National Rottenness
No single area of public life threatens what previously was known as the American Dream more than the apathy of our public officials regarding their fiduciary responsibilities towards their citizens.
They are mismanaging our money and, worse yet, letting others mismanage it, with a wink and a nod that is, for all practical purposes, destroying the concept of personal property.
Recent scandals involving Congressional inside trading, federal investments in bankrupt green companies, inside banking deals that benefited millionaires and billionaires, along with the collapse of investment manager MF Global have contributed to public skepticism, amounting to cynicism, that those we have entrusted to leadership positions have done what British kings, Nazis and Communists have failed to do: namely, kill free and open markets in the US.
Free markets and free governments require public confidence in order to operate successfully. Confidence comes from the public’s perception that the markets and governments are fair- or at least neutral- arbiters for investment and public policy.
Over the last several years, however, there has been mounting evidence that the game of life has been rigged against the general public, not just a little bit, but a lot.
With that realization, our confidence, thus our freedom, has been eroded.
And if either political party is serious about gaining the trust of the electorate again, they had better address some of these scandals before the torches and pitchforks end up on their steps.
Gone are the days when a change of party in Congress or the White House was enough to placate an electorate spoon feed morsels from a media elite of a few dozen national editors. Free and open markets in news and media have replaced a half century old oligarchy. The result has been the slow realization that we have tolerated being wedded to the political equivalent of a bunch of spousal abusers.
For example, the Department of Energy has spent $36 billion on clean energy technology in the form of loan guarantees. And all you need to know about those gauarntees which were originally intended to create jobs, is that the Obama administration has stopped talking about how many jobs they have created, but instead, in a reprise of their bogus stimulus claims, now brag about the jobs they have saved through the program.
Count the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal as a one time charge and be thankful it wasn’t worse. Worse is coming. Instead, look at NRG Energy with a loan guarantee of $1.3 billion creating a whopping 15 permanent jobs. The explanation? According to an analysis of loans made through the D.O.E. program by Peter Schweizer, 80 percent of the loans went to political donors of Obama.
We’ve gotten so used to government graft that plain-old government incompetence would be a welcome relief. But no, we just have to accept the fact that all of our politicians are venial, making legal for themselves what they throw others in jail for.
“Not only can members of Congress legally trade [stocks] on confidential information; they do, despite the potential cost to their reputations,” writes CNN. “The U.S. television program 60 Minutes recently reported that several current members of Congress allegedly used confidential information that they acquired on the job for personal gain.”
At least now they have to report that they are trading strocks, like other insiders.
In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dumped his holdings in energy companies in 2008, right before the energy market crashed and bought healthcare stocks with the proceeds. Within 6 months Reid was heavily involved in re-writing healthcare laws.
The corruption goes way beyond Congress too.
Former US Senator, New Jersey Governor and Obama pal, Jon Corzine- according to Veep Joe Biden, Corzine was the first person Obama called for economic advice after the election and a key architect of the stimulus law passed by Obama- ran futures firm MF Global so solidly into the ground in a little over a year after being bounced from office that the firm dipped into customer accounts to pay their bills. Not only is that an ethical problem, it’s also illegal.
No arrests have yet been made, as of December 1st. Charlie Gasparino at Fox News says that as much as $1.2 billion dollars in customer money may be missing. Oops.
MF Global is one of the ten largest US bankruptcies of all time, according to the UK’s Independent.
Government insiders have also discovered ways of channeling profits toward their friends when government sponsored enterprises go belly-up for public investors.
In 2008, then-Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson dropped by the offices of Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. There he shared with a gathering of hedge fund managers how the government would seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, essentially wiping out private shareholders. But publicly, at the same time, he was telling the press that the government intended that Fannie and Freddie remain in the hands of investors.
The discrepancy could have allowed the hedge fund managers present at the meeting to benefit from non-public information. “There's no evidence that they did so after the meeting,” reports BusinessWeek, “[and] tracking firm-specific short stock sales isn't possible using public documents.”
But BusinessWeek says that at least one participant was so shaken by the disclosures that he immediately called his attorney to make sure that he wasn’t breaking any laws. The lawyer’s advice was to immediately stop trading in any securities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because trading those securities while possessing inside information is against the law for mere mortals who don’t work for the federal government.
How did the hedge fund manager know he risked breaking the law, when Secretary Paulson had no clue? What was legal for Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury is illegal for the rest of us.
Living under different laws than the rest of us is so ingrained in our national leadership, that it seems they hardly give it a second thought. “The present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic,” wrote Mark Twain, “it is not Republican, it is national.”
And that’s the paradox that all of us must grapple with seriously if we wish to preserve both our free markets and our free people.
SOURCE
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The benefits of victimhood
(Don't forget that Hitler thought Germany was a victim of the Jews)
Imagine this: A future Republican president invites Tea Party leaders to the White House. Some of them have themselves photographed standing in front of a portrait of President Barack Obama with their middle fingers extended. They then posted these photos on Facebook with the caption "F--k Obama." (Needless to say, the F-word was spelled out.)
Some questions:
1. How much coverage do you think the national press would give to this?
2. How would Democratic -- and Republican -- leaders react?
3. How would Tea Party activists react?
The answers:
1. The mainstream media across America would widely report what had happened and repeatedly show these photos. "The New York Times" would editorialize about the racism of the Tea Party. Liberal columnists would be relentless in their condemnations of the Tea Party as a low life movement of yahoos.
2. Democrats and Republicans alike would condemn these leaders and demand their resignation.
3. Tea Party activists would feel embarrassed by these people who represented them, and they would be deeply concerned that their movement's good name had been permanently tarnished.
Now let's explore a real-life situation from this past week.
President Barack Obama invited activists to the White House's 2012 LGBT pride reception. Two of them, Matthew "Marty" Hart, a director of the leftist organization, Solutions for Progress, and an activist photographer, Zoe Strauss, posed for a photo in front of a portrait of President Ronald Reagan with both their middle fingers extended. They then posted the photo on Facebook with the caption "F--k Reagan" (the F-word is spelled out).
Now let's answer our questions:
First, the liberal, or "mainstream," media never mentioned the incident. Not a word about it appeared in "The New York Times," "The Washington Post," the "Los Angeles Times" or on NPR (which had given Zoe Strauss extensive and laudatory attention just a few weeks earlier). There was no coverage on ABC News, NBC News, or CBS News. "The Huffington Post" reported the incident in this way: "If several raised fingers are any indication, some LGBT activists who visited the White House last week are fully evolved on what they think of President Ronald Reagan."
It was reported by Fox News, on conservative talk radio shows, by the "The Weekly Standard," "National Review" and other conservative journals and websites.
Second, aside from one tepid rebuke from a man named Shin Inouye, the "Director of Specialty Media in the White House Office of Communications," the Democratic Party and other left-wing organizations said nothing.
And, of course, not a word of condemnation from the world of gay activism, other than the conservative gay organization, Log Cabin Republicans.
What are the lessons?
One is that without Fox News, talk radio and conservative journals and websites, one gets an utterly skewed view of the world. If you want to know how the left wins so many elections despite the fact that many more Americans consider themselves conservative rather than liberal, the filtered news they receive is a major reason -- in America and even more so around the world. (I cover this is in detail in my just-published book " Still the Best Hope.")
The other lesson may be even more important: Contempt for norms of decency -- a form of nihilism -- permeates the left generally and leftist activism (among gays and straights) on behalf of gays specifically. Compare, for example, the behavior of the Occupy movement with that of the Tea Party. Both are equally angry at what they deem injurious to society -- economic inequality for the Occupy movement, ever-expanding government and debt for the Tea Party -- but the latter acts so much more civilly and maturely than the former.
Whether it is the notorious art work "Piss Christ" (a crucifix submerged in "artist" Andres Serrano's urine), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's recent "graffiti art" exhibition, the ubiquitous public use of expletives, the defense of public nudity (the highest court in New York State ruled that there is no difference between women's and men's breasts, therefore women, like men, can go topless in public), the abolition of dress codes in schools, the left revels in giving the finger to religious and civil norms.
Why did these activists for gay causes feel they could act this way in the White House, the most prestigious and revered building in America? Aside from contempt for social norms, the reason is that those who see themselves as victims have impaired consciences. Nothing dulls the conscience quite like regarding oneself and/or one's group as victims. The vast majority of violent criminals believe they are victims of society, poverty, racism, etc.; Islamic terrorists see themselves as victims of the West's alleged "war on Islam;" Germans in the 1930s saw themselves as victims of the Versailles Treaty; and in America today, no one sees themselves as victims as much as gay rights activists do.
What are they victims of? Society's desire to maintain the man-woman definition of marriage, and in Ronald Reagan's case, his alleged ignoring of the AIDS crisis. That explains why gay groups label everyone who supports retaining the man-woman definition of marriage as people filled with hate, and why these activist groups try to destroy the reputations and, where applicable, the businesses of such people. Along with the nihilism -- and immaturity -- that characterizes the activist left, a sense of victimization also explains this defamation of the White House. And it doesn't hurt to know that America's news media will not call you on it.
SOURCE
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Trickle Up Economics
The political left wing has long tried to cast doubt on the fairness, and even the efficacy, of free market capitalism by branding it as a "trickle down" system. This epithet is meant to show how the middle and lower classes are dependent on scraps of wealth that happen to fall from the buffet table of the rich. This characterization of an unfair and inefficient system has helped them demonize policies that lower taxes (if they also extend to the wealthy) and reduce regulation on business.
To correct these supposed problems, they have long called for policies to redistribute wealth or for government to inject funds directly into the economy. Either mechanism puts money into the hands of everyday consumers who they claim to be the true engines of economic growth. They believe that consumer spending lies at the root of the economic pyramid. When people spend, business owners are able to sell more products, hire more workers, and reap more profits. In essence, they believe in a system of "trickle up" economics, whereby prosperity flows upward from government into the lower and middle classes and ultimately to the upper class.
But as usual, they have it exactly backwards. The savings that they find so unproductive is actually the foundation upon which the economy rests. Nothing can be consumed until it is produced. The act of spending is meaningless without something to buy. The savings of the rich forms the capital that funds business investment which increases productivity. The more that society produces, the more that can be consumed. The key here is the supply, not the demand. The grass that feeds the zebras comes from seeds, not rain. Capitalists provide the surplus seeds that are planted.
Demand always exists and does not need to be stimulated by cash redistribution. 21st century Americans are no more desirous of cell phones than their parents were. But in 1980 cell phones were in very limited supply and were therefore very expensive. They were the trophy possessions of the super-rich. The reason why they are now as ubiquitous as key chains is not that government stimulated demand, but that industry figured out how to supply them far more efficiently. The supply satisfied the demand. Investment in the telecom sector, which came from real savings of Americans, allowed for that increased productivity.
In this example, the savings of the wealthy and the innovation of entrepreneurs combined to create a huge benefit for society. Call it trickle down if you want, but it would be more honest to simply call it effective. This is the system that built this country. Relying on trickle up will surely destroy it.
SOURCE
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Monday, July 02, 2012
Why Don't People Get It?
Even now, people think nothing of professing their attachment to socialist ideology at cocktail parties, at restaurants serving abundant foods, and lounging in the fanciest apartments and homes that mankind has ever enjoyed. Yes, it is still fashionable to be a socialist, and — in some circles within the arts and academia — socially required. No one will recoil. Someone will openly congratulate you for your idealism. In the same way, you can always count on eliciting agreement by decrying the evils of Walmart and Microsoft.
Isn't it remarkable? Socialism (the real-life version) collapsed nearly 20 years ago — vicious regimes founded on the principles of Marxism, overthrown by the will of the people. Following that event we've seen these once-decrepit societies come back to life and become a major source for the world's prosperity. Trade has expanded. The technological revolution is achieving miracles by the day right under our noses. Millions have been made far better off, in ever-widening circles. The credit is wholly due to the free market, which possesses a creative power that has been underestimated by even its most passionate proponents.
What's more, it should not have required the collapse of socialism to demonstrate this. Socialism has been failing since the ancient world. And since Mises's book Socialism (1922) we have understood that the precise reason is due to the economic impossibility of the emergence of social order in the absence of private property in the means of production. No one has ever refuted him.
And yet, even now, after all this, professors stand in front of their students and decry the evil of capitalism. Bestselling books make anticapitalism the theme. Politicians parade around telling us about the glorious things that the government will accomplish when they are in charge. And every evil of the day, even those directly caused by the government (airline delays, the housing crisis, the never-ending crisis in public schooling, the lack of healthcare for everyone) are blamed on the market economy.
As an example, the Bush administration nationalized airline security after 9/11, and hardly anyone even questioned that this was necessary. The result was an amazing mess that is visible to every traveler, as delays pile on delays and humiliation became part of the rubric of travel by flight. And yet who gets the blame? Read the letters to the editor. Read the mountains of copy written by journalists covering this issue. The blame is heaped on the private airlines. The solution follows: more regulation, more nationalization.
How can we account for this appalling display? There are two primary factors. The first is the failure of people to understand economics and its elucidation of cause and effect in society. The second is the absence of imagination that such ignorance reinforces. If you don't know what causes what in society, it is impossible to intellectually grasp the proper solutions or imagine how the world would work in the absence of the state.
