

Unfortunately, defense cuts do not occur in isolation. They feed a syndrome best typified by an insolvent and largely defenseless socialist Europe. The more that prosperous societies cut their defenses to expand social programs, the more the resulting dependency leads to even less defense and ever more benefits. Once the state promises to take care of the citizen, the citizen believes that more subsidies are still never enough. And once voters believe that defense spending is an impediment to greater entitlements, the fewer impediments they will pay for. The net result is something like the squabbling, soon-to-collapse European Union: trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities, and unable to defend itself.

Many of the new cuts are aimed at the traditional ground forces, given that we are in a high-tech age of missiles, sophisticated drones and counterinsurgency missions. But the nature of war is neither static nor predictable. After World War II, Harry Truman wanted to do away with the Marines — and then was glad he had not when they largely saved the reputation of the U.S. military during the unforeseen disaster in Korea in December 1950. After the Gulf War of 1990-91, we cut back on our ground forces, only to build them back up so that the Marines could deal with enemies in awful places like Anbar Province in Iraq.

The decline of civilizations of the past — fourth-century-B.C. Athens, fifth-century-A.D. Rome, 15th-century Byzantium, or 1930s Western Europe — was not caused by their spending too much money on defense or not spending enough on public entitlements. Rather, their expanding governments redistributed more borrowed money, while a dependent citizenry wanted even fewer soldiers to guarantee ever more handouts.

History’s bleak lesson is that those societies with self-reliant citizens who protect themselves and their interests prosper; those who grow dependent cut back their defenses — and waste away.

Since we’re on the subject of misguided military policies, G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors forwarded this next item that details that (GASP!)….

U.S. Marines Allegedly Urinate on Taliban Corpses

The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating a video that surfaced online today in which several Marines appear to urinate on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters. The video, which is less than a minute long, appears to show four men in uniform looking around before urinating on three dead bodies, at least one of the men chuckles as they do so.

“Have a great day, buddy,” one of the men is heard saying, apparently to a dead body.

The Marine Corps responded quickly after reports of the video surfaced, calling for a full investigation. “Headquarters Marine Corps has recently been made aware of a video that portrays Marines urinating on what appear to be deceased members of the Taliban,” the USMC statement said. “While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps.” (Well it OUGHTA be!)

The video surfaced on several websites early Wednesday. On one website, the member who posted the video identified the Marines as belonging to the 3/2 Marine battalion out of Camp Lejeune. The battalion served in the northern Helmand Province in Afghanistan last summer.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a D.C.-based human rights group, condemned what it called “the apparent desecration of the dead.” “If verified as authentic, the video shows behavior that is totally unbecoming of American military personnel and that could ultimately endanger other soldiers and civilians,” said CAIR in a statement. “We trust that this disturbing incident will be promptly investigated in a transparent manner and that appropriate actions will be taken based on the results of that investigation.”

Funny….but can anyone remember CAIR issuing similar condemnations upon the occasion of Muslims mistreating the remains of Americans in Mogadishu….or Fallujah?  The noise you hear is Chesty Puller rolling over in his grave.

On the other hand, if this is official U.S. Military policy, it’s totally in keeping with our stated position that we wouldn’t piss on a Muslim extremist were they on fire!

On the Lighter Side….

And in another story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Florida senior citizen shoots dead suspected burglar

A senior citizen in Florida shot dead a would-be burglar at his home early Thursday morning as the suspect was trying to gain entry into the Daytona Beach home. The 82-year-old homeowner woke up at 6 a.m. after hearing someone at his backdoor, the report said. He armed himself with a .45 automatic and fired a single shot through the door, the report said. The suspected burglar was hit in the abdomen and likely died minutes later.

The suspect was described as a white male in a ski mask who was carrying a hammer and screwdriver at the time of the shooting. Police have tentatively identified the suspect as the man wanted for other burglaries in the neighborhood, the report said.

“The 82-year-old resident did something that the criminal justice system couldn’t do,” said Mike Chitwood, the chief of Daytona Beach police. “And that’s put this burglar out of business this morning.”

Finally, here’s a related item in the “You Can’t Cure Stupid”, courtesy of Bill Meisen and the “Ho”-Me State:

Woman Seeking Crack Cocaine Calls Police After Drug Dealer Sells Her Sugar Instead

Really, how many times do we have to say this? If your drug dealer shorts you, steals your money, or provides a substance other than the illegal one sought, do not call 911. Suzanne Basham, 47, (pictured above in a mug shot snapped in October 2010 following a collar for drug possession) made that mistake yesterday morning when she dialed police in Springfield, Missouri to report that she had paid $40 for crack cocaine that turned out to be sugar, according to an incident report.

Basham, who was not seeking a sugar high, asked cops to arrest her dealer for theft (and, of course, secure a refund for her). While patrolmen went to the address where Basham said she purchased the crack, residents there denied selling dope and declined to let investigators into the home. Since cops discovered that Basham was in possession of a crack pipe, she was cited for possession of drug paraphernalia.

Enjoy the weekend!

Magoo