Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
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Author: Redactor
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Mark Twain
Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh no.
The just-re-elected president had promised to slash the deficit in his first term. That didn’t happen, but there’s talk of back room deals being made right now, saith Politico:
Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion. . . . Entitlement programs, mainly Medicare, will be cut by no less than $400 billion — and perhaps a lot more, to get Republicans to swallow those tax hikes. There will be at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and “war savings.” And any final deal will come not by a group effort but in a private deal between two men: Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. . . .
However, the cuts all come in the far, Star Trekkie future. Nick Gillespie of Reason not unreasonably asks if Boehner is really “Dumb enough to take $400 billion in cuts a decade from now in exchange for $1.2 trillion in tax hikes that start ASAP?” Gillespie defines “dumb” in the context of history:
[T]here’s a clear pattern: Republican presidents ratchet up spending and Democratic presidents consolidate the increases. This reality is at almost complete odds with political rhetoric. . . . Perhaps the near-total disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the reason why we can’t get anywhere — taxpayers are constantly being misdirected by the powers that be.
Still, Republicans have stood for lower tax rates. Are Republicans alone in “standing by principle”? No.
There’s another: the 77-member Progressive Caucus “will not support any deal that cuts benefits for families and seniors who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to put food on the table or cover their health costs.”
So, realistically, there is no insider constituency for reducing spending. If enough congressional Republicans vote to increase taxes, they’ll be bilked. Meanwhile, debt overhang strangles the economy, and increased taxes will also cut into the investments that make jobs.
Thus stalemate spells stagnation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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C. S. Lewis
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
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The Dictators’ Drones
Partisanship leads to mass delusion.
The “targeted” drone runs of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama have killed thousands of innocent people in foreign lands — without a declaration of war.
The main theme of Greg Greenwald’s terrific and much-tweeted Guardian article, “Obama: a GOP president should have rules limiting the kill list,” is how Americans have deluded themselves by partisan loyalty and trust into caring about constitutional limits only when thinking about “the other guys.” Democrats fear Republicans in charge, but not their own “Messiah” (to use Andy Levy’s term for the president, on RedEye).
Republicans fear The Socialist Kenyan with his finger on the button, setting off cluster bombs and cruise missiles and the like, but applauded the previous, “Texan” president’s bombing runs a great thing, just what the War on Terror required.
But of course, when drone strikes in multiple Muslim countries kill thousands, when innocents are killed “collaterally” (the previous euphemism) but are redefined as “terrorists” because of proximity or familial relationships, and when even American citizens overseas are targeted for kills without any legal framework for such decisions, something has gotten out of hand.
The president is now above the law, like a Roman emperor. Might as well call him “dictator” and let it go at that.
Both progressives and conservatives need to be reminded that the rule of law — as “inconvenient” as it may seem when it comes to fighting terrorism — is there to protect all of us, including those who wield power.
And not merely from others. Also from ourselves.
Why? Power tends to corrupt. No one is immune. And who seeks to be corrupted?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is being mocked by oh-so-funny lefty pundit Matthew Dowd because Dowd dislikes the anti-higher-tax-rate pledge Norquist invites politicians to sign.
Some long-serving Republicans have renounced the commitment they made to their constituents to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses.” Senator Saxby Chambliss says he cares “more about the country than . . . about a 20-year-old pledge.” Co-Republican and co-pledge-signer Senator Lindsey Graham agrees.
“Grover Norquist is an impediment to good governing,” Dowd said on This Week, ABC’s Sunday morning talking-head program. “The only good thing about Grover Norquist is, he’s named after a character from Sesame Street. ”
Welcome to sound-bite alley. Lucky for Norquist his first name isn’t Elmo or Snuffleupagus, eh?
Expanding on the theme of Norquist’s putative irrelevancy, Time’s Joe Klein says Norquist has passed his “sell-by date.”
Let me interject a question neither about muppets nor sour milk: What is “good governing”?
Does it require stripping the wallets of taxpayers to fund every conceivable government program concocted by those who would run every aspect of our lives?
Those who most eagerly wish to loot the rest of us seem, at the moment, to have the upper hand. That doesn’t mean that the rest of us should supinely wait to be rolled over. The fight for freedom is always relevant. So is keeping one’s word.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Two stories courtesy of Reason’s Hit and Run startled me into thinking about the strange issues that come up when you put government in charge.
Peter Suderman covered another Supreme Court review of Obamacare, featuring Liberty University’s claim that Congress overstepped its authority in mandating employer coverage of specific insurance features, and that the contraception/abortion mandate violates religious freedom.
Then I scrolled down to read Rachel Moran on one conservative British MP’s daring call for “patients suffering from so-called ‘lifestyle diseases,’ such as type II diabetes, [to] pay for their own prescriptions rather than claim free or subsidized drugs.” The Tory MP has a point:
[W]e have got to have an affordable system that rewards individual responsibility. If you want to have doughnuts for breakfast, lunch and dinner, fine, but there’s a cost.
Trouble is, as we learned last Saturday, the whole point of the modern welfare state is to take away folks’ responsibility by removing negative consequences, the costs, from risky behavior.
Here in America, we’re headed that direction. The responsibility for one’s own contraceptive purchases is being shifted (by the Democrats’ healthcare reform law) from individuals and couples to employers, via government — putting the monetary burden onto all citizens, via higher insurance payments.
The religious freedom aspect of the constitutional challenge is a red herring. More basic? Individual freedom and personal responsibility. But those aren’t exactly guaranteed in the Constitution, and politicians haven’t found a way to get elected in enough numbers on the issue of returning responsibility back into the system.
So we’re left in a world where it makes perverted sense to call pregnancy a “lifestyle disease.” And subsidize its prevention.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Sarah Grimké
I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.
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Henry Hazlitt
When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.
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Sarah Grimké
I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.