The Real Lesson of the Shutdown

So much of government in Washington is nonessential.
One of the lessons of the Trump–Pelosi standoff on border security is that government shutdowns are a foolish way to resolve partisan disputes.

But the other lesson may be far more important. The partial shutdown, with agencies such as the Transportation, Agriculture, and State Departments, as well as other independent agencies, closed for business, demonstrated how irrelevant so much of our $4 trillion government is to the everyday lives of Americans.

As I traveled over the last several weeks to Florida, California, and many states in between, and asked people what they thought of the shutdown, many said they didn’t even know the government was shut down for more than a month. Their everyday lives were disrupted or inconvenienced only, if at all, in a trivial way. It turns out there are countless Americans who don’t watch CNN or MSNBC and so didn’t learn about the supposed horrors of agency closures.

This was a particularly painless shutdown for the average taxpayer because the essential activities of government were mostly unaffected. Seniors got their social-security checks. The military was protecting us. We got through the airports with minimal delays — until the last week when some TSA officials and air-traffic controllers weren’t on the job.

It was also telling that the only real “victims” of the shutdown (about whom the media obsessed) were 800,000 government employees who were furloughed. Yes, I know many people in Washington who work for the federal government who faced financial stress for several weeks (and I also know many for whom this was a deferred-pay vacation).

But wait a minute. What is the primary purpose of a government program or agency? To give workers a paycheck? I thought these agencies were in business to serve the taxpayers and provide important services for our economy and our citizens. Businesses don’t keep workers on the payroll if what they produce isn’t necessary to customers or if they don’t add to earnings. They certainly can’t do that if they are losing money. The federal government is $1 trillion in the red a year despite record revenues in 2018.

The media tried to find stories of major negative effects from the shutdown, but amazingly, their findings were pretty slim pickings. One of my favorites was that a climate-change report was going to be delayed. Say it ain’t so. The Wall Street Journal reported that paleontologists were forced to delay their dinosaur research. The horrors! Agencies like the Census may not be able to find out how many bathrooms you have in your house or how often you drive to work. But none of this is the government’s business anyway.

Yes, government is important, and liberals love to point to the very important things government does — like providing security at airports or food-safety inspections. But those public-safety functions are classified as “essential” government services. There were 800,000 government employees laid off due to the partial shutdown. Less than half are considered “essential.” Many of the other half are engaged in activities that are completely incidental to the lives of Americans in most parts of the country. I am not saying that all of these activities are not valuable. I am saying that for the benefit of taxpayers, congress and the president need to find out which are and which aren’t.

Now that the government is reopened, Congress needs to figure out what we can live without in terms of redundant, wasteful, and obsolete services. Congress could start by investigating the thousands upon thousands of examples of waste and misappropriation of funds. Why do federal-government workers get as many as 40 days a year in sick leave, vacation, holidays, personal days, and so on? Many private-sector workers don’t get benefits nearly this exorbitant.

Congress should also examine its spending priorities. Do we need an Urban Transit Agency? This should be conducted by cities and states, not the feds. Do we need a vast diplomatic corps at the State Department? Probably that could be cut in half. Do we need crop subsidies? Do we need the Defense Department to be spending money on climate change? Do we need to pay for foreign-aid programs or arrogant institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, all of which have done little to provide real and lasting economic aid to the poor around the world?

All of government today has more employees than our entire manufacturing sector in America. Twenty years ago, I wrote a book entitled: Government: America’s Number One Growth Industry. It still is, which happens to be the reason we have a $1 trillion deficit and $22 trillion debt. Institutions that lose money year after year after year can’t afford to be spending tens of billions of dollars on nonessential activities.

In October, Trump floated a proposal for every agency to cut at least 5 percent of its budget this year. The government shutdown has taught us how easy this should be.

SOURCE 

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"The Kulaks Must Be Liquidated as a Class"



Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she’s proposing asset forfeiture.

History is very short, if you look at it the right way.

The American Revolution seems like it was a very long time ago, but looked at with the right kind of eyes, it was the day before yesterday: The revolution of Washington and Jefferson inspired the French Revolution, which unhappily perverted the classical-liberal principles of the American Founders and created instead an ersatz religion purporting to be a cult of pure reason — le Culte de la Raison — which culminated in fanaticism, terror, and dictatorship. The French Revolution inspired the Russian Revolution, which created its own cult of pure reason — “scientific socialism” — and modeled its “enemies of the people” purges on French revolutionary practice, culminating in fanaticism, terror, and dictatorship. The Russian Revolution in turn inspired the Iranian one, which had intellectual roots in the Bolshevik experience in the Caucasus and culminated in fanaticism, terror, and dictatorship. The Iranians exported many of their revolutionary principles to Hugo Chávez, his United Socialist party, and their so-called Bolivarian Revolution (whose colectiovos gangs were modeled on Iran’s basji militias) which culminated in fanaticism, terror, and dictatorship, currently on particularly dramatic display.

In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap’n Crunch. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro does look a sight in his beauty-pageant sash and Mr. T-worthy gold chains. The people who endure his socialist government are eating zoo animals and pets in what was the richest country in South America.

Elizabeth Warren is going to look terrific in those mirrored aviator sunglasses and peaked captain’s hat. She’s spent half her life playing dress-up, morally — pretending to be an Indian — so she may as well dress the part of her aspirations. “Who are you wearing to the state dinner? Oscar de la Renta? Prada? Pinochet?”

Revolutions do not set out to be awful. Not usually. They just end up that way. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, many of them wanted to prohibit capital punishment, which they saw as a high-handed czarist institution. V. I. Lenin overruled them. “How can you make a revolution without executions?” he asked. The key to revolution in his mind — and in those of his revolutionary antecedents and descendants — was terror. “We shall return to terror and to economic terror,” he promised, in a revolution of “unrestricted power based on force, not law.”

Senator Warren apparently has found her guiding spirit and has announced along with her presidential campaign a campaign of economic terror based on force, not law. Specifically, she has proposed to begin seizing a portion of the assets of some wealthy Americans, a course of action that the federal government has no constitutional power to undertake. The seizure of assets is a fundamentally different thing from the taxation of income, which itself took a constitutional amendment to implement. What Warren is proposing is essentially a federal version of the hated asset-forfeiture programs that have been so much abused by law-enforcement agencies — minus the allegation of criminal misconduct and made universal and annual.

The senator is in a bit of a panic: She hadn’t expected to face a challenge from her left in her quest for the Democratic nomination, but as her entire party lurches in a chávista direction, she has been forced to go one step farther lest she fall into the “moderate” class, whose members almost certainly will be slaughtered in the 2020 Democratic primary. And so she proposes this ridiculous and illegal course of action.

She may not be the radical she pretends to be, but Senator Warren has pretended to be a lot of things. A Cherokee, for one, which is good for a laugh, but perhaps not the worst of it. Her longing for fame — and money and power — is impossible to miss. She spent a period trying to launch a career as a writer of dopey self-help books (The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan!) and then tried on the costume of a Lou Dobbs-style populist China hawk, and even in her scourge-of-Wall-Street incarnation, she couldn’t help cribbing from Margaret Thatcher in pandering to Dobbs, then at CNN: “One of the problems with spending money in this way is that at some point we really do run out of money.” She boasted that her little bureaucratic fiefdom — the Congressional Oversight Panel — was called “COP.” Her “professor of color” act got her a couple of cushy academic postings and a net worth of a few million dollars. I covered her Senate race against Scott Brown and watched her doing a pretty poor impersonation of an Irish-American ward-heeler in Boston, clapping along awkwardly to “Charlie on the M.T.A.” like some animatronic Muldoon. If she has to pretend to be Hugo Chávez, it won’t be her first act of cultural appropriation. And the recipe book should be a hoot.

Funny thing about Senator Warren’s asset-forfeiture scheme. Like many similar proposals, it probably would not raise much revenue and might in fact leave the country as a whole economically worse off. And the people advising Senator Warren on that are perfectly content with that outcome, because, as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman argue in the case of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to radically increase income taxes, this is to be understood not as an economic question but as a moral one: It is simply morally obligatory to hurt wealthy people. “The point of high top marginal income tax rates is to constrain the immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches,” they write.

