Author: Redactor

Categories
Thought

P. J. O’Rourke

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.” The Ten Commandments are God’s basic rules about how we should live — a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts.
The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law. But then, right at the end, is “Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.” How did that make the top ten? What’s it doing there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose as one of those things jealousy about the starter mansion with in-ground pool next door?
Yet think how important the Tenth Commandment is to a community, to a nation, indeed to a presidential election. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t be a jerk and whine about what the people across the street have — go get your own.
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.

Categories
Thought

President Warren G. Harding

I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they’re the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights!

Categories
national politics & policies

Same Ol’ Blame Game

On Fox’s The Five last night, the subject of whom to blame for the Obamacare debacle came up. Bob Beckel thought the Republicans should apologize to the Democrats: Republicans had messed up Obamacare. Greg Gutfeld was incredulous, and told Bob to shut up.

Not good form, that. There’s no point in losing one’s cool, even if on a “hot-head show.”

After all, Beckel has a plausible point. Obamacare isn’t working. And Republicans have fought against it. Did Republican obstructionism really injure the new program’s rollout?

Is it the very essence of Obamacare to fail, or did opponents hobble it from the start?

Now, before we answer, consider what kind of a question it is. It relates to the bully’s ploy of knocking someone down and then kicking them on the ground, taunting “Weakling!”

A few months ago it became all the rage amongst “liberals” to taunt advocates of laissez faire (interestingly, an old liberal doctrine) for markets never having been made fully free and unsubsidized — for remaining just an unachieved ideal, not a live policy anywhere.

Why the failure of laissez faire?

Because its enemies keep on knocking the policy into oblivion, kicking its proponents until they cry “uncle.”

So, did Republicans similarly kick Obamacare into its current mess?

Well, they were unsuccessful in stopping its passage, or unfunding it, or even postponing it.

Some Republican governors (and activist citizens) have prevented the policy from insinuating itself into their states, as was their right. That’s it.

None of these things had anything to do with 1) the website failures and low enrollment, 2) the massive losses of promised continuance of existing insurance policies, or 3) the expected rise in insurance premiums.

Nice try, Bob. But no “uncles” here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement insider corruption

TheHealthSherpa.com

Government incompetence is no mystery. It’s very similar to government competence: throw enough money at a problem and something will happen.

It may not be what you want, or what you expected, but something will indeed happen.

The ObamaCare rollout is a grand example of governmental hubris and incompetence, as I explained this weekend at Townhall.com.

But the story has a more amusing twist. Three young professional website technicians saw the fiasco of healthcare.gov and decided to try a different approach, cooking up a website in their spare time.

They found enough information and access to information buried in the multi-million dollar contractors’ code, and reconfigured everything.

Their insight? The main ObamaCare website had it all backwards. People want to be able to start shopping immediately. So that’s what they allow visitors to do, start shopping without sign-up.

On e-commerce websites, you can sign up at almost any point.

The young men’s TheHealthSherpa.com is up and running, allowing people not served by a state-led marketplace to check out the “competition,” select the policy that’s right for them, and go directly to the company offering the service.

So how could three guys working pro bono do a better job than the inside-the-beltway “Internet” professionals who were paid millions?

The well-connected insiders were thinking as insiders do. Instead of seeing that their job was to entice customers, they tried corralling citizens, requiring people to first “sign up.”

Of course, the real and enduring problems of ObamaCare are on the “back end,” behind the websites, where the regulations and taxes and mandates (and pride and hubris and incompetence) will do the most damage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Warren G. Harding

Harding

Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Can’t Buy Me Votes

“Corporations and some of the wealthiest Americans have spent more than $1 billion in the past 18 months on ballot initiatives in just 11 states,” Reid Wilson informed Washington Post readers following last week’s election. He dubbed it “an unprecedented explosion of money used to pass new laws and influence the public debate.”

He’s implying that bad ol’ corporations and “the rich” can change our laws merely by petitioning issues onto the ballot. Is that right?

Thankfully, no: we get to vote.

“Money is most effective on ballot measures when you’re trying to get a ‘no’ . . . the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” explained Rob Richie, the executive director of FairVote, appearing yesterday on C-Span’s Washington Journal. “It’s a lot harder, actually, to spend a lot of money and get a ‘yes.’”

He’s exactly right. Big corporations and big labor have had success in defeating measures, but not much at all in passing “new laws.”

Last Tuesday’s election bears this out. While there were 31 issues on state ballots, only three were initiatives petitioned onto the ballot by citizens, and all three were defeated.

In Washington, Initiative 517, a pro-initiative measure, and Initiative 522, a measure requiring genetically modified foods to be labeled, were both badly outspent and defeated. However, in Colorado, those supporting Amendment 66, a tax increase for education, spent over $10 million to promote the measure compared to less than $50,000 spent against it. Still, the tax hike was defeated 2-to-1.

Money helps in campaigning, no doubt. But the facts show that wealthy interests can’t buy our votes or brainwash us to gain new laws. We decide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Warren G. Harding

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

Categories
links

Townhall: The No Knowhow No-No

Obamacare’s failures are not exactly bolts out of the blue, big surprises that should shock us all. Click on over to Townhall, and then back here, for some indication of the principal principles behind the ailing failure.

A number of ideas and phrases appear in the column that might seem familiar to you. Here are a few of them:

Categories
video

Video: Krist Novoselic on Fixing the U.S. House

The problem comes down to gerrymandered districts and how the votes are cast and counted:

Categories
crime and punishment

A Bill for Services Rendered

The satirical dystopian film Brazil does not — in case you haven’t seen it — have much of anything to do with Brazil, the country. But it does have something to do with Deming, New Mexico.

This week’s War on Drugs horror story takes place in Deming, and echoes the “comic,” gallows-humor motif of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 classic. In the movie, armed minions of the futuristic superstate raid your house, kill you, bag you, tag you, and then bill your family for the “service.”

In Deming, an officer stopped a motorist for rolling through a Stop sign. For some reason (so far not explained) the motorist was asked to exit his car, and, the officer claims, exhibited “clenched buttocks” — as if hiding drugs in his rectum.

So, the story goes (and it’s a frighteningly long story), a warrant to search the motorist was obtained, and he was taken to a hospital where multiple anal probes, an x-ray, two enemas in front of multiple witnesses, and a colonoscopy yielded no evidence of drugs.

And then the suspect — “patient,” in medical terms, though the man consented to no services — was billed. You know, for the x-ray, the colonoscopy, the enemas, and the anal probes.

Of course the victim is suing, and if the reportage is correct, that all this really happened, I hope he wins millions. The behavior of the police, the judge, and some medical personnel is inexcusable.

But it fits right in with the dystopian future America has made for itself. The War on Drugs is bringing us — has brought us? — tyranny we’d expect only from the darkest of black comedies.

Yes, it can happen here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.