The educational gap can be overcome. To think in economic terms is to realize that wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.
Without them, where would we be? In a state of nature, which means a dramatically shrunken population hiding in caves and living off what we can hunt and gather. This is the world in which human beings found themselves until we made something of it, and it is the world we can slip back into should any government ever manage to take away freedom and private property rights completely.
This seems like a simple point but it is one that evades vast swaths of even the educated public. The problem comes down to a failure to understand that scarcity is a pervasive feature of the world and the need for a system that rationally allocates scarce resources to socially optimal ends. There is only one system for doing so, and it is not central planning but the free-market price system.
Government distorts the price system in myriad ways. Subsidies short-circuit market judgments. Product bans cause the ascendance of less desirable goods and services over more desirable ones. Other regulations slow down the wheels of commerce, thwart the dreams of entrepreneurs, and foil the plans of consumers and investors. Then there is the most deceptive form of price manipulation: monetary management from the Federal Reserve.
The larger the government, the more our living standards are reduced. We are fortunate as a civilization that the progress of free enterprise generally outpaces the regress of government growth, for if that were not the case, we would be poorer each year — not just in relative terms, but absolutely poorer too. The market is smart and the government is dumb, and to these attributes do we owe the whole of our economic well-being.
The second part of our educational task — imaging how a market-run world would function — is much more difficult. Murray Rothbard once remarked that if the government were the only producer of shoes, most people would be unable to imagine how the market could possibly produce them. How could the market accommodate all sizes? Wouldn't it be wasteful to produce styles for every taste? What about fraudulent shoes and poor quality producers? And shoes are arguably too important a good to turn over to the vicissitudes of market anarchy.
Well, so it is with many issues today, such as welfare. Among the first objections to the idea of a market society is that the poor will suffer and have no one to care for them. One response is that private charity can handle it, and yet we look around and see private charities handling only comparatively small tasks. The sector just isn't big enough to pick up where government leaves off.
This is where imagination is required. The problem is that government services have crowded out private ones and reduced private-sector services beyond what they would be in a free market. Before the age of the welfare state, charities in the 19th century were a vast operation comparable in size to the largest industries. They expanded according to need. They were mostly provided by the churches through donations, and the ethic was there: everyone gave a portion of the family budget to the charitable sector. A nun like Mother Cabrini ran a charitable empire.
But then in the progressive era, ideology changed. Charity came to be considered a public good, something to be professionalized. The state began to encroach on territory once reserved to the private sector. And as the welfare state grew throughout the 20th century, the comparative size of the private sector shrank. As bad off as we are in the United States, it is nothing compared with Europe, the continent that gave birth to charitable services. Today, few Europeans donate a dime to charity, because everyone is of the belief that this is a government service. Moreover, after high taxes and high prices, there isn't much left over to donate.
It is the same in every area the government has monopolized. Until FedEx and UPS came along to exploit a loophole in the letter of the law, people couldn't imagine how the private sector could deliver mail. There are many similar blind spots today in the area of justice provision, security, schooling, medical care, monetary policy, and coinage services. People are aghast at the suggestion that the market should provide all these, but only because it requires mental experiments and a bit of imagination to see how it is possible.
Once you understand economics, the reality that everyone sees takes on a new significance. Walmart is not a pariah but a glorious achievement of civilization, an institution that has finally put to rest that great fear that has pervaded all of human history: the fear that the food will run out. In fact, even the smallest products dazzle the mind once you understand the incredible complexity of the production process and how the market manages to coordinate it all toward the end of human betterment. The achievements of the market suddenly appear in sharp relief all around you.
And then you begin to see the unseen: how much more secure we would be with private security, how much more just society would be if justice were privatized, how much more compassionate we would be if the human heart were trained by private experience rather than government bureaucracies.
And what makes the difference? The socialist and the advocate of free markets observe the same facts. But the person with economic knowledge understands their significance and implications. It is that bit of education that makes the difference. This is why we must never underestimate the central role of teaching about economics. Facts will always be with us. Wisdom, however, must be taught. Achieving a culture-wide understanding of liberty and its implications has never been more important.
SOURCE
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Another Great Society Joins the Trash Heap of History
While the exact date of the fall of the Roman Empire is disputed — there are even some of us, myself included, who say Rome never fell — many, if not most, historians accept English historian Edward Gibbons’ date of Sept. 4, A.D. 476.
He chose that date in his seminal work, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which, ironically, was published in six volumes, the first at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and the last just before ratification of the current U.S. Constitution. The date was the day when Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by the German Odoacer, leader of the Foederati, or foreign mercenaries.
Odoacer, for his part, refused to take the title “emperor” though he essentially ruled as one. A few years later, the Roman Senate officially dissolved the Western Empire, though the Eastern Empire would exist for another millennium.
Choosing the date of the fall of the Roman Empire is really an academic exercise. If you were to borrow my time machine and go back to that fateful Sept. 4 day and talk to average Romans in the streets, they would tell you the empire had not fallen. Indeed, Odoacer and his successors maintained most of the Roman administrative state and all its trappings.
Sometimes it seems as though people believe that one day the Roman Empire was there and the next day, everything was gone.
In reality, what had fallen on that date was the “essence” of what made the Roman Empire the Roman Empire.
If you once again borrow my time machine and travel two millennia into the future and ask historians when the American empire fell, most will probably say it occurred on June 28, A.D. 2012, or the equivalent in whatever dating system is in place in 2,000 years.
That is the date that U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and four of his colleagues declared the federal government no longer has any limitations to its power over our daily lives. That is not hyperbole. NFIB v. Sebelius will go down in legal history as the worst Supreme Court decision since 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford.
However, and for this you need no time machine, very few Americans today will agree that the American empire has fallen. Similar to their Roman counterpart of the fifth century, the average American will fail to recognize the significant change that occurred.
That is the typical way empires fall. There is no huge crash. They just gradually die from within until historians begin debating when the collapse took place. Just as in the Sept. 4, 476, date for the fall of Rome, June 28, 2012, is when the essence of America ended.
The American experiment was one that entailed limited and specifically enumerated powers for its central government. Now, with Roberts’ linguistic gymnastics and sophomoric logic turning a penalty into a tax, there are no limits to what the federal government can do.
If, for example, the U.S. Congress wished to mandate that everyone buy anything from electric cars to broccoli, or zoot suits to jelly beans, it can now do so. The only limitation, really, is that Congress can’t use the Commerce Clause to do so but, instead, will have to rely on its taxing authority. That, of course, has no significance to anyone outside the legal profession. The result is the same: A federal government with unlimited power to control our daily lives.
That, my friends, is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the American experiment. The Constitution is now meaningless because the idea of the Enumerated Powers Doctrine, already weakened by 80 years of Commerce Clause abuse, is now dead. Congress can do what it wants, when it wants. Only politics stands in the way. And politics is no protector of liberty.
To be sure, the decision, in the end, will be a victory for Republicans. I have no doubt that it will result in a huge GOP win in November. And the GOP might even actually repeal Obamacare because, despite its unconstitutionality, it is simply bad law. It is unaffordable, irresponsible and unaccountable. It is overly expensive at $1.76 trillion and will increase taxes by $500 billion in the next 10 years. It puts bureaucrats between doctors and patients and ultimately will decrease the quality of care in the United States, just as similar measures in other countries have done.
It is also simply wrong in a free country.
The idea that the central government (I doubt we can even call it a “federal government” anymore) can force Americans to purchase a product is repugnant to those who value living in a free country, or at least what used to be a free country.
Even so, the long-term damage is done. Recall, Dred Scott led to a war and took a constitutional amendment to cleanse. I doubt even that can salvage the former American empire.
SOURCE
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The Obamacare decision also imposed some limits on the Feds
Some concerns from the Left below
The Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius—the healthcare cases—was a tremendous political victory for the Obama administration and, more importantly, the tens of thousands of Americans who will be saved from illness and death by the law. But make no mistake: the decision could also be a significant legal victory for the political forces committed to limiting the state’s ability to care for the weak and fragile among us.
In the hours after the health care decision was handed down, many commentators crowed over Chief Justice John Roberts’s statesman-like craft in putting together a moderate opinion that, in different parts, managed to unite the left and the right of the Court. They are half right. The opinion may be statesman-like, but it’s ultimately radical, endorsing a view of Congress’s power that had few, if any, takers until it was embraced by the Republican Party and its Tea Party flag-bearers. Indeed, it may even contain a seed that could unravel important benefits of the Affordable Care Act.
The immediate effect of the decision, of course, is that the law’s implementation can proceed. But on the one hand, Roberts, with four liberal justices, held that the individual mandate was constitutional as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power. On the other hand, Roberts joined the four conservative justices in stating that he believed that the same mandate could not be upheld under Congress’s Commerce Clause power. This should not to be overlooked. The Commerce Clause is the central plank of Congressional authority, employed to support everything from the Environmental Protection Agency to the civil rights laws. Flouting the usual rule that judges must avoid addressing unnecessary constitutional questions, Roberts made it clear that his new limitation on the Commerce Clause power was necessary to his opinion, and hence arguably binding on future courts.
In the second part of his opinion, Roberts and a coalition of six justices invalidated one aspect of the Medicaid expansion. Medicaid is one of many important “conditional spending” programs, in which Congress uses its spending power to give money to the states, but attaches conditions to the grant. The Court had never invalidated such a program on constitutional grounds. Yesterday, though, the Court held that although the federal government could condition the Medicaid expansion on the specific funding assigned to that expansion, it could not defund a state’s Medicaid program entirely if the state refused to expand the program. In effect, the Court viewed the states as akin to Methadone addicts, so dependent on their ongoing fiscal fix that the federal government had a constitutional obligation to hook them up.
Remember, there were two key points of constitutional controversy before the Court in the health care cases: first, whether the mandate is valid under the Commerce Clause, and second, whether the Medicaid expansion is a use of federal spending that improperly coerces the states.
But it is the spending clause part of the opinion that may have the more significant ramifications. While the Court has previously invalidated rules related to federal grants to states with strings attached on the ground that those strings were not articulated clearly enough, it has never before struck down a conditional spending effort as coercive—until yesterday. Apart from the puzzling question of how a non-natural entity such as a state can be “coerced,” Roberts’s explanation of this holding is unclear. Provided a federal grant is large enough and has continued for long enough, he might be read to say, the states acquire a right to it in perpetuity.
The reason this portion of the opinion is ground for concern is that it opens the door to extensive new litigation by the states to fight off regulatory mandates in other policy areas, from education to highway maintenance. The federal government often uses conditions on federal grants to pressure states into complying with important legal and policy mandates. Now it’s unclear how many of those conditions are good law. Precisely because it cannot be clearly understood, Roberts’s opinion invited new challenges by the states and new judicial decisions unraveling the regulatory net that keeps states in compliance with many important mandates on everything from civil rights to the environment.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Even now, people think nothing of professing their attachment to socialist ideology at cocktail parties, at restaurants serving abundant foods, and lounging in the fanciest apartments and homes that mankind has ever enjoyed. Yes, it is still fashionable to be a socialist, and — in some circles within the arts and academia — socially required. No one will recoil. Someone will openly congratulate you for your idealism. In the same way, you can always count on eliciting agreement by decrying the evils of Walmart and Microsoft.
Isn't it remarkable? Socialism (the real-life version) collapsed nearly 20 years ago — vicious regimes founded on the principles of Marxism, overthrown by the will of the people. Following that event we've seen these once-decrepit societies come back to life and become a major source for the world's prosperity. Trade has expanded. The technological revolution is achieving miracles by the day right under our noses. Millions have been made far better off, in ever-widening circles. The credit is wholly due to the free market, which possesses a creative power that has been underestimated by even its most passionate proponents.
What's more, it should not have required the collapse of socialism to demonstrate this. Socialism has been failing since the ancient world. And since Mises's book Socialism (1922) we have understood that the precise reason is due to the economic impossibility of the emergence of social order in the absence of private property in the means of production. No one has ever refuted him.
And yet, even now, after all this, professors stand in front of their students and decry the evil of capitalism. Bestselling books make anticapitalism the theme. Politicians parade around telling us about the glorious things that the government will accomplish when they are in charge. And every evil of the day, even those directly caused by the government (airline delays, the housing crisis, the never-ending crisis in public schooling, the lack of healthcare for everyone) are blamed on the market economy.
As an example, the Bush administration nationalized airline security after 9/11, and hardly anyone even questioned that this was necessary. The result was an amazing mess that is visible to every traveler, as delays pile on delays and humiliation became part of the rubric of travel by flight. And yet who gets the blame? Read the letters to the editor. Read the mountains of copy written by journalists covering this issue. The blame is heaped on the private airlines. The solution follows: more regulation, more nationalization.
How can we account for this appalling display? There are two primary factors. The first is the failure of people to understand economics and its elucidation of cause and effect in society. The second is the absence of imagination that such ignorance reinforces. If you don't know what causes what in society, it is impossible to intellectually grasp the proper solutions or imagine how the world would work in the absence of the state.
The educational gap can be overcome. To think in economic terms is to realize that wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.