And who gets to decide what’s merited and what’s unmerited? What are the chances that, say, Senator Warren’s modest millions or her multimillion-dollar home are deemed “unmerited”? What decides, of course, is “unrestricted power based on force, not law,” because the law cannot substantially answer that kind of question but can only instead encode the desires of people with power, which is what Senator Warren is seeking more of.

Again, we have been here before.

When the socialist schemes of Joseph Stalin et al. foundered, they blamed the “kulaks,” i.e. those who had enjoyed the “unmerited accumulation of riches.” There was never any real definition of a “kulak.” Basically, if you had one cow and your neighbor had two, he was a kulak. Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” as a necessary precondition for the progress of his program, which was, like Kamala Harris, “for the people.” Dekulakization (раскулачивание) was responsible for the deaths of about 5 million subjects of the workers’ paradise. This was necessary, the socialists argued, because the kulaks dominated the political party system (“for the rich, wealth begets power,” Zucman writes), because expropriating their wealth was necessary to fund benefits for the people (“The affluent,” Saez and Zucman write, “can contribute more to the public coffers. And given the revenue needs of the country, it is necessary”), because the kulaks were hoarders (under the headline “Elizabeth Warren is trying to save capitalism from itself,” David Atkins of Washington Monthly decries the “artificial lack of resources caused by the looting and hoarding of the obscenely wealthy”), etc.

But do our modern progressives really propose to liquidate these “hoarders” as a class?

Saez and Zucman write hopefully of the prospect that high tax rates would make the class of people with larger incomes “largely disappear.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez declares it “immoral” that we have a “system that allows billionaires to exist.” Marshall Steinbaum, the research director of the progressive Roosevelt Institute, wrote: “It’s increasingly clear that having wealthy people around is a luxury our society can no longer afford.”

And, so, here we are again: The kulaks must be liquidated as a class. But who is a kulak?

You may not feel like a kulak. You may take comfort in hearing that only the “tippy-top” wealthiest people are to be expropriated in the name of social justice. Those children at Covington Catholic probably didn’t think they were Nazis a week ago, either.

SOURCE 

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Trump’s Re-election Chances May Be Better Than You Think

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Whether or not they like Trump, millions of voters still think the president is all that stands between them and socialism, radical cultural transformation, and social chaos.
What are Donald Trump’s chances for reelection in 2020?

If history is any guide, pretty good.

In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster.

A new generation of younger, more conservative Republicans led by firebrand Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Republicans also picked up eight Senate seats in 1994 to take majority control of both houses of Congress.

It was no wonder that Republicans thought the 1996 presidential election would be a Republican shoo-in. But Republicans nominated 73-year-old Senate leader Bob Dole, a sober but otherwise uninspired Washington fixture.

By September of 1996, “comeback kid” Clinton had a Gallup approval rating of 60 percent. Dole was crushed in an Electoral College landslide.

Barack Obama was given a similarly dismal prognosis after the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats. Republicans regained majority control of the House, though Democrats clung to a narrow majority in the Senate. At the time, Obama had an approval rating in the mid-40s.

Republicans once again figured Obama would be a one-term president. Yet they nominated a Dole-like candidate in the 2012 election. Republican nominee Mitt Romney had little appeal to Republicans’ conservative base and was easily caricatured by the left as an out of touch elite.

By late 2012, Obama’s approval rating was consistently at or above 50 percent, and he wound up easily beating Romney.

What is the significance of these rebound stories for Trump, who had a better first midterm result than either Clinton or Obama and similarly low approval ratings?

People, not polls, elect presidents.

Presidents run for reelection against real opponents, not public perceptions. For all the media hype, voters often pick the lesser of two evils, not their ideals of a perfect candidate.

We have no idea what the economy or the world abroad will be like in 2020. And no one knows what the country will think of the newly Democrat-controlled Congress in two years.

The public has been hearing a lot from radical new House representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). Their pledges to deliver “Medicare for All,” to phase out fossil fuels, and to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service are occasionally delivered with snark. Tlaib recently used profanity to punctuate her desire to see Trump impeached.

But much of the public supports Trump’s agenda of deregulation, increased oil and gas production, getting tough with China on trade, and stopping illegal immigration.

What if the Democrats impeach Trump, even knowing that a Republican Senate would never convict him?

When Republicans did that to Bill Clinton, his approval rating went up. Some Republican senators even joined the Democrats in the effort to acquit Clinton. As a reward for the drawn-out drama around the impeachment, Republicans lost seats in both the 1998 and 2000 House elections.

We still don’t have any idea whom the Democrats will nominate to run against Trump. Will they go the 1996 or 2012 Republican route with a predictable has-been such as Joe Biden, who will turn 78 shortly after the 2020 election?

Well-known candidates from the Senate such as Walter Mondale in 1984, Dole in 1996, John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 have a poor recent track record in recent presidential elections. They are usually nominated only by process of elimination and the calling in of political chits rather than due to grassroots zeal.

Democrats can continue their hard-left drift and nominate socialist Bernie Sanders, or they can try again to elect the first female president, either Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, both of whom represent the far left.

But going to extremes did not work well in 1972, when leftist Democratic Senator George McGovern was crushed by incumbent Richard Nixon. The Republicans learned that lesson earlier when they nominated Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were wiped out.

Whether or not they like Trump, millions of voters still think the president is all that stands between them and socialism, radical cultural transformation, and social chaos.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump was ahead of the times: Saw years ago the trouble with open borders, while others were downplaying it

Donald Trump’s wall draws a line between two centuries. The 20th-century dream of a liberal international order is dimming. The new world order is nationalist, Western and unrepentant.

In 2015, Trump wrote the blueprint for what would become his winning election manifesto. In "Great Again", immigration, infrastructure and national security formed the basis of renewed patriotism. To get an idea of how essential building the southern wall was to his election manifesto, note the chapter title: "Immigration: Good Walls Make Good Neighbours".

No Democrat can feign shock about Trump’s border wall demand. It has been in the offing for years. Despite it forming the core of Trump’s winning election campaign, or perhaps because of it, the Democrats are holding the US government to ransom by blocking funds for construction.

Like open-border activists the world over, they use race-baiting inflammatory rhetoric to conceal the irrationality of porous border policy. But people beyond the beltway know there will be no liberty in the world unless free world nations defend their borders.

The southern border wall is estimated to cost 0.01 per cent of federal funding. It will be designed to deter people-smugglers and traffickers. Republicans are aiming to create a disincentive for gangs who profit from the movement of people across the southern border.

There is a large-scale illegal immigration problem in the US. About 400,000 migrants were caught trying to cross the border last year. Senate Republicans report 6000 were gang members. There were 60,000 unaccompanied children who arrived at the border in the last financial year — a 25 per cent increase. About 70 per cent of aspiring immigrants become victims of violence or trafficking en route to the US border.

If Trump needed evidence that the border wall constitutes a national emergency, the Democrats are providing it readily. Their refusal to support a hard border endangers US citizens while enabling criminal activity, people-smugglers and trafficking. But the irrationality of the American Left runs deep. In response to Trump’s Oval Office address on border security last week, #MeToo activist Rose McGowan tweeted: “Trump was grooming hard tonight. Hitler-Ian rhetoric.” Bette Midler compared his approach to Munchausen by proxy. It would be better simply to emphasise Trump’s historical claim that Mexico would pay for the wall.

The convulsions over border security in the US reflect the broader shift in geopolitics triggered by mass migration from the global south. Australia has fought a protracted battle to secure borders by introducing boat turnbacks and tougher vetting procedures while maintaining offshore immigration processing.

The Liberal Coalition government has thwarted 80 people-smuggling operations in five years. The Australian reported last year that 33 boats had been turned back and more than 3300 illegal immigrants denied entry.

In contrast to Australia, the EU has facilitated people-smuggling and trafficking operations by demanding open borders.

