Corporations cannot and do not tax, conscript, and kill under claim of legal authority to do so.
Only governments do that.
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Category: national politics & policies
Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton . . .
Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.
And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta!
Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-to-guess password “p@ssw0rd.”
The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.
And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Department of Education were to go to an African-American candidate. . . .”
Ah, tokenism!
Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-color.
Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is . . . suspiciously close to being racist.
Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.
They live in a race-based bubble. But like the Podesta-Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:
Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch
Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official
Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden
“Republicans would create chaos in the health care system because they are stuck,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “between a rock and a cliché.”
Oh. Off by a word or two. But I don’t need to fix it.
What needs to be fixed is the whole system. “Head clown”* Schumer gloats that it cannot be done. The “delicate balance” that is the Affordable Care Act makes it impregnable. For all Republicans’ talk of repeal, “for five years now they’ve had nothing to put in its place.”
Schumer sees the trap. He set it when he and his comrades voted Obamacare in without reading it. Any new program with any new constituency always presents a set of . . . political hurdles . . . that quickly become “impossible” to jump.
The President-elect, he notes, has supported three of the “most popular” regulations in Obamacare: “pre-existing conditions,” “26-year-olds on parents’ plans,” and sex equality re: insurance rates.
What Schumer fails to mention is that these are three huge drivers of spiraling insurance prices. The Affordable Care Act “delicately balances” medical markets by shifting who pays for what, hoping that the biggest losers† don’t complain too much and the obvious winners never cease protesting‡ any change.
The truth? Obamacare can be repealed. But replacing it would be a disaster. The best plan is no plan. Repeal all the regulations. The federal government should completely deregulate the markets, and prevent states from ruining interstate markets in insurance and health care.
Do what the Commerce clause was designed to do.
Schumer is counting on Republicans to do nothing. Despite signs they’re cooking up something.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*What Trump called Schumer. And in the same tweet dubbed Obamacare “a lie.” Truer words never spoken?
† Obamacare presents a huge burden on the self-employed, self-insured, and on the previously insured, since it is these people who most obviously pay for all the newly insureds. Of course, in the end, everybody pays . . . from increasing prices and decreasing rates of progress.
‡ At least they are the focus of advocacy groups. The poor neatly serve as innocent shields of the spoliators.
N. B. Adapted from this weekend’s Townhall column.
A “rule of law” is based on general principles, and makes room for — or, better yet, is based upon — the protection of individual rights.
It used to be common to say, “a rule of law, not of men”; it was even as common in political oratory as was spouted out over drinks at the Rotary. But as the modern Regulatory State has grown in scope and power, most folks seem to have lost track of the notion. It is now not even a cliché. Few even of our most educated folks can explain this idea. Vast swaths of the mis-educated public appear not to “get” the idea of limiting government to the enforcement of a few general principles; instead, they cry for more “regulations” (along with additional spending and maybe even a whole new division of the executive government) every time a crisis, tragedy or atrocity occurs.
So we are left with a political culture in which the words of Tacitus seem to a majority as implausible at best, evil at worst: “The more the laws, the more corrupt the State.” Contrary to today’s trendy prejudice, we do not need “more laws” — edicts legislated by representatives, or regulations concocted by bureaucracies — we need Law.
As in, “a rule of Law.”
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Funny how none of the progressive “achievements”happened before capitalism made them possible.
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SOCIALISM…
The childlike faith that a powerful, ever-growingGovernment couldn’t possibly pose a threat to freedom.
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Don’t worry…
Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”
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The savvier economists (and intellectuals like Steven Pinker) like to remind us that it is progress that must be explained; poverty is natural.
But when you see poverty settle in like an infestation of slime mold, staining a whole modern city or region, you begin to wonder. As Ron Bailey wonders in his excellent Reason report on West Virginia’s impoverished McDowell County . . .
WHY DON’T THESE PEOPLE JUST MOVE?
The feeling of being trapped in your community — in your hovel, in your own blighted life — does not come, these days, from mere poverty alone. I remember the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath; my family has a history. Once upon a time, folks in America, when industry ran out, left. Traveled. Migrated — to find work where industry boomed.
And sure, McDowell used to be much more populated. Bailey’s family left two generations ago.
But the stragglers?
Almost any community has its specific enticements.
But one thing becomes clear, as you read through Bailey’s sad survey (in part memoir, since he has family ties there): government is the worst culprit.
A lot of welfare goes into McDowell, and a huge percentage of the population is retired or on disability.
“If you get public assistance to supply your needs without any effort from you,” explains one young man who came back to his beleaguered hometown, “you’ve got no incentive to better yourself or your situation.”
Government subsidizes poverty. Sure, it prevents destitution. Utter misery. But it also traps people, robbing them of their wherewithal to get up and go and achieve something.
Modern government is in the stasis business. Our assistance programs don’t just assist.
A modern American nightmare.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
[mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”62″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]C[/mks_dropcap]onsumer sovereignty is the idea that in markets consumers call the shots. In capitalism, most mass production is indeed for the masses, and the masses have a big say in what gets done. All profits and wages of successful businesses come from consumers.
But don’t take this too far.
Consumers don’t “create jobs,” for example.
Recently, Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been floating this bizarre notion. To his Facebook audience, last month, he wrote that it is a myth that “the ‘job creators’ are CEOs, corporations, and the rich, whose taxes must be low in order to induce them to create more jobs.
Rubbish. The real job creators are the vast middle class and the poor, whose spending induces businesses to create jobs. That is why raising the minimum wage, extending overtime protection, enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, and reducing middle-class taxes are all necessary.”
So, we have people in roles of “producers” and “consumers,” and it is the consumers who “create jobs”? And they do this by “inducing” businesses to, wait, uh, “create jobs”?
Face it: businesses create jobs — out of capital from somebody’s invested savings. Entrepreneurs brace themselves to take big risks, fronting workers’ wages as well as hiring and purchasing capital goods and material.
Before a penny is spent by consumers.
Only when entrepreneurs guess right does the flow of money come full circle.
Reich repeated his quasi-Keynesian rap yesterday: it’s spending consumers who “get businesses to expand and hire.”
Truth is, Reich doesn’t “get” basic economics. But he does understand political equations, which is why folks on the Democratic left think he’s a genius.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Consider the intersection of freedom and decontextualized fragments.
The specific “decontextualized fragments” in question appear in great and not-so-great works of literature, assigned in public schools for young adults to read: a graphic rape scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved; racial slurs in Huckleberry Finn; sex, violence.
“Virginia regulators are drafting rules that would require school districts to red-flag objectionable teaching material and make it easier for parents to control what books their children see in the classroom,” reports the Washington Post.
Those regulations won’t be finalized for a year or more (because government bureaucracies are painfully slow). Yet an “earlier version of the language released on a state website drew hundreds of comments from the public,” the Post informs.
“Most parents were supportive of the change. . . .”
Teachers? Against.
Stafford County Public Schools literacy coordinator Sarah Crain worries about literature being wrongly labeled “sexually explicit.” To “reduce a book or a work down to something that is a mere decontextualized fragment of the work,” she argues, “actually impedes the ability for teachers and parents to have informed conversations.”
What about freedom?
Well, public schools aren’t primarily about freedom.
Teachers have a job to do; students follow instruction.
And it is pretty easy to see one reason for the opposition by “the professionals”: the new rules would entail more work.
Nonetheless, parents and their kids deserve as much choice as can be provided. And in every context.
Here, freedom means acknowledging the right of parents to decide. Not experts. Parents.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Original photo credit: wealhtheow on Flickr