Without them, where would we be? In a state of nature, which means a dramatically shrunken population hiding in caves and living off what we can hunt and gather. This is the world in which human beings found themselves until we made something of it, and it is the world we can slip back into should any government ever manage to take away freedom and private property rights completely.
This seems like a simple point but it is one that evades vast swaths of even the educated public. The problem comes down to a failure to understand that scarcity is a pervasive feature of the world and the need for a system that rationally allocates scarce resources to socially optimal ends. There is only one system for doing so, and it is not central planning but the free-market price system.
Government distorts the price system in myriad ways. Subsidies short-circuit market judgments. Product bans cause the ascendance of less desirable goods and services over more desirable ones. Other regulations slow down the wheels of commerce, thwart the dreams of entrepreneurs, and foil the plans of consumers and investors. Then there is the most deceptive form of price manipulation: monetary management from the Federal Reserve.
The larger the government, the more our living standards are reduced. We are fortunate as a civilization that the progress of free enterprise generally outpaces the regress of government growth, for if that were not the case, we would be poorer each year — not just in relative terms, but absolutely poorer too. The market is smart and the government is dumb, and to these attributes do we owe the whole of our economic well-being.
The second part of our educational task — imaging how a market-run world would function — is much more difficult. Murray Rothbard once remarked that if the government were the only producer of shoes, most people would be unable to imagine how the market could possibly produce them. How could the market accommodate all sizes? Wouldn't it be wasteful to produce styles for every taste? What about fraudulent shoes and poor quality producers? And shoes are arguably too important a good to turn over to the vicissitudes of market anarchy.
Well, so it is with many issues today, such as welfare. Among the first objections to the idea of a market society is that the poor will suffer and have no one to care for them. One response is that private charity can handle it, and yet we look around and see private charities handling only comparatively small tasks. The sector just isn't big enough to pick up where government leaves off.
This is where imagination is required. The problem is that government services have crowded out private ones and reduced private-sector services beyond what they would be in a free market. Before the age of the welfare state, charities in the 19th century were a vast operation comparable in size to the largest industries. They expanded according to need. They were mostly provided by the churches through donations, and the ethic was there: everyone gave a portion of the family budget to the charitable sector. A nun like Mother Cabrini ran a charitable empire.
But then in the progressive era, ideology changed. Charity came to be considered a public good, something to be professionalized. The state began to encroach on territory once reserved to the private sector. And as the welfare state grew throughout the 20th century, the comparative size of the private sector shrank. As bad off as we are in the United States, it is nothing compared with Europe, the continent that gave birth to charitable services. Today, few Europeans donate a dime to charity, because everyone is of the belief that this is a government service. Moreover, after high taxes and high prices, there isn't much left over to donate.
It is the same in every area the government has monopolized. Until FedEx and UPS came along to exploit a loophole in the letter of the law, people couldn't imagine how the private sector could deliver mail. There are many similar blind spots today in the area of justice provision, security, schooling, medical care, monetary policy, and coinage services. People are aghast at the suggestion that the market should provide all these, but only because it requires mental experiments and a bit of imagination to see how it is possible.
Once you understand economics, the reality that everyone sees takes on a new significance. Walmart is not a pariah but a glorious achievement of civilization, an institution that has finally put to rest that great fear that has pervaded all of human history: the fear that the food will run out. In fact, even the smallest products dazzle the mind once you understand the incredible complexity of the production process and how the market manages to coordinate it all toward the end of human betterment. The achievements of the market suddenly appear in sharp relief all around you.
And then you begin to see the unseen: how much more secure we would be with private security, how much more just society would be if justice were privatized, how much more compassionate we would be if the human heart were trained by private experience rather than government bureaucracies.
And what makes the difference? The socialist and the advocate of free markets observe the same facts. But the person with economic knowledge understands their significance and implications. It is that bit of education that makes the difference. This is why we must never underestimate the central role of teaching about economics. Facts will always be with us. Wisdom, however, must be taught. Achieving a culture-wide understanding of liberty and its implications has never been more important.
SOURCE
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Another Great Society Joins the Trash Heap of History
While the exact date of the fall of the Roman Empire is disputed — there are even some of us, myself included, who say Rome never fell — many, if not most, historians accept English historian Edward Gibbons’ date of Sept. 4, A.D. 476.
He chose that date in his seminal work, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which, ironically, was published in six volumes, the first at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and the last just before ratification of the current U.S. Constitution. The date was the day when Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by the German Odoacer, leader of the Foederati, or foreign mercenaries.
Odoacer, for his part, refused to take the title “emperor” though he essentially ruled as one. A few years later, the Roman Senate officially dissolved the Western Empire, though the Eastern Empire would exist for another millennium.
Choosing the date of the fall of the Roman Empire is really an academic exercise. If you were to borrow my time machine and go back to that fateful Sept. 4 day and talk to average Romans in the streets, they would tell you the empire had not fallen. Indeed, Odoacer and his successors maintained most of the Roman administrative state and all its trappings.
Sometimes it seems as though people believe that one day the Roman Empire was there and the next day, everything was gone.
In reality, what had fallen on that date was the “essence” of what made the Roman Empire the Roman Empire.
If you once again borrow my time machine and travel two millennia into the future and ask historians when the American empire fell, most will probably say it occurred on June 28, A.D. 2012, or the equivalent in whatever dating system is in place in 2,000 years.
That is the date that U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and four of his colleagues declared the federal government no longer has any limitations to its power over our daily lives. That is not hyperbole. NFIB v. Sebelius will go down in legal history as the worst Supreme Court decision since 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford.
However, and for this you need no time machine, very few Americans today will agree that the American empire has fallen. Similar to their Roman counterpart of the fifth century, the average American will fail to recognize the significant change that occurred.
That is the typical way empires fall. There is no huge crash. They just gradually die from within until historians begin debating when the collapse took place. Just as in the Sept. 4, 476, date for the fall of Rome, June 28, 2012, is when the essence of America ended.
The American experiment was one that entailed limited and specifically enumerated powers for its central government. Now, with Roberts’ linguistic gymnastics and sophomoric logic turning a penalty into a tax, there are no limits to what the federal government can do.
If, for example, the U.S. Congress wished to mandate that everyone buy anything from electric cars to broccoli, or zoot suits to jelly beans, it can now do so. The only limitation, really, is that Congress can’t use the Commerce Clause to do so but, instead, will have to rely on its taxing authority. That, of course, has no significance to anyone outside the legal profession. The result is the same: A federal government with unlimited power to control our daily lives.
That, my friends, is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the American experiment. The Constitution is now meaningless because the idea of the Enumerated Powers Doctrine, already weakened by 80 years of Commerce Clause abuse, is now dead. Congress can do what it wants, when it wants. Only politics stands in the way. And politics is no protector of liberty.
To be sure, the decision, in the end, will be a victory for Republicans. I have no doubt that it will result in a huge GOP win in November. And the GOP might even actually repeal Obamacare because, despite its unconstitutionality, it is simply bad law. It is unaffordable, irresponsible and unaccountable. It is overly expensive at $1.76 trillion and will increase taxes by $500 billion in the next 10 years. It puts bureaucrats between doctors and patients and ultimately will decrease the quality of care in the United States, just as similar measures in other countries have done.
It is also simply wrong in a free country.
The idea that the central government (I doubt we can even call it a “federal government” anymore) can force Americans to purchase a product is repugnant to those who value living in a free country, or at least what used to be a free country.
Even so, the long-term damage is done. Recall, Dred Scott led to a war and took a constitutional amendment to cleanse. I doubt even that can salvage the former American empire.
SOURCE
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The Obamacare decision also imposed some limits on the Feds
Some concerns from the Left below
The Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius—the healthcare cases—was a tremendous political victory for the Obama administration and, more importantly, the tens of thousands of Americans who will be saved from illness and death by the law. But make no mistake: the decision could also be a significant legal victory for the political forces committed to limiting the state’s ability to care for the weak and fragile among us.
In the hours after the health care decision was handed down, many commentators crowed over Chief Justice John Roberts’s statesman-like craft in putting together a moderate opinion that, in different parts, managed to unite the left and the right of the Court. They are half right. The opinion may be statesman-like, but it’s ultimately radical, endorsing a view of Congress’s power that had few, if any, takers until it was embraced by the Republican Party and its Tea Party flag-bearers. Indeed, it may even contain a seed that could unravel important benefits of the Affordable Care Act.
The immediate effect of the decision, of course, is that the law’s implementation can proceed. But on the one hand, Roberts, with four liberal justices, held that the individual mandate was constitutional as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power. On the other hand, Roberts joined the four conservative justices in stating that he believed that the same mandate could not be upheld under Congress’s Commerce Clause power. This should not to be overlooked. The Commerce Clause is the central plank of Congressional authority, employed to support everything from the Environmental Protection Agency to the civil rights laws. Flouting the usual rule that judges must avoid addressing unnecessary constitutional questions, Roberts made it clear that his new limitation on the Commerce Clause power was necessary to his opinion, and hence arguably binding on future courts.
In the second part of his opinion, Roberts and a coalition of six justices invalidated one aspect of the Medicaid expansion. Medicaid is one of many important “conditional spending” programs, in which Congress uses its spending power to give money to the states, but attaches conditions to the grant. The Court had never invalidated such a program on constitutional grounds. Yesterday, though, the Court held that although the federal government could condition the Medicaid expansion on the specific funding assigned to that expansion, it could not defund a state’s Medicaid program entirely if the state refused to expand the program. In effect, the Court viewed the states as akin to Methadone addicts, so dependent on their ongoing fiscal fix that the federal government had a constitutional obligation to hook them up.
Remember, there were two key points of constitutional controversy before the Court in the health care cases: first, whether the mandate is valid under the Commerce Clause, and second, whether the Medicaid expansion is a use of federal spending that improperly coerces the states.
But it is the spending clause part of the opinion that may have the more significant ramifications. While the Court has previously invalidated rules related to federal grants to states with strings attached on the ground that those strings were not articulated clearly enough, it has never before struck down a conditional spending effort as coercive—until yesterday. Apart from the puzzling question of how a non-natural entity such as a state can be “coerced,” Roberts’s explanation of this holding is unclear. Provided a federal grant is large enough and has continued for long enough, he might be read to say, the states acquire a right to it in perpetuity.
The reason this portion of the opinion is ground for concern is that it opens the door to extensive new litigation by the states to fight off regulatory mandates in other policy areas, from education to highway maintenance. The federal government often uses conditions on federal grants to pressure states into complying with important legal and policy mandates. Now it’s unclear how many of those conditions are good law. Precisely because it cannot be clearly understood, Roberts’s opinion invited new challenges by the states and new judicial decisions unraveling the regulatory net that keeps states in compliance with many important mandates on everything from civil rights to the environment.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Sunday, July 01, 2012
Did CJ Roberts exercise the Judicial Restraint conservatives have been asking for?
Judicial restraint is the idea that judges should defer to the will of lawmakers whenever possible, turning to the U.S. Constitution on only the rarest of occasions in order to nullify a duly-enacted law. One of the earliest and most influential proponents of this idea was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), who routinely criticized his fellow justices for striking down legislation and preventing “the right of the majority to embody their opinions in law.” As Holmes once put it, “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.”
Holmes was a great hero to the left-leaning activists of the Progressive era, who enjoyed reading his sharply-worded dissents attacking the Court’s majority for striking down various economic regulations. But judicial restraint has also had its champions on the American right. Conservative legal icon Robert Bork, for example, famously argued that “in wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities,” and that judges should therefore act accordingly by deferring to lawmakers on most matters.
Chief Justice John Roberts also believes in judicial restraint, or judicial modesty, as he described it during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings, and that belief came shining through yesterday in his majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Although Roberts rejected the Obama administration’s novel claim that Congress may force Americans to buy health insurance as part of its power to regulate interstate commerce, he nonetheless found the health insurance mandate to be lawful under a different constitutional provision, Congress’ power to “lay and collect taxes.”
“The text of a statute can sometimes have more than one possible meaning,” Roberts wrote, before proceeding to embrace the only possible meaning that would allow the statute to survive. “The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution,” he continued. “Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can be so read.”
And so judicial restraint reared its head. In fact, as an authority for his deferential maneuvering, Roberts turned to none other than Justice Holmes, citing the famous jurist’s concurring opinion in the 1928 case of Blodgett v. Holden, which declared, “between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
In other words, the tie goes to the government.
Many of Roberts’ critics will no doubt be tempted to denounce this ruling as an example of judicial activism. But in fact the opposite is true. By employing a method of statutory interpretation designed to give Congress and the White House the benefit of the doubt, Roberts exhibited the hallmarks of judicial restraint. “It is not our job,” he declared, taking yet another page from Holmes’ playbook, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Today’s conservatives frequently complain about the dangers of judicial activism. Perhaps now they’ll be more alert to the dangers of judicial restraint.
SOURCE
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Legislative Dishonesty: The Indian Child Welfare Act doesn’t promote child welfare
By Thomas Sowell
Nowhere is political rhetoric more shameless — or more dangerous — than in the pious names that politicians give to the legislation they pass. Perhaps the most egregious example is the so-called Indian Child Welfare Act, which callously sacrifices the welfare of Indian children.