Recent data from Eurostat, the European statistical agency, found 618,780 non-EU citizens were illegally in the union. The problems caused by malformed immigration policy are comprehensive. Last year, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees found about 43,000 migrants were unable to read or write. Despite targeted language courses, they were unable to learn German.

Language difficulties result in many migrants being unemployable in the West. The consequent welfare dependency coupled with a failure to integrate are creating a perfect storm in the West as public resentment rises in response to poorly designed migration policy.

Statistical agencies estimate the number of undocumented mig­rants in the US is about 11 million. A recent Yale University study by Fazel-Zarandi et al. put the figure at closer to double that. The think tank Federation for American Immigration Reform issued a study that estimated the cost of resettling refugees for the five years to 2016. The authors, Matthew O’Brien and Spencer Raley, included costs for various government services, public education and housing, Medicaid and food stamps. They concluded that for the first five years, resettling a refugee cost about $US79,600 ($110,200) in taxpayer funding. Across the period studied, taxpayers paid $US8.8bn for refugee resettlement.

While it is contentious to use a utilitarian calculus to assess refugees’ contribution to society, the fin­ancial crises that have rocked Western countries coupled with unprecedented debt are forcing a rethink on immigration and population policy. Many people are questioning the sustainability of mass immigration programs.

The rise of jihad as a Western condition has contributed further to public scepticism about the social and economic benefits of mass immigration and accepting large cohorts of asylum-seekers.

The argument for open borders fell foul of public opinion as violent crime rose, public debt increased and activists failed to counter evidence that lax border security had enabled terrorism.

As the backlash against porous borders grew, politicians, officials and the media no longer could depend on shaming dissenters into silence. Instead of acknowledging the failure of multiculturalism and improving border security in response to it, globalists refused to reckon with reality.

The EU and UN defended the old world order by vilifying dissenters from porous border policy as racist, xenophobic and intolerant. In late 2016, the then UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, lashed out at conservative politicians.

His bizarre speech at The Hague illustrated the globalist panic about democratic demands for national security. He said: “I am the global voice on human rights, universal rights; elected by all governments.” He compared Trump and Viktor Orban to Islamic State. But the emotive rhetoric failed. The political cor­rectness and collective guilt that had kept dissenters in check for decades succumbed to grassroots resistance marshalled by politicians with realist instincts.

Trump understands the new world order and the natural instinct for security that gave rise to it. He won the US presidency with the vow to make America great again in the wake of globalism. His political future is nailed to the wall.

SOURCE 

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Reality Check: Support for Single-Payer Healthcare Craters When Americans Discover Higher Taxes, Longer Wait Times

Leftists are crowing about a new public survey that they claim shows robust, or even overwhelming, support for single-payer healthcare -- which they refer to as "Medicare for All."  As usual, whenever Medicare is invoked in this context, it is imperative to note the mathematical reality that the existing program is currently on an express train to insolvency, according to government accountants.  Undaunted, an increasing number of Democrats are determined to take the financially-doomed program for seniors and massively expand it to the entire population.  And look, they say, it's popular:

Overall, a majority of Americans (56/42) initially favor "Medicare for All."  But as I've argued repeatedly, and will continue to argue, this is a disastrous policy.  It would (1) uproot well over 150,000,000 Americans from their existing healthcare arrangements, (2) hand much more unaccountable power over to an unresponsive and often incompetent federal bureaucracy, (3) inevitably increase wait times for care through rationing, (4) deeply hamper America's world-leading innovation in the critical field of medical technology, and (5) require truly enormous tax increases on every single American worker and family.  How might those, shall we say, "policy tradeoffs" sit with voters?  Not well:

The poll found that Americans initially support “Medicare-for-all,” 56 percent to 42 percent. However, those numbers shifted dramatically when people were asked about the potential impact, pro and con. Support increased when people learned “Medicare-for-all” would guarantee health insurance as a right (71 percent) and eliminate premiums and reduce out-of-pocket costs (67 percent). But if they were told that a government-run system could lead to delays in getting care or higher taxes, support plunged to 26 percent and 37 percent, respectively. “The issue that will really be fundamental would be the tax issue,” said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who reviewed the poll. He pointed out that state single-payer efforts in Vermont and Colorado failed because of concerns about the tax increases needed to put them in place.

Democrats inveighed against the GOP-passed tax reform law of 2017 by warning -- falsely -- that it was a tax increase on the middle class, eventually shifting to complain that the middle class tax cuts weren't permanent (before voting en masse against making them permanent).  In light of the political anathema that is hiking taxes on the non-"rich," let there be no mistake: Single-payer health care would absolutely, positively force tax rates much higher on middle income and working class Americans.  Please recall this menu of ugly options to cover the annual (!) $3.2 to $3.8 trillion price tag (for context, the entire federal budget in 2017 was $4 trillion) of "Medicare for All," which would bend the total American healthcare cost curve upward by four-to-six trillion dollars over its first decade alone:

 The Mercatus Study -- like others -- shows that "Medicare for All" would require a federal tax hike of roughly 10% of GDP even after capturing state govt. savings.

But capturing the savings to families into a "single-payer tax" is not easy -- which is why Sanders comes up short

Perhaps the most efficient way to achieve that would be to combine the top three revenue generators listed: Raise the payroll tax (paid for by workers and employers) by ten percentage points for everyone, impose a brand new 20 percent national VAT/sales tax, and hike income tax rates across the board by ten percentage points.  Not one of those three; all of those three.  That is an extraordinary, radical, humongous package of tax increases on virtually all Americans.  Please notice that cobbling together a string of more populist "fair share" nibblings that tend to poll better would result in woefully insufficient revenues.

If the general concept of tax increases to pay for single-payer drags public support down into the 30's, how would the bruising blend of hikes mentioned above go over with Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer?

As for delays in treatment, that consequence is an unavoidable side effect of government-run systems, as we've seen at the VA, and in places like Great Britain (where entire types of surgeries are sometimes postponed nationwide for months, with even more drastic measures being debated), and Canada. 

Americans would have their existing plans canceled, be given far fewer options, wait longer (already polling at 26 percent) for care, and relinquish decision-making power to a centralized government machine under "Medicare for All."  And that's even if we somehow had a realistic or palatable way to pay for it, which we don't. 

There's a reason why this idea crashed and burned in Colorado, was abandoned in uber-liberal Vermont, and would shatter California's broken budget.  The failed state-level experiments are already speaking for themselves -- loudly.  I'll leave you with a useful refutation of the deeply misleading statistics that are often invoked to justify demolishing America's world-class healthcare status quo in favor of a government supremacist regime.

SOURCE 

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The FDA is on a mission to 'protect' you from harmless products

Regardless of how you feel about any given government shutdown, they do provide a great opportunity to evaluate what the government is actually doing when agencies are funded. A strong argument can be made that President Trump and his supporters should be eager to reopen the government so that the administration can continue its unprecedented work in cutting regulatory red tape.

However, this is not so much the case when it comes to the Food and Drug Administration. Some of the current agenda items at the FDA should leave supporters of the Trump administration scratching their heads.

While it is hard to tell what exactly is going on inside federal agencies whether the government is open or not, we do know that the FDA, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of critical consumer products such as medicine, cosmetics, and, of course, food, is considering major regulatory actions against products that not only aren’t hurting anyone, but allow consumers to reduce their risk of having life-threatening illnesses.

The FDA’s crusade against e-cigarettes and other reduced-risk nicotine products is the one grabbing the most attention. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb last Friday just trial-ballooned the prospect of completely banning e-cigarettes and vaping products. FDA also appears to be considering a regulation on using dairy terms in the name of plant-based products.

That’s right, the FDA is positioning itself to go after almond milk and vegan cheese.

The current impasse over funding the government is entirely about immigration and border security, but this seems like as good a time as any to ask why we’re funding what can only be described as radical nanny-statism at the FDA. Vaping and vegan products aren’t likely to find a lot of sympathizers outside of the people who actually consume them. But perception and popularity generally do not breed good policy, which is a reason why we supposedly have “independent” regulatory agencies like the FDA.

