Larry Elder on Hebdo Massacre: French Govt Takes 65%, Kills Economic Opportunties
After splitting with KABC last December, Larry Elder—the "Sage of South Central"— is streaming his radio show live every Monday through Friday from 3 P.M. to 6 P.M. Pacific Time.
A lawyer by training, Elder is also an outspoken libertarian.
Go here for more details and go here to listen live at the appointed hour.
He's also got a lively Twitter feed and a column archive here. From his latest piece, about "France's Other Problem":
[If] "lack of opportunity" is a cause for the attraction to violent jihad, why does the French economy offer so few options? The answer is simple: job-killing economics.
At all levels of government, France takes over 44 percent of the earnings of its citizens. And this is before one assigns a cost to the numerous regulations placed on the shoulders of French entrepreneurs. In America, at all three levels—federal, state and local—government takes 33 percent of GDP, including mandates like Social Security. Add a cost to regulations mandated by state and local government, and UCLA economist Lee Ohanian says that government takes over 50 percent. Assume the same "cost percentage" that Americans pay for regulations to the French and you have a French economy where government takes about 65 percent of the earnings its people.
Reason interviewed back in 1996. A snippet:
A lot of…anger coming from inner-city blacks stems from a prevailing theory that the greater society not only doesn't even care about blacks, but actively seeks to hurt them. When Maxine Waters calls the L.A. riots an uprising; when she says, "no justice, no peace"; when Jesse Jackson suggests that the difference between crack and powder is evidence of a racist criminal justice system; when Al Sharpton stands up before the Million Man March and says that O.J. is "home" now and that there are hundreds and thousands of black people behind bars and we can't rest until they are home, too; when people like Maya Angelou make the remarks she made about Jeopardy!; when people like Bill Cosby suggests that he "has a feeling" that AIDS is part of the plot to exterminate the black race–my point is that nothing's going to change much until black leaders stop such reckless, careless, conspiratorial nonsense. Say you're a 9- or 10-year-old kid who wants to study and you just now hear Bill Cosby say that AIDS is a government plot against blacks, or Al Sharpton say that black people are thrown in prison for no apparent reason, or you hear that Alex Trebek discriminates against qualified applicants for Jeopardy!, you're going to figure, what's the point?