Time and again, children with some American Indian ancestry, who have been adopted by families that are not of that ancestry, have been suddenly taken by law from the only parents they have ever known and transferred to some distant Indian reservation, to live among strangers in a world they know nothing about.
You might think that the sight of bewildered, desperate, and weeping children in court, crying out for Mommy and Daddy as they are forcibly removed from people who have cared for them for years, might cause those who are seizing them to relent. But no! Such children are routinely sacrificed on the altar of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The child might be two years old or twelve. But the legal rights of a biological relative and tribal authorities trump the well-being of the child, even if that biological relative has been a complete stranger to the child.
Some years ago, the chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission visited a 14-year-old girl who had been removed from her adoptive parents and was living on an Indian reservation, where she was miserable. But when the story came out, outrage was directed not at those who had ruined this girl’s life, but at the member of the Civil Rights Commission who had dared to intrude on the sacred soil of the Indian reservation.
Similar things have happened to black children raised by white foster parents. There is no congressional legislation in these cases, but the dogmatism of social workers and so-called social-welfare departments can lead to the same results. However, the absence of federal legislation enables those judges who have common sense, and common decency, to prevent similar tragedies.
What is behind such perverse racial policies? Theories, ideologies, and presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue. It has been known for centuries that there are people, especially among the intelligentsia, who love humanity in the abstract but are not all that concerned about what happens to the actual flesh-and-blood human beings who are subjected to their grand visions and policies.
If the vogue is that children should be raised in their own racial culture, that overrules other considerations. As T. S. Eliot said, long ago: “Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
But the rest of us need to be on guard against their rhetoric. Nor is the Indian Child Welfare Act the only piece of legislation whose effects are the direct opposite of its title.
The Obama administration introduced legislation called the “Employee Free Choice Act.” What would it do? Destroy the free choice of workers as to whether or not they want to be represented by a labor union.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave workers the right to a federally conducted secret-ballot election, in which they could vote to have a union or not have a union. But, as more and more workers in recent years have voted not to have a union, union bosses have pushed for a law to allow this decision to be made without a secret ballot. This would allow union organizers to use pressure and coercion on those who don’t want to have a union.
Since union bosses contributed both money and manpower to the election of Barack Obama, it is hardly surprising that he was willing to reciprocate with the Employee Free Choice Act.
In this case, the act failed to pass in Congress. But President Obama accomplished some of its goals by appointing pro-union members to the National Labor Relations Board, whose regulations tilted elections in the unions’ favor.
If you can’t be bothered to look beyond rhetoric to realities, don’t complain about bad laws, or even about the degeneration of law itself into arbitrary rule over what was once a free people.
SOURCE
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The worldwide Leftist program: Creating dependency
It's already well underway in Britain, where ever larger numbers of young people choose a life on welfare rather than work
by RALPH PETERS
In an age of the globalization of everything from bird flu to bad debts, we still try to compartmentalize, pretending that what happens in Athens, stays in Athens. Thus, too many Americans fail to connect the massive attempt at wealth transfer (and wealth destruction) behind Obamacare to the wild irresponsibility of southern Europe's socialist government models that have led multiple states to practical, if not yet formal, bankruptcy.
But problems ranging from the Democratic Party's efforts to turn illegal immigrants into still more electoral slaves, to Greek or Spanish demands that hardworking Germans pick up their lifestyle tabs, all have the same roots: The Left's lust for power and its preferred means of seizing power today: Addicting the least-productive and utterly unproductive members of society to giveaway programs funded by the diminishing number of citizens willing to study, work and pay taxes.
Obamacare isn't about alleviating suffering. It's about keeping poor people poor by enmeshing them in a web of addictive hand-outs that keep them dependent on government. Every leftwing "social" program has the ultimate goal of destroying incentives for self-improvement, while piling on the incentives for parasitical behavior.
Whenever a leftist politician speaks of "social justice" or "justice" of any kind, get ready to write a check to the government, if you earn an honest living. To Leftists, social justice means only two things: First, empowering the Lumpenproletariat (society's bottom-feeders, against whom Karl Marx warned us, by the way) to create an electoral mob that will always vote to preserve and increase hand-outs; and, second, punishing responsible citizens who have done something constructive with their lives.
In Europe itself, we see a sharp north-south divide (with France, under its new idiot-left president, opting to align itself with the bankrupt south, the financial equivalent of Napoleon's invasion of Russia). In the north, most governments pursue sound fiscal policies and restrain their socialist impulses within the limits of affordability. In the German case, two traditions have resulted in one of the world's soundest economies, despite soft-core socialism: The old, unfashionable, academically derided "Protestant Work Ethic," and the worthy old Prussian admonition to live a life of Mehr sein als schein ("Live within your budget and don't flash bling"). [Literally: More being than appearing -- JR]
In Europe and here, the Left has proven that the old saying "There's no free lunch!" is a lie, at least for a while. There's a free lunch every day, as long as someone else can be conned or forced into picking up the tab. Eventually, though, the famine years arrive.
Here at home, it's often been observed that a fundamental problem is that "we've made poverty too comfortable," thus removing incentives for people to study, work and better their lives. That's absolutely true: When you willfully contribute nothing to society throughout your lifetime, while using food stamps to buy chips, candy, soda and frozen dinners, and then bill the government for your self-inflicted health problems while couch-surfing through a "life of poverty" that includes a cell phone and a flat-screen television, well, there are, unfortunately, plenty of human beings content to be narcotized into slavery on the left's vast, soul-destroying electoral plantations. The left uses government giveaways to bribe the poor to stay poor.
Why? The left craves power. Once upon a time, it craved power for imagined noble ends. Now it's just about the power itself. Leftists know full well how soul-crushing conditions are in the ghettos, barrios and poor-white communities in which they confine their supporters, keeping them on a life-support drip-feed of benefits (brilliantly constructed so that anyone who tries to fight their way out of the poverty trap immediately loses multiple advantages reserved for those content to remain willing slaves).
What has our Left done for the poor except to addict them to poverty? What has the European left done for the poor except to promise a fairy-tale ending, only to leave the "workers and peasants" to face the Big Bad Wolves of mass unemployment, endless debt and lifelong disappointment?
There is no dignity in living on hand-outs. But that's just fine with the Left: The destruction of individual dignity, the reduction of pride from a matter of real achievement to status based on running shoes, is one of the left's most vital tools in subverting our republic ("How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the block, once that they've read Ayn Rand?" The ultimate nightmare of the American left is a literate minority population). Note that, on the rare occasion when a minority celebrity calls for personal responsibility and educational reform, the left attacks him or her immediately, savagely and enduringly.
For that matter, what has our self-declared-as-black president done to improve education for minorities and reduce minority unemployment? How many black or Latino executives, exactly, worked at Solyndra?
For me, the Obamacare agenda was never really about the health of the American people. Instead, it's another wealth-transfer (and wealth-destruction) tool that removes yet another incentive for individual citizens to better their lives. It's also about further dismantling our sense of personal responsibility, broadening the sense of victimhood yet again. The "free lunch" of universal health care would be paid for by those who work in order to provide endless care, premium for those who refuse to work or to take any responsibility for their own physical condition.
The message of the Left long has been: Nothing is your fault, you're all victims of the dark forces of free enterprise ("Freedom is slavery," as Big Brother put it). Obamacare was designed to extend that message to: "Eat like a pig, smoke like a chimney, drink life a fish and stay put on your sofa-and, as long as you vote the Left's party line, you'll get the same benefits as someone who has worked steadily for fifty years to support a family.
The worst addiction crisis in our country isn't to illegal drugs, but to life-numbing government giveaway programs that purposely kill ambition among the poor.
Oh, and the Left's recent discovery of the suffering middle class (suffering because of the Left's bankrupting programs)? Don't believe it. The academic left has always despised the petty bourgeois, while merely envying the wealthy. The middle-class shopkeeper or small-town entrepreneur was always immune to the Left's inanity, while at least some of the rich could be conned into a guilt-trip and big donations.
As for those of us with jobs, the Left wants us to be in debt, in doubt, and hurting. The new dream of the American Left is to turn productive citizens into a new class of victims. And, true to the European model the American left emulates, our leftists close their eyes to the fact that somebody has to make money to pay taxes, or, eventually, there's no funding for anything. When it comes to balancing the books, the Left has always taken the Mr. Micawber view that "Something will turn up."
Welcome to Greece: It's always about wealth transfers, even as the last wealth disappears.
At a time when the American Left dreams of turning ten million illegal immigrants into ten million permanently impoverished voters, it's time to relook the entire leftist experiment we've endured for the last half-century. Food stamps? Sure, for the deserving or disabled. But no junk food or desserts of any kind. Computerized supermarket inventory and check-out programs could easily manage this-but it won't happen, because politicians from both parties would rather foster obesity than take on potato-chip manufacturers. And let's routinely recheck eligibility and make it a felony to sell food stamps to a third party. Benefits fraud? Lose all government benefits for the rest of your life. Voting rights? Time for a step backward (the Left's outrageous objections to voter ID laws show just how corrupt the Democrats have become). No individual or family tax return? No right to vote. No high-school diploma? No right to vote. Citizens don't just have rights. Responsibilities come first.
As for health care, I support enlightened rationing that, while allowing for "no-fault" serious diseases or accidents caused by others, incentivizes citizens to take at least some responsibility for their own health. If I bust my ass to stay in shape, I shouldn't have to pay for extravagant care for the shamelessly self-indulgent. Past a reasonable point, you should have to pay your own way if you've abused your body for decades. If you want endless platinum care for ailments you've inflicted on yourself, take out your checkbook.
Not a single cowardly politicians in either party will admit it, but without laws that foster personal responsibility for our health, our health-care system will bankrupt us, whether Obamacare can be repealed or not.
Frau Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, stick to your refusal to pay off the credit cards of spendthrift Greeks. My fellow Amerians, stand up for the fundamental value that, above all, made this country great, the belief that personal responsibility is the building block of freedom.
I would not undo "social" programs that help the genuinely needy, but I'd damned well make sure that "needy" meant physically or mentally helpless to help themselves, not lazy, cynical and content to remain illiterate.
There's a line from the 1960s that I used to trot out for a laugh. Faced with today's degenerate entitlement culture, I've come to see authentic wisdom in the saying. It's from the Reverend Ike, the Little Richard of evangelists, who, when asked about his Cadillacs and jewelry, said, "The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them."
Work hard, pay your bills, and take responsibility for your own life. That, my friends, is true American patriotism.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Judicial restraint is the idea that judges should defer to the will of lawmakers whenever possible, turning to the U.S. Constitution on only the rarest of occasions in order to nullify a duly-enacted law. One of the earliest and most influential proponents of this idea was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), who routinely criticized his fellow justices for striking down legislation and preventing “the right of the majority to embody their opinions in law.” As Holmes once put it, “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.”
Holmes was a great hero to the left-leaning activists of the Progressive era, who enjoyed reading his sharply-worded dissents attacking the Court’s majority for striking down various economic regulations. But judicial restraint has also had its champions on the American right. Conservative legal icon Robert Bork, for example, famously argued that “in wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities,” and that judges should therefore act accordingly by deferring to lawmakers on most matters.
Chief Justice John Roberts also believes in judicial restraint, or judicial modesty, as he described it during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings, and that belief came shining through yesterday in his majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Although Roberts rejected the Obama administration’s novel claim that Congress may force Americans to buy health insurance as part of its power to regulate interstate commerce, he nonetheless found the health insurance mandate to be lawful under a different constitutional provision, Congress’ power to “lay and collect taxes.”
“The text of a statute can sometimes have more than one possible meaning,” Roberts wrote, before proceeding to embrace the only possible meaning that would allow the statute to survive. “The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution,” he continued. “Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can be so read.”
And so judicial restraint reared its head. In fact, as an authority for his deferential maneuvering, Roberts turned to none other than Justice Holmes, citing the famous jurist’s concurring opinion in the 1928 case of Blodgett v. Holden, which declared, “between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
In other words, the tie goes to the government.
Many of Roberts’ critics will no doubt be tempted to denounce this ruling as an example of judicial activism. But in fact the opposite is true. By employing a method of statutory interpretation designed to give Congress and the White House the benefit of the doubt, Roberts exhibited the hallmarks of judicial restraint. “It is not our job,” he declared, taking yet another page from Holmes’ playbook, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Today’s conservatives frequently complain about the dangers of judicial activism. Perhaps now they’ll be more alert to the dangers of judicial restraint.
SOURCE
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Legislative Dishonesty: The Indian Child Welfare Act doesn’t promote child welfare
By Thomas Sowell
Nowhere is political rhetoric more shameless — or more dangerous — than in the pious names that politicians give to the legislation they pass. Perhaps the most egregious example is the so-called Indian Child Welfare Act, which callously sacrifices the welfare of Indian children.
Time and again, children with some American Indian ancestry, who have been adopted by families that are not of that ancestry, have been suddenly taken by law from the only parents they have ever known and transferred to some distant Indian reservation, to live among strangers in a world they know nothing about.
You might think that the sight of bewildered, desperate, and weeping children in court, crying out for Mommy and Daddy as they are forcibly removed from people who have cared for them for years, might cause those who are seizing them to relent. But no! Such children are routinely sacrificed on the altar of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The child might be two years old or twelve. But the legal rights of a biological relative and tribal authorities trump the well-being of the child, even if that biological relative has been a complete stranger to the child.