The idea that companies using dairy terms in their plant-based product names constitutes a crisis deserving FDA attention is ridiculous on its face and most certainly does not justify a massive breach of these companies’ First Amendment rights. What’s more likely happening here is a giveaway to the dairy industry in terms of a regulatory boot on the neck of their competitors — as if the billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies for dairy producers are not enough. There are already regulations forcing companies to clearly list the ingredients of their food products.

If these are insufficient to protect people from getting confused by almond milk, then that’s a problem for the Department of Education, not the FDA.

Despite the obvious public health crisis presented by conventional cigarette use, there is no evidence to suggest that e-cigarettes and vaping products constitute any sort of major threat. Nicotine is undeniably addictive, however it is not known to cause cancer. Getting products to market that will safely deliver nicotine to the millions of people who struggle to quit smoking or choose not to will save countless lives, not endanger them. Other countries realize the amazing benefits offered by reduced-risk nicotine products, not emergencies. According to Cancer Research UK, “Switching from tobacco to e-cigarettes substantially reduces a major health risk.”

Cancer Research UK further adds that no significant evidence exists that the chemicals in the vapor emitted from these products present any danger:

"Some studies have found chemicals in e-cigarette vapour that are known to cause health problems. But these studies have tended to use artificial conditions, and when good quality e-cigarettes are used normally (e.g. not overheated), there are far fewer harmful chemicals present in the vapour than in tobacco smoke. If the e-liquid is being overheated it tends to produce an acrid, unpleasant taste — you’ll know if this happens."

Restricting e-cigarette and vaping products because they might be dangerous when misused is a terrible precedent to set in terms of consumer product safety. It’s hard to imagine a product that isn’t potentially dangerous when misused.

When the government inevitably opens back up, most Americans will likely be relieved to have government watchdogs back on their normal beat. However, the overzealous agenda of the current FDA begs the question: What good is a watchdog that gets distracted and bites innocent people?

SOURCE 

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Trump hatred among British conservatives too

There's still a small segment of the GOP that doesn't like Trump (think Jeff Flake). There's a larger segment in Britain

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper has apologised and paid damages to US first lady Melania Trump after publishing an article it says contained many false statements.

The newspaper said on Saturday it apologises “unreservedly” to Mrs Trump and her family for any embarrassment caused by the content of a cover story published on January 19 in the newspaper’s weekly magazine supplement.

“As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs,” The Telegraph said.

The newspaper did not disclose the size of the settlement with Mrs Trump. The Telegraph said it falsely characterised Mrs Trump’s father’s personality, falsely reported the reasons she left an architecture program, and falsely reported her career as a model was unsuccessful before she met Donald Trump.

“We accept that Mrs Trump was a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling work without his assistance,” the newspaper said, also acknowledging it had incorrectly reported the year when the couple first met.

“The claim that Mrs Trump cried on election night is also false,” The Telegraph said.

It also retracted the statement that Mrs Trump’s father, mother and sister had relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Trump.

The Telegraph is one of Britain’s leading broadsheet newspapers and is traditionally aligned with the Conservative Party.

It is not the first time Mrs Trump has successfully challenged the British press.

She received damages and an apology from the Daily Mail in 2017 after bringing a libel action against the popular tabloid.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Barmaid Sandy



That she has a degree in economics and international relations proves that if you have a good rack and Leftist attitudes you don't actually have to know anything

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Britain is doing well economically under a conservative administration too

The number of people in work has hit another high and wages have continued to grow at their fastest pace in a decade despite a slowdown in the economy and the uncertainty created by Brexit.

Employment rose by 141,000 to 32.5 million in the three months to November, the highest since records began in 1971, the Office for National Statistics said. While unemployment increased by 8,000 to 1.37 million, the total is 68,000 lower than a year ago. This pushed the jobless rate to 4 per cent, the lowest since 1975.

SOURCE 

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Leftists are attacking America’s bedrock institutions to advance “social justice”

Progressives want to radically transform America’s noble experiment in self-government, the securing of inalienable rights of the individual, and the rule of law within the structure of a constitutional republic. They prefer a model of an all-powerful government expanding its reach as necessary to bring about their evolving conception of a virtuous society. They use epithets such as “racist” and “bigot” to silence opposition to their leftist agenda and try to ruin the livelihoods of those who won't be silenced. When that does not work, progressives resort to “hate speech” codes enforced by sympathetic social media and college campus censors.

The liberal media’s darling and possible candidate for the presidency, former Democrat Representative Beto O'Rourke, questioned whether the United States can “still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago.” That’s nothing new for progressives. They have been mouthing much the same thing for over a century, from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama and beyond. They believe that the Constitution is nothing more than an outdated document written by dead white males to protect their property interests.

President Woodrow Wilson, the progressives’ hero who was a blatant racist himself, urged that the Constitution be treated as a living document and that its core principle of checks and balances be discarded.  “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live,” he wrote.

Barack Obama criticized the Constitution’s focus on “negative liberties” rather than saying “what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.” Obama had in mind “the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”

In an op-ed column for the New York Times entitled “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” a progressive law professor, Louis Michael Seidman, wrote that “our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions” is to blame for “a dysfunctional political system.” In a law review article that he wrote in 2018, the professor defined progressivism today as “a modern political stance favoring an activist government that strives to achieve the public good, including the correction of unjust distributions produced by the market and the dismantling of power hierarchies based on traits like race, nationality, gender, class, and sexual orientation.”

Progressives are not content with tearing down the U.S. Constitution’s pillars of liberty to advance their idea of “the public good.” They also believe it necessary to delegitimize traditional Western religious beliefs and their adherents as evil vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

“Christians became moral renegades,” wrote Rachel Lu, a contributor at The Federalist, “because the mainstream culture shifted, leaving our beliefs ‘on the wrong side of history’ as progressives have envisioned it. We’re vilified for maintaining positions that have been embedded in the Christian tradition for centuries. If the dominant culture can change enough to permit this level of kulturkampf against an ancient Western faith, who can say how much further it might go?”

Totalitarian purges and persecutions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrate how much further such enforced cultural transformation can go. Progressives like to think of themselves as too enlightened to go down such a destructive path. However, they mimic the dogma of the French Revolution’s Republic of Virtue that perverted the reasoned enlightened thought and political philosophy upon which the Founding Fathers had drawn for their own inspiration.

The Founding Fathers sought to preserve individual freedom of worship and practice while eschewing the establishment of any official state religion. French revolutionary zealots, on the other hand, sought to de-Christianize France as much as possible. Their secular belief, based on the slogan "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," was intended to replace religious beliefs. Temples of Reason took the place of churches, which were treated as the enemies of the Republic of Virtue.

Progressives today target traditional religious beliefs to make way for the dominance of secularism in all realms of American society. Moral absolutes of good and evil based on religious truths get in the way of progressives’ application of evolving cultural norms to define morality. In arguing for their belief in moral relativism, they seek to marginalize people of faith and interfere with their freedom of religion. Progressives use all instruments available to them to enforce their code of secular virtues.

For example, progressives are using activist courts to force Christian photographers and bakers to employ their expressive skills to celebrate same-sex weddings. An activist federal judge in Pennsylvania just blocked the Trump administration from implementing a rule that would have allowed employers to decline to offer contraceptive coverage in their health insurance policies on moral or religious grounds.

Progressives troll and slander people of faith on social media. A recent example is the vicious onslaught against Second Lady Karen Pence for daring to decide to teach art at a traditional Christian school in Virginia. One anti-religion progressive tweeted that “Karen Pence is an extremist bigot” and “a dangerous monster” who is “unfit to even be around kids, let alone teach them.” A fellow hater of religion replied that “exposing children to the toxic virus of religion before they are 21 should be considered child abuse.”

This anti-religion attitude has moved from social media to the halls of Congress. Nominees for federal judgeships have been lambasted for their personal religious views during Senate confirmation hearings. For example, Senator Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Senator Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, quizzed Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, over his membership in the Catholic charity organization known as the Knights of Columbus. The senators were uncomfortable with some of the religious-based stances the Knights of Columbus organization has taken on such issues as same-sex marriage and abortion. They wanted to know if Mr. Buescher would resign from the Knights of Columbus once he is confirmed. Last year, Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., went after another Trump nominee for the federal bench, Amy Coney Barrett, for her Catholic beliefs. “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” Senator Feinstein said. Evidently, these senators have forgotten that Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

The zealots of the French Revolution went after people who, in their minds, had strayed from the path of virtue and expressed impure thoughts favoring the interests of the rich and powerful propertied classes. The progressives of today likewise believe, in the words of Professor Seidman, that free speech “favors status quo distributions and, so, the rich and powerful.”  He added that “the free speech right tends to obstruct the realization of progressive objectives.”

It follows, therefore, that progressives must seek to enforce their own code of acceptable speech. Words deemed offensive to certain “oppressed” identity groups would themselves be considered acts of violence that must be suppressed. Anyone who crosses the line is subject to boycott, ostracism, vitriolic personal attacks online, firing and even physical assault.

Of course, progressives can hurl pretty much any epithet at Christians and Jews they want and get away with it. They hide behind the First Amendment. But, for example, when a public high school teacher simply declined, out of religious conviction, to use the politically correct pronoun for a self-identified transgender student, the teacher was fired. “I am being punished for what I haven’t said,” the fired teacher told a Virginia newspaper. After all, once you know the gender that someone identifies with, “if you continue to misgender them, that’s when you get into violent territory,” wrote a transgender activist.

During the French Revolution, the Enragés were a direct action group who advocated radical measures including violence to achieve social and economic transformation on behalf of the poor who constituted the bottom 90 percent of the population.

Today’s progressives are the 21st century’s version of the Enragés, without there being anything remotely close in the United States to the horrendous conditions that inflamed the rage of the French masses. Progressives wear their rage on their sleeves. Just recall those who disrupted the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, hounded senators at their homes, issued death threats, and then clawed at the Supreme Court doors when they did not get their way. Protesters in the third anti-Trump Women’s March this weekend held up signs with radical slogans such as “White Old Men…Extinction Nearing!” and “Pussy is God.”

There is little difference between today’s version of progressivism and democratic socialism. Both call for radical change in America’s government, economy and society in the service of “social justice” for the “oppressed.”

The New York Democratic Socialists of America  tweeted last year their core demands: "Abolish profit, abolish prisons, abolish cash bail, abolish borders." Its platform has moved to the House of Representatives in the person of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was recently elected as a progressive Democrat congresswoman from New York. She is leading the charge for such radical ideas as confiscatory taxes, a rapid change-over to a fossil fuel free economy, government-run health care for all, and open borders. “I do think we are in a crisis of late-stage capitalism,” she claimed. Evidently, historically low unemployment, including for African-Americans and Hispanics, is a “crisis” according to the self-described radical Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.

We are at the crossroads that Ronald Reagan foresaw nearly fifty-five years ago in his 1964 speech entitled “A Time for Choosing.”  He observed that “the full power of centralized government was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. Either we accept the responsibility for our own destiny, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual belief in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

The progressives want our country to abandon the American Revolution and its legacy of constrained governmental power and the protection of individuals’ inalienable rights. In the progressives’ version of the French Revolution’s Republic of Virtue, border barriers are “immoral,” masculinity is “toxic,” all white persons in America are born “privileged,” due process depends on the racial or sexual identity of the accused and accuser, and biological sex is no more than an “oppressive” social construct.  Equality of outcome must be enforced through massive government action to redistribute wealth and control major sectors of the economy. All this does not represent the land of the free that many of us grew up in. Rather, we would be taking what Ronald Reagan described as “the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

SOURCE 

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The crusade against masculinity

Courage, stoicism and autonomy are things we should all strive for

Toxic masculinity has emerged as the target of choice of many identitarians. That said, the term itself has almost become redundant, since masculinity itself is now increasingly framed as toxic, as a kind of poison.

The recent entry of the term ‘toxic masculinity’ into mainstream media discussions – as we saw last week with the controversy over Gillette’s #MeToo-inspired advert – coincides with a growing tendency to cast men, especially white men, as the key obstacle to a just, ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ society. It is important to note that the crusade is not simply against men, but against the values associated with men. Outwardly, the wrath of the campaign is directed against male violence, entitlement and sexual aggressiveness. But this crusade is also intensely hostile to virtues such as courage, risk-taking, self-control and stoicism. These once-celebrated values are treated as pathologies.

The invention of toxic masculinity is really an attempt to pathologise masculine identity. Our era is characterised by the flourishing and celebration of a growing number of identities, but it makes an exception for male identity. That cannot be celebrated. Indeed, male identity has all but become what the sociologist Erving Goffman, in his classic study Stigma, characterised as a ‘spoiled identity’.

A spoiled identity is one that lacks any redeeming moral qualities. It is an identity that invites stigma and scorn. What is perhaps unique to the spoiled identity of masculinity is that it has not only been morally devalued – it has also been medicalised. The American Psychological Association, for example, recently published guidelines for dealing with boys and men which explicitly present masculinity as a medical problem.

According to the APA, traditional masculinity is ‘marked by stoicism, competitiveness’; it casually couples these values with ‘dominance and aggression’. It says that the bad habits associated with masculinity, ‘like suppressing emotions and masking distress’, often start early in life and are ‘psychologically harmful’.

Psychology has a long history of denigrating identities by medicalising them. Until the 1970s, homosexuality was broadly treated as an illness. Today, it seems, it is the turn of masculinity to be cast in the role of a dangerous pathology.

These guidelines reflect a wider cultural crusade against masculinity which is aimed at re-engineering boys and young men. As one of the authors of the guidelines, Ryon McDermott explains, ‘If we can change men, [then] we can change the world’. From this standpoint, masculinity is the moral equivalent of a disease that must be eradicated.

Since the rapid ascendancy of the #MeToo movement, the moral crusade against masculinity has gained widespread support among the cultural elites and mainstream media. And now psychology is providing the intellectual resources that might give this crusade the authority of scientific expertise.

In truth, though, it is not science but moralising that informs the APA guidelines. The APA condemns so-called masculine values while counterposing them to what it considers emotionally correct values.

Since the 1990s, the emotional inadequacy of men has been a constant theme in psychological literature. The central argument being that the failure of men to seek help, display their emotions and acknowledge their vulnerability harms them and others. The term ‘toxic masculinity’ has been developed to disparage stoic men who are drawn towards autonomous behaviour and self-control.

The apparent inability of masculinity to acquiesce to weakness is framed as a fatal flaw in the male psyche. Self-control and the aspiration for individual autonomy are presented as psychologically destructive impulses. Indeed, the therapeutic profession has continually decried the tendency of young boys to aspire to autonomy. As two British psychologists, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, wrote in The Times in 1999, ‘Stereotypical ideas about masculine toughness deny a boy his emotions and rob him of the chance to develop the full range of emotional resources’.

This new hostility to masculine values is not simply a hostility to men. Women who display such ‘masculine’ characteristics as self-control and strong ambition have also come under intense suspicion. Men who act like women are clearly preferred to women who behave like men. According to today’s emotionally correct hierarchy, feminine women come out on top, feminine men beat masculine women for second place, and ‘macho’ men come last.

The stigmatisation of masculine behaviour actually corrodes the psychological and moral development of boys and young men. Young boys are continually taught that they are morally and emotionally inferior to their female counterparts. Many of them are led to believe that unless they cease behaving like boys, they will never become emotionally literate and be able to cope with the challenges of life. Teaching children that masculine behaviour is a cultural crime disorients young boys. Many young men today find the transition to adulthood confusing because values that are associated with being a man receive so little cultural validation.

Humanity as a whole suffers from this crusade against values that are (wrongly) attributed to men. Courage, autonomy and risk-taking have been central to the development of the human spirit. Contrary to the APA’s new guidelines, the ethos of stoicism serves well those who face difficult experiences. Humanist values will suffer a severe setback if this crusade against so-called male values continues.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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All babies are born equal, no matter their race or class (?)