Some years ago, the chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission visited a 14-year-old girl who had been removed from her adoptive parents and was living on an Indian reservation, where she was miserable. But when the story came out, outrage was directed not at those who had ruined this girl’s life, but at the member of the Civil Rights Commission who had dared to intrude on the sacred soil of the Indian reservation.
Similar things have happened to black children raised by white foster parents. There is no congressional legislation in these cases, but the dogmatism of social workers and so-called social-welfare departments can lead to the same results. However, the absence of federal legislation enables those judges who have common sense, and common decency, to prevent similar tragedies.
What is behind such perverse racial policies? Theories, ideologies, and presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue. It has been known for centuries that there are people, especially among the intelligentsia, who love humanity in the abstract but are not all that concerned about what happens to the actual flesh-and-blood human beings who are subjected to their grand visions and policies.
If the vogue is that children should be raised in their own racial culture, that overrules other considerations. As T. S. Eliot said, long ago: “Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
But the rest of us need to be on guard against their rhetoric. Nor is the Indian Child Welfare Act the only piece of legislation whose effects are the direct opposite of its title.
The Obama administration introduced legislation called the “Employee Free Choice Act.” What would it do? Destroy the free choice of workers as to whether or not they want to be represented by a labor union.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave workers the right to a federally conducted secret-ballot election, in which they could vote to have a union or not have a union. But, as more and more workers in recent years have voted not to have a union, union bosses have pushed for a law to allow this decision to be made without a secret ballot. This would allow union organizers to use pressure and coercion on those who don’t want to have a union.
Since union bosses contributed both money and manpower to the election of Barack Obama, it is hardly surprising that he was willing to reciprocate with the Employee Free Choice Act.
In this case, the act failed to pass in Congress. But President Obama accomplished some of its goals by appointing pro-union members to the National Labor Relations Board, whose regulations tilted elections in the unions’ favor.
If you can’t be bothered to look beyond rhetoric to realities, don’t complain about bad laws, or even about the degeneration of law itself into arbitrary rule over what was once a free people.
SOURCE
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The worldwide Leftist program: Creating dependency
It's already well underway in Britain, where ever larger numbers of young people choose a life on welfare rather than work
by RALPH PETERS
In an age of the globalization of everything from bird flu to bad debts, we still try to compartmentalize, pretending that what happens in Athens, stays in Athens. Thus, too many Americans fail to connect the massive attempt at wealth transfer (and wealth destruction) behind Obamacare to the wild irresponsibility of southern Europe's socialist government models that have led multiple states to practical, if not yet formal, bankruptcy.
But problems ranging from the Democratic Party's efforts to turn illegal immigrants into still more electoral slaves, to Greek or Spanish demands that hardworking Germans pick up their lifestyle tabs, all have the same roots: The Left's lust for power and its preferred means of seizing power today: Addicting the least-productive and utterly unproductive members of society to giveaway programs funded by the diminishing number of citizens willing to study, work and pay taxes.
Obamacare isn't about alleviating suffering. It's about keeping poor people poor by enmeshing them in a web of addictive hand-outs that keep them dependent on government. Every leftwing "social" program has the ultimate goal of destroying incentives for self-improvement, while piling on the incentives for parasitical behavior.
Whenever a leftist politician speaks of "social justice" or "justice" of any kind, get ready to write a check to the government, if you earn an honest living. To Leftists, social justice means only two things: First, empowering the Lumpenproletariat (society's bottom-feeders, against whom Karl Marx warned us, by the way) to create an electoral mob that will always vote to preserve and increase hand-outs; and, second, punishing responsible citizens who have done something constructive with their lives.
In Europe itself, we see a sharp north-south divide (with France, under its new idiot-left president, opting to align itself with the bankrupt south, the financial equivalent of Napoleon's invasion of Russia). In the north, most governments pursue sound fiscal policies and restrain their socialist impulses within the limits of affordability. In the German case, two traditions have resulted in one of the world's soundest economies, despite soft-core socialism: The old, unfashionable, academically derided "Protestant Work Ethic," and the worthy old Prussian admonition to live a life of Mehr sein als schein ("Live within your budget and don't flash bling"). [Literally: More being than appearing -- JR]
In Europe and here, the Left has proven that the old saying "There's no free lunch!" is a lie, at least for a while. There's a free lunch every day, as long as someone else can be conned or forced into picking up the tab. Eventually, though, the famine years arrive.
Here at home, it's often been observed that a fundamental problem is that "we've made poverty too comfortable," thus removing incentives for people to study, work and better their lives. That's absolutely true: When you willfully contribute nothing to society throughout your lifetime, while using food stamps to buy chips, candy, soda and frozen dinners, and then bill the government for your self-inflicted health problems while couch-surfing through a "life of poverty" that includes a cell phone and a flat-screen television, well, there are, unfortunately, plenty of human beings content to be narcotized into slavery on the left's vast, soul-destroying electoral plantations. The left uses government giveaways to bribe the poor to stay poor.
Why? The left craves power. Once upon a time, it craved power for imagined noble ends. Now it's just about the power itself. Leftists know full well how soul-crushing conditions are in the ghettos, barrios and poor-white communities in which they confine their supporters, keeping them on a life-support drip-feed of benefits (brilliantly constructed so that anyone who tries to fight their way out of the poverty trap immediately loses multiple advantages reserved for those content to remain willing slaves).
What has our Left done for the poor except to addict them to poverty? What has the European left done for the poor except to promise a fairy-tale ending, only to leave the "workers and peasants" to face the Big Bad Wolves of mass unemployment, endless debt and lifelong disappointment?
There is no dignity in living on hand-outs. But that's just fine with the Left: The destruction of individual dignity, the reduction of pride from a matter of real achievement to status based on running shoes, is one of the left's most vital tools in subverting our republic ("How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the block, once that they've read Ayn Rand?" The ultimate nightmare of the American left is a literate minority population). Note that, on the rare occasion when a minority celebrity calls for personal responsibility and educational reform, the left attacks him or her immediately, savagely and enduringly.
For that matter, what has our self-declared-as-black president done to improve education for minorities and reduce minority unemployment? How many black or Latino executives, exactly, worked at Solyndra?
For me, the Obamacare agenda was never really about the health of the American people. Instead, it's another wealth-transfer (and wealth-destruction) tool that removes yet another incentive for individual citizens to better their lives. It's also about further dismantling our sense of personal responsibility, broadening the sense of victimhood yet again. The "free lunch" of universal health care would be paid for by those who work in order to provide endless care, premium for those who refuse to work or to take any responsibility for their own physical condition.
The message of the Left long has been: Nothing is your fault, you're all victims of the dark forces of free enterprise ("Freedom is slavery," as Big Brother put it). Obamacare was designed to extend that message to: "Eat like a pig, smoke like a chimney, drink life a fish and stay put on your sofa-and, as long as you vote the Left's party line, you'll get the same benefits as someone who has worked steadily for fifty years to support a family.
The worst addiction crisis in our country isn't to illegal drugs, but to life-numbing government giveaway programs that purposely kill ambition among the poor.
Oh, and the Left's recent discovery of the suffering middle class (suffering because of the Left's bankrupting programs)? Don't believe it. The academic left has always despised the petty bourgeois, while merely envying the wealthy. The middle-class shopkeeper or small-town entrepreneur was always immune to the Left's inanity, while at least some of the rich could be conned into a guilt-trip and big donations.
As for those of us with jobs, the Left wants us to be in debt, in doubt, and hurting. The new dream of the American Left is to turn productive citizens into a new class of victims. And, true to the European model the American left emulates, our leftists close their eyes to the fact that somebody has to make money to pay taxes, or, eventually, there's no funding for anything. When it comes to balancing the books, the Left has always taken the Mr. Micawber view that "Something will turn up."
Welcome to Greece: It's always about wealth transfers, even as the last wealth disappears.
At a time when the American Left dreams of turning ten million illegal immigrants into ten million permanently impoverished voters, it's time to relook the entire leftist experiment we've endured for the last half-century. Food stamps? Sure, for the deserving or disabled. But no junk food or desserts of any kind. Computerized supermarket inventory and check-out programs could easily manage this-but it won't happen, because politicians from both parties would rather foster obesity than take on potato-chip manufacturers. And let's routinely recheck eligibility and make it a felony to sell food stamps to a third party. Benefits fraud? Lose all government benefits for the rest of your life. Voting rights? Time for a step backward (the Left's outrageous objections to voter ID laws show just how corrupt the Democrats have become). No individual or family tax return? No right to vote. No high-school diploma? No right to vote. Citizens don't just have rights. Responsibilities come first.
As for health care, I support enlightened rationing that, while allowing for "no-fault" serious diseases or accidents caused by others, incentivizes citizens to take at least some responsibility for their own health. If I bust my ass to stay in shape, I shouldn't have to pay for extravagant care for the shamelessly self-indulgent. Past a reasonable point, you should have to pay your own way if you've abused your body for decades. If you want endless platinum care for ailments you've inflicted on yourself, take out your checkbook.
Not a single cowardly politicians in either party will admit it, but without laws that foster personal responsibility for our health, our health-care system will bankrupt us, whether Obamacare can be repealed or not.
Frau Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, stick to your refusal to pay off the credit cards of spendthrift Greeks. My fellow Amerians, stand up for the fundamental value that, above all, made this country great, the belief that personal responsibility is the building block of freedom.
I would not undo "social" programs that help the genuinely needy, but I'd damned well make sure that "needy" meant physically or mentally helpless to help themselves, not lazy, cynical and content to remain illiterate.
There's a line from the 1960s that I used to trot out for a laugh. Faced with today's degenerate entitlement culture, I've come to see authentic wisdom in the saying. It's from the Reverend Ike, the Little Richard of evangelists, who, when asked about his Cadillacs and jewelry, said, "The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them."
Work hard, pay your bills, and take responsibility for your own life. That, my friends, is true American patriotism.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Saturday, June 30, 2012
The Feds can penalize you for anything as long as they call it a tax
Today is my Sabbath and I would not normally be posting anything today but the decision by SCOTUS (above) completely alters the ball game for America so I felt I had to put up a few bits on at least this blog, if not on my others.
If Americans want to know where their healthcare is heading now, have a good look at my EYE ON BRITAIN blog. Every day I put up at least one horror story there about how socialized medicine treats people.
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GOP governors vow to ignore Obamacare
Republican governors are planning to ignore the Supreme Court's decision Thursday to uphold Obamacare hoping that the issue will drive voters to dump President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney who has vowed to kill the Affordable Care Act.
After the decision, the Republican Governors Association said that nothing should be done by the states until after the election, a clear signal that they believe a GOP president, House and Senate will kill the health care reform pushed through by Democrats and opposed by Republicans.
RGA Chairman Bob McDonnell said, "Today's ruling crystallizes all that's at stake in November's election. The only way to stop Barack Obama's budget-busting health care takeover is by electing a new president. Barack Obama's health care takeover encapsulates his presidency: Obamacare increases taxes, grows the size of government and puts bureaucrats over patients while doing nothing to improve the economy."
The Virginia governor, who is on Mitt Romney's list of potential vice presidential candidates, added, "By replacing Barack Obama with Mitt Romney, we will not only stop the federal government's healthcare takeover, but will also take a giant step towards a full economic recovery."
Other governors have urged a similar strategy. Scott Walker, the newly re-elected Wisconsin governor, said that he won't put into place any elements of Obamacare until after the election. Other governors are taking a similar position.
SOURCE
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Is The Roberts Ruling Good For ObamaCare Opponents?
By upholding all of ObamaCare on the grounds that the individual mandate falls under Congress’ taxing power, it seems like Chief Justice John Roberts has given liberty a very bad day.
But maybe not.
Roberts has now taken away the ability of proponents to obfuscate on the individual mandate. During the ObamaCare debate in Congress, many supporters insisted that the mandate wasn’t a tax knowing that its passage would be much harder if it was, indeed, called a tax. During legal arguments, supporters started referring to it as a tax as a sort of “legal insurance policy” against the Supreme Court throwing it out.
The Roberts ruling in effect says, “Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. And since you let me decide this, I’m calling it a tax.”
That leaves ObamaCare proponents politically vulnerable in a number of ways.
First, supporters will now have to call the mandate a “tax,” something that will make it even less popular than it is now.
Second, their flank will be unprotected against the charge that ObamaCare is one of the largest tax increases in history.
Third, opponents can now say, “Do you want to be taxed to force you to buy insurance?” and “If you don’t buy insurance, your taxes go up.” I’m betting those are winning soundbites.
Fourth, since the mandate is now a tax, it is a no-brainer that it can be repealed using budget reconciliation rules. In other words, you don’t need 60 votes in the Senate get rid of the mandate.
To know if the above analysis is correct, watch for what the Democrats don’t do. If you don’t see Democrats and others on the left running around proudly touting the mandate as a tax, you’ll know that they know that they don’t have a winning argument.
Longer term, if Obama is not touting that the Court found ObamaCare constitutional in his stump speeches, you’ll know this is an issue that he wants to avoid.
Just guessin’, but telling voters that you’ve just raised their taxes probably isn’t a good reelection strategy.
SOURCE
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Regulations to fix problems caused by regulations?
Congress has passed the FDA Safety & Innovation Act in response to the recent prescription drug shortages. The Act’s solution to the shortages includes increasing the FDA’s regulatory power. Over-zealous regulation and bureaucrats at FDA had been a main cause of the problem.
The Act will increase the number of pharmaceutical manufacturers that must report to the FDA any discontinuation of certain drugs at least six months before ending production. Additionally, the Act would require the Secretary of the FDA to implement a “task force” to enhance the Secretary’s response to shortages. Neither of these proposed solutions will attenuate another drug shortage but instead exasperate one. It is expected that President Obama will sign the bill into law in early July.
Paul Howard, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress, has argued against more government intervention into the market, stating, “Medicare restrictions on average sale prices (which can only be updated every six months) for generic medicines, just-in-time inventory supply practices at hospitals, reverse-auction contracts from large group purchasing organizations for supplying generic drugs, tougher FDA manufacturing and inspection standards for domestic companies (which can raise costs), and increased global competition from low-cost suppliers in India and China have all created a “perfect storm” for creating shortages of some vital generic medicines.”
Howard pointed out that the pharmaceutical market exists beyond the United States, and in order for our companies to stay competitive we need less red tape.
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform, found the FDA to be the primary cause of the drug shortages, and concluded in the Committee’s report, “This shortage appears to be a direct result of over aggressive and excessive regulatory action.”
The report continued, “Addressing this shortage requires a common sense regulatory approach that considers market conditions and the overall impact. These drugs can save lives and keep people who need them living healthy lives. The FDA is failing to ensure the availability of quality products.”
Chairman Issa argues that if the FDA’s purpose is to ultimately save lives than it should not be preventing life-extending drugs from entering into hospitals and the market.
A recent academic article by Assistant Professor Ali Yurukoglu of the Stanford Graduate School of Business found a strong, positive correlation between A) the fraction of revenue received from Medicare Part B for a drug and B) the probability of a shortage for that drug. Specifically, each 10 percent market share accounted for by Medicare is linked with an increase of shortage frequency by 7.5 percent.
Preventing future shortages, according to John R. Graham—director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy—would entail freeing up the pharmaceutical market to allow for more competition and shift medicines from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D to ensure manufacturers receive adequate compensation. Unlike Part B, which fixes prices, Part D depends on a less market-intrusive mechanism to provide health care. Part D relies on private health insurers to compete against one another in annual auctions in order to provide drug plans to Medicare beneficiaries.
Graham concludes that ultimately the FDA’s monopoly on the approval of drugs for medical use should be ended to allow competing manufacturers to enter the market in case of future shortages.
If Congress wishes to contribute a viable solution, it should first understand the primary cause of the problem it wishes to solve. In this case, instead of addressing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid’s price-fixing powers and the FDA’s over-regulation of pharmaceutical markets — the major contributing factors of the drug shortages — Congress has granted even more power to the government, either to little effect or making the problem even worse.
SOURCE
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More verbal trickery from the Left
Thomas Sowell on "social justice". If it were "justice" it would not need the "social" adjective
If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase "social justice" would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.
In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of "social justice."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase "social justice" has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century -- and counting.
If someone told you that Country A had more "social justice" than Country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether Country A or Country B had more "social justice"? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice -- if it has any concrete meaning?
In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?
Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury -- each through no fault of their own and no virtue of their own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?
The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?
If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective, an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution or society.
Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a particular society.
Anyone who studies geography in any depth can see that different peoples and nations never had the same exposure to the progress of the rest of the human race. People living in isolated mountain valleys have for centuries lagged behind the progress of people living in busy ports, where both new products and new ideas constantly arrive from around the world.
If you study history in addition to geography, you are almost forced to acknowledge that there was never any realistic chance for all peoples to have the same achievements -- even if they were all born with the same potential and even if there were no social injustices.
Once I asked a class of black college students what they thought would happen if a black baby were born, in the middle of a ghetto, and entered the world with brain cells the same as those with which Albert Einstein was born.
There were many different opinions -- but no one in that room thought that such a baby, in such a place, would grow up to become another Einstein. Some blamed discrimination but others saw the social setting as too much to overcome.
If discrimination is the main reason that such a baby has little or no chance for great intellectual achievements, then that is something caused by society -- a social injustice. But if the main reason is that the surrounding cultural environment provides little incentive to develop great intellectual potential, and many distractions from that goal, that is a cosmic injustice.
Many years ago, a study of black adults with high IQs found that they described their childhoods as "extremely unhappy" more often than other black adults did. There is little that politicians can do about that -- except stop pretending that all problems in black communities originate in other communities.
Similar principles apply around the world. Every group trails the long shadow of its cultural heritage -- and no politician or society can change the past. But they can stop leading people into the blind alley of resentments of other people. A better future often requires internal changes that pay off better than mysticism about one's own group or about "social justice."
SOURCE
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Religion as a bulwark against big government
The ongoing debate in the United States over Obamacare recalls the value of religion in the debate on liberty. Key to the religious perspective on the debate are efforts by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to require Catholic organisations to provide contraceptive, abortifacient and sterilisation services to their employees as part of their health insurance programmes; an attempt which the Catholic Church has staunchly resisted as infringing on matters of conscience.
The opposition from the Catholic Church of course hinges on religious freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment, but galvanises awareness among religious groups of the broader personal freedoms at stake under the other Obamacare mandate, requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance on pain of a fine. Indeed, a Gallup poll now shows that a majority of Americans regardless of political persuasion view the mandate central to the health reform package as unconstitutional.
In some ways, the circumstances resemble the manner in which the first New Deal was brought down by provisions which violated the kosher practices of Jewish butchers, as recounted in an article in The Freeman this month. In that case, the butchers’ challenge did not rest on First Amendment grounds, but it was motivated by religion and ultimately resulted in the economic regulation being struck down by the Supreme Court.
As the religiously-minded classical liberals of the 19th-century wrote, religion was valuable in a free society because it reminded the people that their sole duty was not to the state, and could thus serve as a means of protecting civil liberties from encroaching government. As historian Ralph Raico says of Alexis de Tocqueville, who penned Democracy in America in 1835, the Frenchman believed that religious sentiment:
“...sets up barriers to the heedless trampling on individual rights. It is ultimately because of these influences, he holds, that ‘no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants.’ ” (p. 99)
Whatever the Supreme Court may decide this week – whether it overturns or upholds the individual mandate which affects all citizens, or the HHS contraceptive mandate which affects employers – the religious dimension of this debate will hopefully sharpen awareness of individual liberties in future political discourse. Many secular libertarians today, like their 19th-century forerunners, suspect authority including religious authority. Rather, it is coercive authority which is to be suspect. Ultimately, the first protection in upholding the rule of law in a free society is not the court or legislature, but the sentiment of the people, wherein religious sentiment can perform a valuable role.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Today is my Sabbath and I would not normally be posting anything today but the decision by SCOTUS (above) completely alters the ball game for America so I felt I had to put up a few bits on at least this blog, if not on my others.
If Americans want to know where their healthcare is heading now, have a good look at my EYE ON BRITAIN blog. Every day I put up at least one horror story there about how socialized medicine treats people.
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GOP governors vow to ignore Obamacare
Republican governors are planning to ignore the Supreme Court's decision Thursday to uphold Obamacare hoping that the issue will drive voters to dump President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney who has vowed to kill the Affordable Care Act.
After the decision, the Republican Governors Association said that nothing should be done by the states until after the election, a clear signal that they believe a GOP president, House and Senate will kill the health care reform pushed through by Democrats and opposed by Republicans.
RGA Chairman Bob McDonnell said, "Today's ruling crystallizes all that's at stake in November's election. The only way to stop Barack Obama's budget-busting health care takeover is by electing a new president. Barack Obama's health care takeover encapsulates his presidency: Obamacare increases taxes, grows the size of government and puts bureaucrats over patients while doing nothing to improve the economy."
The Virginia governor, who is on Mitt Romney's list of potential vice presidential candidates, added, "By replacing Barack Obama with Mitt Romney, we will not only stop the federal government's healthcare takeover, but will also take a giant step towards a full economic recovery."
Other governors have urged a similar strategy. Scott Walker, the newly re-elected Wisconsin governor, said that he won't put into place any elements of Obamacare until after the election. Other governors are taking a similar position.
SOURCE
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Is The Roberts Ruling Good For ObamaCare Opponents?
By upholding all of ObamaCare on the grounds that the individual mandate falls under Congress’ taxing power, it seems like Chief Justice John Roberts has given liberty a very bad day.
But maybe not.
Roberts has now taken away the ability of proponents to obfuscate on the individual mandate. During the ObamaCare debate in Congress, many supporters insisted that the mandate wasn’t a tax knowing that its passage would be much harder if it was, indeed, called a tax. During legal arguments, supporters started referring to it as a tax as a sort of “legal insurance policy” against the Supreme Court throwing it out.
The Roberts ruling in effect says, “Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. And since you let me decide this, I’m calling it a tax.”
That leaves ObamaCare proponents politically vulnerable in a number of ways.
First, supporters will now have to call the mandate a “tax,” something that will make it even less popular than it is now.
Second, their flank will be unprotected against the charge that ObamaCare is one of the largest tax increases in history.
Third, opponents can now say, “Do you want to be taxed to force you to buy insurance?” and “If you don’t buy insurance, your taxes go up.” I’m betting those are winning soundbites.
Fourth, since the mandate is now a tax, it is a no-brainer that it can be repealed using budget reconciliation rules. In other words, you don’t need 60 votes in the Senate get rid of the mandate.
To know if the above analysis is correct, watch for what the Democrats don’t do. If you don’t see Democrats and others on the left running around proudly touting the mandate as a tax, you’ll know that they know that they don’t have a winning argument.
Longer term, if Obama is not touting that the Court found ObamaCare constitutional in his stump speeches, you’ll know this is an issue that he wants to avoid.
Just guessin’, but telling voters that you’ve just raised their taxes probably isn’t a good reelection strategy.
SOURCE
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Regulations to fix problems caused by regulations?
Congress has passed the FDA Safety & Innovation Act in response to the recent prescription drug shortages. The Act’s solution to the shortages includes increasing the FDA’s regulatory power. Over-zealous regulation and bureaucrats at FDA had been a main cause of the problem.
The Act will increase the number of pharmaceutical manufacturers that must report to the FDA any discontinuation of certain drugs at least six months before ending production. Additionally, the Act would require the Secretary of the FDA to implement a “task force” to enhance the Secretary’s response to shortages. Neither of these proposed solutions will attenuate another drug shortage but instead exasperate one. It is expected that President Obama will sign the bill into law in early July.
Paul Howard, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress, has argued against more government intervention into the market, stating, “Medicare restrictions on average sale prices (which can only be updated every six months) for generic medicines, just-in-time inventory supply practices at hospitals, reverse-auction contracts from large group purchasing organizations for supplying generic drugs, tougher FDA manufacturing and inspection standards for domestic companies (which can raise costs), and increased global competition from low-cost suppliers in India and China have all created a “perfect storm” for creating shortages of some vital generic medicines.”
Howard pointed out that the pharmaceutical market exists beyond the United States, and in order for our companies to stay competitive we need less red tape.
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform, found the FDA to be the primary cause of the drug shortages, and concluded in the Committee’s report, “This shortage appears to be a direct result of over aggressive and excessive regulatory action.”
The report continued, “Addressing this shortage requires a common sense regulatory approach that considers market conditions and the overall impact. These drugs can save lives and keep people who need them living healthy lives. The FDA is failing to ensure the availability of quality products.”
Chairman Issa argues that if the FDA’s purpose is to ultimately save lives than it should not be preventing life-extending drugs from entering into hospitals and the market.
A recent academic article by Assistant Professor Ali Yurukoglu of the Stanford Graduate School of Business found a strong, positive correlation between A) the fraction of revenue received from Medicare Part B for a drug and B) the probability of a shortage for that drug. Specifically, each 10 percent market share accounted for by Medicare is linked with an increase of shortage frequency by 7.5 percent.
Preventing future shortages, according to John R. Graham—director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy—would entail freeing up the pharmaceutical market to allow for more competition and shift medicines from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D to ensure manufacturers receive adequate compensation. Unlike Part B, which fixes prices, Part D depends on a less market-intrusive mechanism to provide health care. Part D relies on private health insurers to compete against one another in annual auctions in order to provide drug plans to Medicare beneficiaries.
Graham concludes that ultimately the FDA’s monopoly on the approval of drugs for medical use should be ended to allow competing manufacturers to enter the market in case of future shortages.
If Congress wishes to contribute a viable solution, it should first understand the primary cause of the problem it wishes to solve. In this case, instead of addressing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid’s price-fixing powers and the FDA’s over-regulation of pharmaceutical markets — the major contributing factors of the drug shortages — Congress has granted even more power to the government, either to little effect or making the problem even worse.
SOURCE
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More verbal trickery from the Left
Thomas Sowell on "social justice". If it were "justice" it would not need the "social" adjective
If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase "social justice" would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.