Do-gooder BS gets really extreme here.  What they did was equalize the mothers in major ways and then discovered that their babies were equal too!  If a student had handed me a research proposal as dumb as that, I would have failed it.  IQ, health and much else is inherited and IQ is quite well related to physical health, wealth, social position etc. So the equalizations they did would have strongly equalized IQ as well

But that's not the worst of it. They examined IQ only up to age 2.  That is also hilarious.  You cannot reliably measure IQ at age 2.  Any scores you get at that age have little or no relation to scores at ages 16 or 30 (for instance)

What a shemozzle!  Totally unwarranted inferences from a brainless study

Babies born in similar circumstances will thrive regardless of race or ­geography, Oxford-led research has found, quashing the idea that race or class determines intelligence.

In a scientific first, the team of ­researchers tracked the physical and intellectual development of babies around the world from the earliest days after conception to age two.

“At every single stage we’ve shown that healthy mothers have healthy ­babies and that healthy babies all grow at exactly the same rate,” said Prof ­Stephen Kennedy, the co-director of the Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute.

“It doesn’t matter where you are living, it doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, it doesn’t matter what your race and ­ethnicity is, receiving decent medical care and nutrition is the key.”

The INTERGROWTH-21st Project, led jointly by Prof Kennedy and Prof José Villar at Oxford, involved nearly 60,000 mothers and babies, tracking growth in the womb, then followed more than 1,300 of the children, measuring growth and development.

The mothers – in locations as diverse as Brazil, India and Italy – were chosen because they were in good health and lived in similar, clean, urban environments. Their babies scored similarly on both physical and intellectual development.

The study should help settle the debate over the role of genetics in determining intelligence, which has been rumbling since the publication of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve in the Nineties. The book argued that a “cognitive elite” was becoming separated from the general population.

“There’s still a substantial body of opinion out there in both the scientific and lay communities who genuinely believe that intelligence is predominantly determined by genes and the environment that you’re living in and that your parents and grandparents were living in and their nutritional and health status are not relevant,” said Prof Kennedy. “Well, that’s clearly not the case.”

SOURCE 

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Another Nuclear Option to Clear Judicial Backlog?

If there's one thing President Donald Trump has been dogged about — besides feeding his Twitter habit — it's the pace he's kept in sending judicial nominees to the Senate. For most of the first half of his term, he was getting approvals at a blistering pace. But as the 115th Congress closed, the petulant antics of lame-duck GOP Sen. Jeff Flake left the president with dozens of nominees who didn't get through the process. As our Thomas Gallatin wrote late last year, "Hopefully, with Flake gone and a larger majority, Senate Republicans can make up lost ground and get Trump's nominees confirmed at a rapid pace."

To that end, President Trump has renominated a slate of 51 jurists — including one for Brett Kavanaugh's old seat and another for a newly created judgeship in the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review — in his latest effort to put a dent in the 140 judicial vacancies currently without nominees. (Six vacancies in various district courts have nominees pending.) One would think that without Flake to gum up the works and an enhanced Senate majority of 53 Republican senators — a majority that makes moderates like Maine's Susan Collins and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski less of an obstacle in seating conservative jurists — that Trump's nominees would sail through.

Unfortunately, minority Democrats have found a new stalling tactic as they try to run out the clock on Trump's term. Hot Air's Jazz Shaw points out, "The reason for this [delay is] the fact that Democrats are dragging their feet as much as possible and demanding a full 30 hours of allowable debate after cloture, even in cases where no serious objections have been raised and the candidate will clearly be confirmed anyway." At 30 hours per nominee, confirmation is like pulling teeth.

Shaw further notes that when Republicans were in the minority during the Obama administration, they reached an informal agreement with Democrats to limit debate to eight hours. It's doubtful Chuck Schumer intends to play nice like the GOP did, though.

In that same vein, Washington Examiner analyst Quin Hillyer suggests that those holdovers previously nominated be waived through the Senate committee process. According to Senate rules, the leadership can order that nominees bypass committee, writes Hillyer, and in this case it's appropriate because the nominees were vetted by the previous Congress. This process wouldn't be used for new nominees, but it could clear the backlog.

During the Obama administration, Democrats tried to paint Republicans as constituting a "do-nothing Congress." Now that we have a Democrat-controlled House bent on investigating Donald Trump and a rump coalition of 47 Democrat senators who exist simply to be obstinate rather than do the people's business, these suggestions have been placed in the hopper. Trump can now at least focus on the judicial branch — a task that's always time well spent. But he's going to need help from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

SOURCE 

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Under Trump, US Economic Freedom Rises Significantly

The U.S. economy is roaring like no other time in recent memory. The job market is hot, unemployment is down to record lows, and small business optimism is soaring.

But this newfound dynamism didn’t come from nowhere. It required a package of market and consumer-friendly reforms passed by Congress and adopted by the Trump administration. These reforms have boosted economic freedom.

According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, America’s economic freedom has seen a dramatic boost—from 18th place in the world to 12th place in the span of just one year. America’s score ticked up by more than a full point from last year, reaching the highest level in eight years.

The annual index—now celebrating its 25th year—provides an overall snapshot of almost every country’s level of economic freedom. It takes into account a variety of factors, like taxation, regulation, and trade. It is relevant to our job prospects and the prices we pay for goods and services, not to mention what kind of appliances and cars we can choose and buy.

Higher economic freedom scores tend to correlate with faster growth and broader economic expansion, as well as higher incomes and overall wealth. In fact, per capita incomes in the freest countries as measured by the index are six to seven times higher than incomes in the least free countries.

With that in mind, the United States’ notable rebound is very good news.

The vibrant growth we’re feeling has been unleashed by several key policy changes over the past two years, the most important being the 2017 tax cuts and deregulation. Real gross domestic product grew by upward of 3 percent over the last four quarters—unlike anything seen in the last 13 years. No wonder small business optimism has risen.

More remarkably, almost half of the states in the union now enjoy their lowest unemployment rates ever recorded by the Labor Department. Wages are rising for the first time in two decades, with an overall unemployment rate of 3.8 percent, matching the lowest rate in 50 years.

As the index has demonstrated since its first edition in 1995, the overarching objective of economic policies should be to create an environment that empowers people with more choices, thereby encouraging greater dynamism, business creation, and economic expansion.

Fortunately, some policymakers, both in the U.S. and abroad, have been paying attention to the data presented in the index. More than half of the countries ranked in this year’s index registered gains in economic freedom.

Others have stuck with discredited models of state planning and centralized control, and have reaped the consequences. Regrettably, the world remains divided between those who have economic freedom and those who do not.

This year’s index results give cause for cautious optimism, but show that the task of restoring America’s economic freedom is far from complete. As the U.S. economy is becoming more vibrant, the coming months and years present unique opportunities to implement more freedom-oriented economic policies.

America should build upon its new momentum. Why would we heap on more government spending, protectionism, and taxes?

Cutting the corporate tax rate to a competitive level was a critical step to freeing up capital for investment. Reducing government spending remains equally vital to enhancing economic freedom and improving the country’s overall economic performance.

It is also vital to keep the economy open to flows of international trade and investment. Protectionist policies are sure to hamper growth and reduce prosperity within the U.S., for individuals and businesses alike.

Delivering on policies that will promote economic freedom in these areas is key to making sure this rebound in dynamism doesn’t come to an abrupt halt.

2019 is the year of renewed opportunity for America. We must not let it go to waste.

SOURCE 

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End of Net Neutrality Brings Booming Broadband Growth

A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) shows that the removal of Title II regulations — or net neutrality — in 2017 helped boost the growth of broadband and close the digital divide.

In what FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called "a stunning drop," the number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband service of 100 megabits per second download and 10 Mbps upload plummeted 56 percent — from 78.9 million to 34.8 million.

Those lacking access to the minimum broadband standard of 25/3 Mbps decreased from 24.8 million to 19.4 million.

"In other words, the digital divide is closing," Pai wrote.

Meanwhile, competition is increasing. The report also points out that the number of Americans who have at least two wired broadband providers offering 100/10 Mbps competing for their business rose from 26 percent to 54.5 percent.

Pai also noted that wireless providers increased their capital investment in 2017 while prices went down an average of 11 percent.