In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of "social justice."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase "social justice" has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century -- and counting.
If someone told you that Country A had more "social justice" than Country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether Country A or Country B had more "social justice"? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice -- if it has any concrete meaning?
In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?
Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury -- each through no fault of their own and no virtue of their own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?
The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?
If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective, an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution or society.
Making a distinction between cosmic justice and social justice is more than just a semantic fine point. Once we recognize that there are innumerable causes of innumerable disparities, we can no longer blithely assume that either the cause or the cure can be found in the government of a particular society.
Anyone who studies geography in any depth can see that different peoples and nations never had the same exposure to the progress of the rest of the human race. People living in isolated mountain valleys have for centuries lagged behind the progress of people living in busy ports, where both new products and new ideas constantly arrive from around the world.
If you study history in addition to geography, you are almost forced to acknowledge that there was never any realistic chance for all peoples to have the same achievements -- even if they were all born with the same potential and even if there were no social injustices.
Once I asked a class of black college students what they thought would happen if a black baby were born, in the middle of a ghetto, and entered the world with brain cells the same as those with which Albert Einstein was born.
There were many different opinions -- but no one in that room thought that such a baby, in such a place, would grow up to become another Einstein. Some blamed discrimination but others saw the social setting as too much to overcome.
If discrimination is the main reason that such a baby has little or no chance for great intellectual achievements, then that is something caused by society -- a social injustice. But if the main reason is that the surrounding cultural environment provides little incentive to develop great intellectual potential, and many distractions from that goal, that is a cosmic injustice.
Many years ago, a study of black adults with high IQs found that they described their childhoods as "extremely unhappy" more often than other black adults did. There is little that politicians can do about that -- except stop pretending that all problems in black communities originate in other communities.
Similar principles apply around the world. Every group trails the long shadow of its cultural heritage -- and no politician or society can change the past. But they can stop leading people into the blind alley of resentments of other people. A better future often requires internal changes that pay off better than mysticism about one's own group or about "social justice."
SOURCE
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Religion as a bulwark against big government
The ongoing debate in the United States over Obamacare recalls the value of religion in the debate on liberty. Key to the religious perspective on the debate are efforts by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to require Catholic organisations to provide contraceptive, abortifacient and sterilisation services to their employees as part of their health insurance programmes; an attempt which the Catholic Church has staunchly resisted as infringing on matters of conscience.
The opposition from the Catholic Church of course hinges on religious freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment, but galvanises awareness among religious groups of the broader personal freedoms at stake under the other Obamacare mandate, requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance on pain of a fine. Indeed, a Gallup poll now shows that a majority of Americans regardless of political persuasion view the mandate central to the health reform package as unconstitutional.
In some ways, the circumstances resemble the manner in which the first New Deal was brought down by provisions which violated the kosher practices of Jewish butchers, as recounted in an article in The Freeman this month. In that case, the butchers’ challenge did not rest on First Amendment grounds, but it was motivated by religion and ultimately resulted in the economic regulation being struck down by the Supreme Court.
As the religiously-minded classical liberals of the 19th-century wrote, religion was valuable in a free society because it reminded the people that their sole duty was not to the state, and could thus serve as a means of protecting civil liberties from encroaching government. As historian Ralph Raico says of Alexis de Tocqueville, who penned Democracy in America in 1835, the Frenchman believed that religious sentiment:
“...sets up barriers to the heedless trampling on individual rights. It is ultimately because of these influences, he holds, that ‘no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants.’ ” (p. 99)
Whatever the Supreme Court may decide this week – whether it overturns or upholds the individual mandate which affects all citizens, or the HHS contraceptive mandate which affects employers – the religious dimension of this debate will hopefully sharpen awareness of individual liberties in future political discourse. Many secular libertarians today, like their 19th-century forerunners, suspect authority including religious authority. Rather, it is coercive authority which is to be suspect. Ultimately, the first protection in upholding the rule of law in a free society is not the court or legislature, but the sentiment of the people, wherein religious sentiment can perform a valuable role.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Friday, June 29, 2012
Muslim pigs and dogs
Is that a fair description of them? Read the story below and decide for yourself
A BRITISH journalist was brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo's Tahrir Square as thousands of Egyptians gathered to celebrate the nation's presidential election results.
Natasha Smith, 21, has detailed how she was violently attacked by a 'group of animals' who stripped her naked, scratched and clenched her breasts. She only escaped by donning men's clothes and a burka and being whisked away to safety by two other men.
Writing on her blog, she said: 'All I could see was leering faces, more and more faces sneering and jeering as I was tossed around like fresh meat among starving lions.'
The incident occured on Sunday when Egyptians flooded the area celebrating the announcement Mohammed Morsi would be the nation's first democratically elected leader.
Smith, who will graduate with an MA in International Journalism from University College Falmouth in August, was in Tahrir to film the crowd for a documentary on women's rights.
But the initial 'atmosphere of jubilation, excitement, and happiness', quickly turned against her. She said: 'Just as I realised I had reached the end of the bridge, I noticed the crowd became thicker, and decided immediately to turn around to avoid Tahrir Square.
'My friends and I tried to leave. I tried to put my camera back in my rucksack. But in a split second, everything changed. 'Men had been groping me for a while, but suddenly, something shifted. I found myself being dragged from my male friend, groped all over, with increasing force and aggression.
'I screamed. I could see what was happening and I saw that I was powerless to stop it. I couldn't believe I had got into this situation.' The former Weymouth College and University of Nottingham student said she was then stripped naked and assaulted.
She wrote: 'I began to think, 'maybe this is just it. Maybe this is how I go, how I die. I’ve had a good life. Whether I live or die, this will all be over soon.'
A friend eventually reached her and managed to guide her to a medical tent. Local women helped protect her as she put on the burka and clothes.
She said: 'The men outside remained thirsty for blood; their prey had been cruelly snatched from their grasp. 'They peered in, so I had to duck down and hide. They attempted to attack the tent, and those inside began making a barricade out of chairs. They wanted my blood.'
She then escaped by posing as a stranger's wife and walking out hand-in-hand with the man.
She added: 'The women told me the attack was motivated by rumours spread by trouble-making thugs that I was a foreign spy. 'But if that was the cause, it was only really used as a pretext, an excuse, to molest and violate a blonde young Western girl.'
Smith is not the first western woman to be assaulted while working in Egypt. CBS News' Lara Logan was attacked during the 2011 revolution. She said 'men in the crowd had raped me with their hands'.
Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy was also assaulted by Egyptian security forces in November.
And Smith has vowed that the abuse would not stop her from exposing the wider issue of sexual assault in the country. She said: 'I will overcome this and come back stronger and wiser. My documentary will be fuelled by my passion to help make people aware of just how serious this issue is.
'It's not just a passing news story that briefly gets people’s attention then is forgotten. This is a consistent trend and it has to stop. 'Arab women, western women – there are so many sufferers.'
SOURCE
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Veteran mainstream journalist slams the Leftist bias of his colleagues
By Deacon Greg Kandra
First, there was the Trayvon Martin boondoggle a few months ago.
Then yesterday, evidence of some creative editing regarding Mitt Romney’s visit to a Wawa in Pennsylvania.
Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother. Fine. Here’s what we left out.” She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.
I’m tired. Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no. Calm down. They meant well. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake. These things happen.” I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.
But now?
Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.
Good job. I just have one question: What the hell is wrong with you guys?
SOURCE
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Discrimination is fair
John Stossel
I'm scared. I fear that even if the Supreme Court overrules most of Obamacare (or did already, by the time you read this), Republicans will join Democrats in restoring "good" parts of the law, like the requirement that insurance companies cover kids up to age 26 and every American with a pre-existing condition.
Those parts of Obamacare are popular. People like getting what they think is free stuff. But requiring coverage to age 26 makes policies cost more.
Even Bill O'Reilly lectures me that government should ban discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions. Most Americans agree with him. Who likes discrimination? Racial discrimination was one of the ugliest parts of American history. None of us wants to be discriminated against. But discrimination is part of freedom. We discriminate when we choose our friends or our spouse, or when we choose what we do with our time.
Above all, discrimination is what makes insurance work. An insurance regime where everyone pays the same amount is called "community rating." That sounds fair. No more cruel discrimination against the obese or people with cancer. But community rating is as destructive as ordering flood insurance companies to charge me nothing extra to insure my very vulnerable beach house, or ordering car insurance companies to charge Lindsay Lohan no more than they charge you. Such one-size-fits-all rules take away insurance companies' best tool: risk-based pricing. Risk-based pricing encourages us to take better care of ourselves.
Car insurance works because companies reward good drivers and charge the Lindsay Lohans more. If the state forces insurance companies to stop discriminating, that kills the business model.
No-discrimination insurance isn't insurance. It's welfare. If the politicians' plan was to create another government welfare program, they ought to own up to that instead of hiding the cost.
Obama -- and the Clintons before him -- expressed outrage that insurance companies charged people different rates based on their risk profiles. They want everyone covered for the same "fair" price.
The health insurance industry was happy to play along. They even offered to give up on gender differences. Women go to the doctor more often than men and spend more on medicines. Their lifetime medical costs are much higher, and so it makes all the sense in the world to charge women higher premiums. But Sen. John Kerry pandered, saying, "The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change!" The industry caved. The president of its trade group, Karen M. Ignagni, said that disparities "should be eliminated."
Caving was safer than fighting the president and Congress, and caving seemed to provide the industry with benefits. Insurance companies wouldn't have to work as hard. They wouldn't have to carefully analyze risk. They'd be partners with government -- fat and lazy, another sleepy bureaucracy feeding off the welfare state. Alcoholics, drug addicts and the obese won't have to pay any more than the rest of us.
But this just kills off a useful part of insurance: encouraging healthy behavior. Charging heavy drinkers more for insurance gives them one more incentive to quit. "No-discrimination" pricing makes health care costs rise even faster. Is it too much to expect our rulers to understand this?
Of course, the average citizen doesn't understand either. When I argue that medical insurance makes people indifferent to costs, I get online comments like: "I guess the 47 million people who don't have health care should just die, right, John?"
The truth is, almost all people do get health care, even if they don't have health insurance. Hospitals rarely turn people away; Medicaid and charities pay for care; some individuals pay cash; some doctors forgive bills. I wish people would stop conflating the terms "health care," "health insurance" and "Obamacare." Reporters ask guests things like: "Should Congress repeal health care?" I sure don't want anyone's health care repealed.
Reporters also routinely called Obamacare health "reform." But the definition of reform is: making something better. More government control won't do that. We should call politicians' insurance demands "big intrusive complex government micromanagement."
Let the private sector work. Let it discriminate.
SOURCE
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Beware the deceptive Language of the Left
The language of the Left is designed to push the debate in their direction, even when it conveys false information. The word for spending is spending, not a euphemism like "investment." The word for taxes is taxes, not "revenue enhancements." These words are brought into the debate for one purpose; to mislead.
Lou Dobbs invited Define America co-founder Jose Antonio Vargas on his Fox News show to debate Obama's unilateral declaration rescinding part of our immigration law. Vargas, a prominent writer, had recently announced that he was not a US citizen, even though he has lived here most of his life. Dobbs repeatedly referred to him and others here illegally as "illegals", and Vargas repeatedly corrected him saying they were "undocumented." What is the difference?
"Illegal" means that the individual is breaking the law. That seems pretty clear. People crossed the border illegally or illegally overstayed a visa (those born here to illegals are US citizens). "Undocumented" means that the individual has no documents, but may be here legally or illegally. It is the difference between driving without having obtained a driver's license, or driving when you left your driver's license home. If you are guilty of the former, suggesting you are the latter is simply false.
Recently The New York Times and National Public Radio invented some new terms. They referred to George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin, as a white Hispanic, or a white Latino. Why? Simple. They wanted to make the tragedy into a race-driven incident, even though by all accounts such an assumption is nonsense. Zimmerman is half white and half Latino. There is absolutely no evidence in his past or in the sequence of events leading up to the incident that indicated race was a factor. Common verbiage would describe him as Hispanic or Latino. Given those labels, or as the PC crowd says, a person of color, the race element in this tragedy disappears. Did the NYT or NPR, those august institutions, ever refer to Barack Obama as a white African American? Of course not.
"Stakeholder" is one of my favorites. In a capitalist system private property is vigorously protected, and the use of that property (within the law) is directed by its owner. This system has provided us with the most prosperous, most generous, freest nation in the history of mankind. The term stakeholder was invented by socialists to create the false impression that the public at large has the rights to that private property. The public has the right to expect an owner to obey the law and to honor his contracts, but that is all. If we don't like the owner's choices, we are free not to do business with him. If there are enough of us, he will get the message or cease to exist. Were the state to give the public the right to determine the use of that private property, all economic and social progress going forward would fall victim to the public's insatiable want of something for nothing.
"Social justice" has also joined the lexicon of the Left. The words sound very compassionate. Who can be against justice, especially in a social sense? In reality those who use it are simply trying to usurp private property rights to fund a redistributive agenda, one chasing an unachievable, false, utopian dream. The term is used to support and justify every socialist idea under the sun. Real social justice consists of protecting a man's right to the fruits of his labor, not simply because it is ethical, but because it provides the most goods and services, the best environmental care, the best healthcare and the best of everything else that we as a society are capable of producing, and for everyone.