While Title II regulations weren’t removed until June 2018 when the order was finalized, Pai made it clear after taking the chairman’s post in January 2017 that we would reverse former chairman Tom Wheeler’s 2015 move to establish the regulations. The report shows that the market responded.

Roslyn Layton of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this past December that a year after that decision the internet is humming right along. She pointed out that the FCC actually "added cops to beat," restoring power to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to police the internet.

Layton wrote that while the FTC oversaw the internet from 1996 to 2015, the web "experienced massive growth and success." The FTC took 500 actions against internet service providers during that time and fined one ISP $100 million for transparency violations in 2014, she noted.

Pai and the FCC look ahead to a 2019 in which internet growth keeps going.

"As we head into 2019, we are on the right track, and we aim to keep these positive trends going," Pai wrote. "We will continue to close the digital divide and bring better, faster, cheaper broadband to all Americans by continuing to eliminate barriers to infrastructure investment and broadband deployment and promoting innovation."

SOURCE 

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Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Review Census Citizenship Case

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to hear a case on including a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

Last week, federal Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Southern District of New York ruled the Census Bureau could not ask about citizenship. The judge ruled the question would lead to undercounting illegal residents and Hispanics.

“This is the right step for the administration to take, as the 2020 census needs to be printed soon. The United States is a nation-state constituted to safeguard the rights of American citizens, and the only distinction colorblind government should take note of is citizenship. It is irrational that the census can ask a question on race, ethnicity, sex and everything else, but not citizenship,” says Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration moved to bypass the appeals courts, and take the issue straight to the Supreme Court, given the urgency to prepare the U.S. Census. The case would normally be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

“Time is of the essence,” Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “It takes a long lead time to print the millions of census forms.”

He noted bypassing the regular appeals process is a very rare request and very rarely granted.

Von Spakovsky and Gonzalez published an op-ed in The Daily Signal Saturday, saying, “The administration must wage a fierce fight to get this decision overturned,” referring to Furman’s ruling.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco petitioned the court, arguing, the “case is of such imperative public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice and to require immediate determination in this Court.”

The plaintiffs challenging the citizenship question include several advocacy groups, 18 states, and several cities and jurisdictions.

Currently, all 50 states count the entire population when it comes to redistricting for state legislative seats. However, based on a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, states would be allowed to set their own standards—such as citizenship or even registered voters—so long as the standard is uniform and complies with the 14th Amendment, said Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

The entire population includes illegal immigrants.

The organization has filed an amicus brief on the side of the administration in the case.

“Without citizenship data in the census, where you live determines the protection you have under the Voting Rights Act,” Churchwell told The Daily Signal.

Churchwell said citizenship data would also make it easier for the Justice Department to know whether to investigate if certain maps are drawn in a constitutional way, in compliance with the 14th Amendment.

He said counting noncitizens or illegal immigrants also disproportionately harms African-American voters by making Hispanic districts larger and decreasing the size of predominantly black districts. He pointed to the Los Angeles City Commission as an example.

Counting citizenship “could be the Trump administration’s greatest legacy in terms of empowering and enfranchising African-Americans and helping African-Americans get elected,” Churchwell said.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, announced the policy to include a citizenship question last year. The plaintiffs sought to stop the case from proceeding until litigation was solved on whether Ross could be compelled to testify. The Supreme Court ruled last week that it would not stop the trial from going forward over the dispute about the Ross testimony.

There are separate cases in Maryland and California litigating the same matter, The Washington Post reported.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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I'm back already

My procedure went unexpectedly well and I am now out of hospital and back to normal.  So I am posting today but will be observing my usual Sabbath tomorrow

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Shutdown alarm is unfounded

There's a view that the President is elected to adminster the law only, not to create it or force it to be created.  Trump, however, is doing what he does on the authority of the voters. They voted for the wall in voting for him.  It was his big issue.  He has a democratic mandate to build the wall. So I think we have here a case of divided authority rather than one branch of government usurping the authority of another

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, the federal government spent $3.9 trillion in 2017. In Argentina, total federal spending in 2017 was $161 billion.

The above statistical disparity rates mention in consideration of all the hand wringing related to the partial federal government shutdown in the U.S. Supposedly an elongated one would slam the brakes on the U.S. economic expansion. No less than J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon observed this week that a prolonged shuttering of one quarter of the federal government could “reduce growth to zero.”

Dimon would be wise to relax. So would others convinced that government spending is a substantial driver of U.S. economic vitality. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Implicit in what’s wholly false is that Argentina’s economy is a fraction of the U.S.’s simply because its politicians are quite a bit more parsimonious than are the members of Congress. Such a view isn’t serious, but it’s a reminder of just how much statistics can obscure reality.

Simply put, Argentina’s federal spending is a fraction of U.S. federal spending precisely because its economic output is a fraction of what takes place stateside. Just the same, federal spending in the U.S. dwarfs that of other countries precisely because the U.S. economy is quite a bit larger than other country economies.

Governments only have money to spend insofar as the private sector in countries produces wealth for them to spend. Congress was able to spend $4.1 trillion (according to CBO data) in 2018 because American output is many multiples of $4.1 trillion.

Governments can’t stimulate economic growth with spending; rather their spending is only possible because of economic growth. Applied to the partial shutdown of the federal government, what limits government spending logically cannot limit economic growth. Figure that if there were a permanent cessation of a quarter of federal activity, the result would be trillions worth of extra resources for private actors to put to work.

Readers might think about the above for a moment. When our federal government spends, it means that Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are playing a substantial role in the allocation of trillions worth of wealth first created in the private sector. On the other hand, when fewer dollars flow to Washington it happily means that people like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Travis Kalanick have more in the way of resources to experiment with. Yet defenders of the big government status quo persist.

In a client report written last week, Regions Bank chief economist Richard Moody lamented that the partial shutdown would disrupt the “flow of economic data” at a “most inopportune time given increased uncertainty about over the course of the U.S. economy.” Moody unwittingly makes the case the case for a more permanent shutdown.

Lest he forget, arguably the most scrutinized of all economic statistics produced by the federal government is the one that measures the rate of unemployment in the U.S. Yet too often unsaid here is how totally unnecessary the report is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employs 2,500 people at a cost of $640 million annually to produce its monthly unemployment report. Each month, meanwhile, the private company ADP releases a report two days ahead of the BLS's that nearly mimics the BLS's, all at no expense to the taxpayer. There is a market demand for reliable employment data, and the market is providing it. What works for unemployment can logically work for any other statistic that economists claim to be necessary for them to do their jobs. If it’s necessary, private actors can do it without burdening every American with the cost.

The point of all this is that true believers in limited government would be wise to not let this partial government shutdown go to waste. Instead, proponents of a shrunken federal footprint should seriously address whether or not many people in a country populated by over 300 million have actually noticed a difference in their lives in the past few weeks. 

Indeed, arguably the most vivid lesson of the shutdown is being overlooked. 800,000 furloughed federal employees, and what, exactly, is the noticeable harm?  The media trumpet the federal employees’ missed paychecks and niche difficulties faced by the citizenry (economists and financial types lacking economic data, for instance), but what goes unreported is that for 95% of the population, life goes on essentially unaffected in any material way. What better evidence that our government spending is mostly waste and make-work?

So while alarmists will continue to promote false notions about the “lost” economic growth that will result from the political class wasting fewer dollars, reality will continue to intrude on what’s not serious as most get on with their lives properly indifferent to what at least temporarily limits the activities of ¼ of our federal behemoth.

Which brings up a challenge that is also an opportunity. What hasn’t affected voters after three weeks will similarly not affect them after three years. If Republicans really want to prove how unnecessary our $4 trillion federal government is, keep it shut down through the 2021. The economy will boom in the interim thanks to a shrunken federal burden, and a long-term point will have been made about the good of shrinking Leviathan to all of our betterment.

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The 7 Most Insane Licensing Proposals of 2019 (So Far)

State lawmakers target pet groomers, drain cleaners, interior designers, pecan buyers, athletic trainers, antler dealers, and....art therapists?

The new year brought the opening of many state legislative sessions, and the opening of state legislative sessions has brought a predictable but disappointing flurry of new licensing proposals.

Today, nearly 30 percent of American workers need a license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. The majority of that growth, as the White House noted in a 2016 report on licensure, comes "from an increase in the number of professions that require a license rather than composition in the workforce."

Some states seem to have gotten wise to the economic problems that excessive licensing can cause—one study has found that licensing laws across all 50 states resulted in 2.85 million fewer jobs and cost consumers more than $200 billion annually. As Reason detailed last week, the governors of Ohio and Idaho took action in early 2019 to join three other states—Louisiana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma—in approving important reforms that curtail the power of licensing boards and increase economic freedom.

Unfortunately, many state lawmakers seem determined to continue the expansion of occupational licensing into professions where there is little public health or safety justification for these barriers to employment.

"We know occupational licensing reduces consumer choice, increases prices, and keeps people out of jobs. It also criminalizes innocent behavior," says Shoshana Weissman, digital media director and policy fellow at the R Street Institute, which tracks these and other state legislative proposals, and advocates for licensing reforms. "Are we willing to fine people or throw them in jail for practicing interior design or being a health coach without a license? This is insanity and it hurts real people."

Insanity, indeed. Here are the five worst occupational licensing proposals of 2019—so far.

Pet Groomers (New Jersey and New York)

Two states are proposing new regulations for anyone who makes money by bathing, brushing, clipping, or styling a pet, and New Jersey's proposal is a particularly good example of how bad licensing laws get on the books.

The bill offered by three members of the state assembly would create a new licensing board—the New Jersey State Board of Pet Groomers—consisting of three members of the public, three pet groomers, two veterinarians, and one governor-appointee. The bill, as currently written, would delegate pretty much all rulemaking authority to the newly created board. The board would get to set qualification requirements, including a written and practical test that applicants would have to pass, and would determine licensing fees as well as fines for unlicensed pet grooming. The board would also be empowered to investigate and even shut down pet groomers that it determined were not meeting the board's standards.

All of that might sound fine—no one wants their pet to get a bad haircut—but those types of provisions are the makings of an anti-competitive cartel. The groomers and veterinarians on the board have an incentive to limit competition and control a majority of the votes. By proposing to delegate so much authority to the board, the state lawmakers have effectively eliminated their own role in the lawmaking process—and are effectively allowing the board to do whatever it wants.

That's not just unwise, it might also run afoul of a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that requires state lawmakers to actively supervise licensing boards.

Pecan Buyers (Texas)

Should it be a crime to buy nuts without a government-issued permission slip? At least one state lawmaker in Texas (Rep. Mary González) thinks so. Her bill would require anyone "engaged in the business of purchasing in-shell pecans from a pecan producer" to be licensed by the state—though grocery stores would be exempted.

Getting the license would require the payment of a fee of $400 and showing government-issued identification. What's really pernicious about González' proposal, though, is the record-keeping requirement imposed on those licensed pecan buyers. Licensed pecan buyers would have to maintain up-to-date records of all purchases, including the date and location of the transaction, the license plate number of the seller's vehicle (along with the make and model), and the address "or physical location of the tree" where the pecans originated.

Failure to keep those records accurately would trigger a $250 fine, and each violation could be another fine. Assuming that pecan buyers in Texas are probably buying thousands if not millions of pecans every month, well, those fines could add up fast.

Athletic Trainers (West Virginia)

Despite living in one of America's least healthy states, three state lawmakers in West Virginia have decided that what their state really needs is fewer personal trainers.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the need for a license like this, of course, but the bill also highlights another problem with licensing laws in general. Buried way down on the 14th page of the proposal is a clause that would allow the state board of physical therapy (which would be given power over athletic trainers) to block applicants who have committed a "felony or other crime involving moral turpitude" along with anyone who is judged to be "guilty of unprofessional conduct" as determined by the board itself.

As we've covered at Reason on many occasions, banning individuals with criminal records from getting licenses is bad policy. It continues to punish someone long after they've paid their debt to society, it decreases employment, and it increases recidivism—because the best predictor of whether someone will commit another crime after getting out of prison is whether they have a job or not. The use of deliberately vague language ("moral turpitude" and "unprofessional conduct") gives the state board even greater authority to block would-be personal trainers from getting licensed.

Antler Dealers (Nevada)

A full legislative committee in the Nevada Assembly has teamed up to introduce a bill on behalf of the state Department of Wildlife to create a new licensing category for people who sell or trade antlers. The bill would make it a crime to "engage in the business of buying, selling, trading or dealing in certain antlers or any head or skull of a big game mammal without first obtaining an antler dealer's license," though the proposal does not include any details for how violators would be punished.

There's no testing or mandatory training requirements included in the bill—a would-be antler dealer only has to sign up with the Department of Wildlife and pay a fee—making this the least bad form of licensing. Still, it would likely restrict the ability of non-Nevada residents to sell antlers in Nevada, and...do we really need a license for selling antlers in the first place?

Art Therapists, Drain Cleaners, and Interior Designers (Massachusetts)

Yes, these are all serious proposals.

Sen. Diana DiZoglio (D-First Essex) wants to license practitioners of art therapy, which is "a mental health discipline that integrates use of psychotherapeutic principles, art media, and the creative process." That sounds like it might help some people cope with stress or more severe mental disorders, but it also really doesn't sound like something that needs a permission slip from the government.

Meanwhile, Sen. Barry Finegold (D-Middlesex) has a bill to license drain cleaners under the auspices of the Board of Examiners of Plumbers—which really sounds like it should be abolished, rather than expanded—and to impose unspecified civil penalties against anyone who dares to make money by cleaning a drain without the state board's permission.

And Sen. Joan Lovely (D-Second Essex) is proposing to make Massachusetts the fourth state to adopt licensing for interior designers, presumably to protect her constituents from the dangers of mismatched drapes and ugly throw pillows. The proposal would create a new board to regulate interior designers, and the bill specifies that four of the five members of the board must be "engaged in the practice of interior design." I'm sure they can be trusted to write rules that don't restrict their own competitors.

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When single-payer medicine kills

The deaths of up to 250 patients who died following heart surgery at an NHS hospital are to be reviewed.

All the patients underwent surgery at St George's Hospital in Tooting, south London, between April 2013 and September 2018.

The review, commissioned by NHS Improvement, comes after the hospital suspended complex heart surgery last year to improve services.

A leaked report previously suggested that poor relationships at the cardiac unit contributed to a higher mortality rate.

The review only applies to cardiac surgery at St George's, and does not include other associated specialities - for example, cardiology.

The panel will examine the safety and quality of care that patients who died during or after cardiac surgery at St George's received during the review period.

They will do this by reviewing the medical records of deceased cardiac surgery patients, as well as any investigations conducted by the Trust at the time of the patients' deaths.

The panel is likely to review between 200-250 deaths as part of this process, which will take place between six and 12 months to complete.

The period between April 2013 and March 2017 has been identified as a time when the trust had a statistically higher mortality rate compared with the other 31 cardiac surgery centres in the UK.

The panel will also review deaths between April 2017 and 1 September 2018, when improvements were being made.

Last summer a leaked report  warned that a "toxic" feud between two rival camps at the unit left staff feeling a high death rate was inevitable.

St George's Hospital heart unit was consumed by a "dark force" and patients were put at risk, the investigation concluded.

The damning review was written by former NHS England deputy medical director Mike Bewick in response to higher mortality rates at the hospital.

He found the south London facility had a cardiac surgery death rate of 3.7 per cent - above the national 2 per cent average, reports said.

Internal scrutiny was said to be "inadequate" and the department was riven between "two camps" exhibiting "tribal-like activity".

Professor Bewick's review was quoted as saying: "Some felt that there was a persistent toxic atmosphere and stated that there was a 'dark force' in the unit."

Conversations with 39 members of staff revealed they were shocked by the death rate, but "most felt that poor performance was inevitable due to the pervading atmosphere".

The independent reviewer examined "disturbing and often difficult information", concluding an "existential threat" was posed to the unit because staff and patients would go elsewhere if problems persisted.

SOURCE 

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