Columbus thought he reached the Indian Ocean when he landed in the Antilles and named the people there "Indians." The term stuck long after the mistake was recognized, and for centuries it referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The PC crowd determined that it was a demeaning term and changed their reference to "Native American." Native American had been used for centuries to refer to anyone born on American soil, regardless of race, regardless of when. Why would they do this? Indian had nothing pejorative associated with it. My theory is that since the Left adapts to change quickly, during the transition it allowed them to claim the moral high ground when those of us with less verbal agility continue to use the newly designated "racist" term, Indian.
There are other reasons the Left change names. In the same way no liberal columnist wants to review any of their past predictions (invariably they are wrong), so too does the Left like to shed its failed past by changing names. Woodrow Wilson led the "progressive" movement until 1920, but his disregard for the Constitution, and such things as the Left's embrace of eugenics, soured the public on the movement. So, progressive was renamed "liberal." But the liberals' close ties with Communism, as well as with other unpopular policies such as their softness on crime, became a political liability, so in the 1980s they returned to the name "progressive" (no one remembered the Wilson era, most were dead by then). The problem is that no matter what they call themselves, they continue to champion the same failed policies.
Did anyone notice that all of the old Communist organizations and their members are today avid environmentalists? Same people, same ideas, just a different name. Is global warming science, or a political ploy designed to create world government?
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Is that a fair description of them? Read the story below and decide for yourself
A BRITISH journalist was brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo's Tahrir Square as thousands of Egyptians gathered to celebrate the nation's presidential election results.
Natasha Smith, 21, has detailed how she was violently attacked by a 'group of animals' who stripped her naked, scratched and clenched her breasts. She only escaped by donning men's clothes and a burka and being whisked away to safety by two other men.
Writing on her blog, she said: 'All I could see was leering faces, more and more faces sneering and jeering as I was tossed around like fresh meat among starving lions.'
The incident occured on Sunday when Egyptians flooded the area celebrating the announcement Mohammed Morsi would be the nation's first democratically elected leader.
Smith, who will graduate with an MA in International Journalism from University College Falmouth in August, was in Tahrir to film the crowd for a documentary on women's rights.
But the initial 'atmosphere of jubilation, excitement, and happiness', quickly turned against her. She said: 'Just as I realised I had reached the end of the bridge, I noticed the crowd became thicker, and decided immediately to turn around to avoid Tahrir Square.
'My friends and I tried to leave. I tried to put my camera back in my rucksack. But in a split second, everything changed. 'Men had been groping me for a while, but suddenly, something shifted. I found myself being dragged from my male friend, groped all over, with increasing force and aggression.
'I screamed. I could see what was happening and I saw that I was powerless to stop it. I couldn't believe I had got into this situation.' The former Weymouth College and University of Nottingham student said she was then stripped naked and assaulted.
She wrote: 'I began to think, 'maybe this is just it. Maybe this is how I go, how I die. I’ve had a good life. Whether I live or die, this will all be over soon.'
A friend eventually reached her and managed to guide her to a medical tent. Local women helped protect her as she put on the burka and clothes.
She said: 'The men outside remained thirsty for blood; their prey had been cruelly snatched from their grasp. 'They peered in, so I had to duck down and hide. They attempted to attack the tent, and those inside began making a barricade out of chairs. They wanted my blood.'
She then escaped by posing as a stranger's wife and walking out hand-in-hand with the man.
She added: 'The women told me the attack was motivated by rumours spread by trouble-making thugs that I was a foreign spy. 'But if that was the cause, it was only really used as a pretext, an excuse, to molest and violate a blonde young Western girl.'
Smith is not the first western woman to be assaulted while working in Egypt. CBS News' Lara Logan was attacked during the 2011 revolution. She said 'men in the crowd had raped me with their hands'.
Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy was also assaulted by Egyptian security forces in November.
And Smith has vowed that the abuse would not stop her from exposing the wider issue of sexual assault in the country. She said: 'I will overcome this and come back stronger and wiser. My documentary will be fuelled by my passion to help make people aware of just how serious this issue is.
'It's not just a passing news story that briefly gets people’s attention then is forgotten. This is a consistent trend and it has to stop. 'Arab women, western women – there are so many sufferers.'
SOURCE
****************************
Veteran mainstream journalist slams the Leftist bias of his colleagues
By Deacon Greg Kandra
First, there was the Trayvon Martin boondoggle a few months ago.
Then yesterday, evidence of some creative editing regarding Mitt Romney’s visit to a Wawa in Pennsylvania.
Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother. Fine. Here’s what we left out.” She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.
I’m tired. Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no. Calm down. They meant well. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake. These things happen.” I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.
But now?
Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.
Good job. I just have one question: What the hell is wrong with you guys?
SOURCE
*****************************
Discrimination is fair
John Stossel
I'm scared. I fear that even if the Supreme Court overrules most of Obamacare (or did already, by the time you read this), Republicans will join Democrats in restoring "good" parts of the law, like the requirement that insurance companies cover kids up to age 26 and every American with a pre-existing condition.
Those parts of Obamacare are popular. People like getting what they think is free stuff. But requiring coverage to age 26 makes policies cost more.
Even Bill O'Reilly lectures me that government should ban discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions. Most Americans agree with him. Who likes discrimination? Racial discrimination was one of the ugliest parts of American history. None of us wants to be discriminated against. But discrimination is part of freedom. We discriminate when we choose our friends or our spouse, or when we choose what we do with our time.
Above all, discrimination is what makes insurance work. An insurance regime where everyone pays the same amount is called "community rating." That sounds fair. No more cruel discrimination against the obese or people with cancer. But community rating is as destructive as ordering flood insurance companies to charge me nothing extra to insure my very vulnerable beach house, or ordering car insurance companies to charge Lindsay Lohan no more than they charge you. Such one-size-fits-all rules take away insurance companies' best tool: risk-based pricing. Risk-based pricing encourages us to take better care of ourselves.
Car insurance works because companies reward good drivers and charge the Lindsay Lohans more. If the state forces insurance companies to stop discriminating, that kills the business model.
No-discrimination insurance isn't insurance. It's welfare. If the politicians' plan was to create another government welfare program, they ought to own up to that instead of hiding the cost.
Obama -- and the Clintons before him -- expressed outrage that insurance companies charged people different rates based on their risk profiles. They want everyone covered for the same "fair" price.
The health insurance industry was happy to play along. They even offered to give up on gender differences. Women go to the doctor more often than men and spend more on medicines. Their lifetime medical costs are much higher, and so it makes all the sense in the world to charge women higher premiums. But Sen. John Kerry pandered, saying, "The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change!" The industry caved. The president of its trade group, Karen M. Ignagni, said that disparities "should be eliminated."
Caving was safer than fighting the president and Congress, and caving seemed to provide the industry with benefits. Insurance companies wouldn't have to work as hard. They wouldn't have to carefully analyze risk. They'd be partners with government -- fat and lazy, another sleepy bureaucracy feeding off the welfare state. Alcoholics, drug addicts and the obese won't have to pay any more than the rest of us.
But this just kills off a useful part of insurance: encouraging healthy behavior. Charging heavy drinkers more for insurance gives them one more incentive to quit. "No-discrimination" pricing makes health care costs rise even faster. Is it too much to expect our rulers to understand this?
Of course, the average citizen doesn't understand either. When I argue that medical insurance makes people indifferent to costs, I get online comments like: "I guess the 47 million people who don't have health care should just die, right, John?"
The truth is, almost all people do get health care, even if they don't have health insurance. Hospitals rarely turn people away; Medicaid and charities pay for care; some individuals pay cash; some doctors forgive bills. I wish people would stop conflating the terms "health care," "health insurance" and "Obamacare." Reporters ask guests things like: "Should Congress repeal health care?" I sure don't want anyone's health care repealed.
Reporters also routinely called Obamacare health "reform." But the definition of reform is: making something better. More government control won't do that. We should call politicians' insurance demands "big intrusive complex government micromanagement."
Let the private sector work. Let it discriminate.
SOURCE
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Beware the deceptive Language of the Left
The language of the Left is designed to push the debate in their direction, even when it conveys false information. The word for spending is spending, not a euphemism like "investment." The word for taxes is taxes, not "revenue enhancements." These words are brought into the debate for one purpose; to mislead.
Lou Dobbs invited Define America co-founder Jose Antonio Vargas on his Fox News show to debate Obama's unilateral declaration rescinding part of our immigration law. Vargas, a prominent writer, had recently announced that he was not a US citizen, even though he has lived here most of his life. Dobbs repeatedly referred to him and others here illegally as "illegals", and Vargas repeatedly corrected him saying they were "undocumented." What is the difference?
"Illegal" means that the individual is breaking the law. That seems pretty clear. People crossed the border illegally or illegally overstayed a visa (those born here to illegals are US citizens). "Undocumented" means that the individual has no documents, but may be here legally or illegally. It is the difference between driving without having obtained a driver's license, or driving when you left your driver's license home. If you are guilty of the former, suggesting you are the latter is simply false.
Recently The New York Times and National Public Radio invented some new terms. They referred to George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin, as a white Hispanic, or a white Latino. Why? Simple. They wanted to make the tragedy into a race-driven incident, even though by all accounts such an assumption is nonsense. Zimmerman is half white and half Latino. There is absolutely no evidence in his past or in the sequence of events leading up to the incident that indicated race was a factor. Common verbiage would describe him as Hispanic or Latino. Given those labels, or as the PC crowd says, a person of color, the race element in this tragedy disappears. Did the NYT or NPR, those august institutions, ever refer to Barack Obama as a white African American? Of course not.
"Stakeholder" is one of my favorites. In a capitalist system private property is vigorously protected, and the use of that property (within the law) is directed by its owner. This system has provided us with the most prosperous, most generous, freest nation in the history of mankind. The term stakeholder was invented by socialists to create the false impression that the public at large has the rights to that private property. The public has the right to expect an owner to obey the law and to honor his contracts, but that is all. If we don't like the owner's choices, we are free not to do business with him. If there are enough of us, he will get the message or cease to exist. Were the state to give the public the right to determine the use of that private property, all economic and social progress going forward would fall victim to the public's insatiable want of something for nothing.
"Social justice" has also joined the lexicon of the Left. The words sound very compassionate. Who can be against justice, especially in a social sense? In reality those who use it are simply trying to usurp private property rights to fund a redistributive agenda, one chasing an unachievable, false, utopian dream. The term is used to support and justify every socialist idea under the sun. Real social justice consists of protecting a man's right to the fruits of his labor, not simply because it is ethical, but because it provides the most goods and services, the best environmental care, the best healthcare and the best of everything else that we as a society are capable of producing, and for everyone.
Columbus thought he reached the Indian Ocean when he landed in the Antilles and named the people there "Indians." The term stuck long after the mistake was recognized, and for centuries it referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The PC crowd determined that it was a demeaning term and changed their reference to "Native American." Native American had been used for centuries to refer to anyone born on American soil, regardless of race, regardless of when. Why would they do this? Indian had nothing pejorative associated with it. My theory is that since the Left adapts to change quickly, during the transition it allowed them to claim the moral high ground when those of us with less verbal agility continue to use the newly designated "racist" term, Indian.
There are other reasons the Left change names. In the same way no liberal columnist wants to review any of their past predictions (invariably they are wrong), so too does the Left like to shed its failed past by changing names. Woodrow Wilson led the "progressive" movement until 1920, but his disregard for the Constitution, and such things as the Left's embrace of eugenics, soured the public on the movement. So, progressive was renamed "liberal." But the liberals' close ties with Communism, as well as with other unpopular policies such as their softness on crime, became a political liability, so in the 1980s they returned to the name "progressive" (no one remembered the Wilson era, most were dead by then). The problem is that no matter what they call themselves, they continue to champion the same failed policies.
Did anyone notice that all of the old Communist organizations and their members are today avid environmentalists? Same people, same ideas, just a different name. Is global warming science, or a political ploy designed to create world government?
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Thursday, June 28, 2012
It looks like McAfee are off their heads too
Following are some of the McAfee responses to my mirror sites:
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/tripod.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/green.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/food.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/pcwatch.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
Note that these sites are NOT the ones targeted by Norton/Symantec. It's an entirely different bit of buffoonery. I sent an enquiry to Norton but got no reply. I sent an enquiry to McAfee and my email was bounced back as spam! It's clear that none of these galoots want to talk to me and explain themselves. One of my readers commented that his Norton software seemed to him like a type of malware itself, it was so bad.
Following are some of the McAfee responses to my mirror sites:
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/tripod.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/green.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/food.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
“Use caution on this site.
http://jonjayray.comuv.com/pcwatch.html
A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow”
Note that these sites are NOT the ones targeted by Norton/Symantec. It's an entirely different bit of buffoonery. I sent an enquiry to Norton but got no reply. I sent an enquiry to McAfee and my email was bounced back as spam! It's clear that none of these galoots want to talk to me and explain themselves. One of my readers commented that his Norton software seemed to him like a type of malware itself, it was so bad.
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