On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly on power, thus ushering the way for the dissolution of the putatively communist empire.
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Words Without Meaning
“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” President Barack Obama told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News during last Sunday’s Super Bowl interview.
When studies show one in 20 food stamp transactions to be fraudulent; when the GAO finds $120 million a year spent paying federal workers who are deceased; when, well, “name your own favorite absurdly wasteful program here,” how does the word “accountable” pass through the president’s lips without a respondent clap of thunder followed by the sizzle and pop of a lightning bolt?
Yet, Obama claims — no, promises! — that this omnipresent accountability reaches absolutely “everybody” in the federal government.
President O was responding specifically to O’Reilly’s charge that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the official responsible for the disastrous Obamacare rollout, has faced no consequences.
She’s not alone. Only by replacing the word “everybody” with the phrase “virtually no one” would Mr. Obama’s statement be made accurate.
Yesterday, I detailed several different ways the IRS has violated people’s most important and basic political rights — from blocking citizens trying to form non-profit groups for communicating their ideas to trashing privacy rights by handing personal tax information to one’s political opponents to harassing donors to “the other” candidate with multiple unwarranted audits. No one in any of these scandals has been disciplined, let go or in any meaningful way held accountable.
“Political language is designed,” as George Orwell warned, “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Up and down the line.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Aaron Burr born on Feb 6
On February 6, 1756, Aaron Burr was born. Burr was an American politician who served as third Vice President of the United States, a man with a deeply ambiguous record. His popularity in his home state of New York, combined with the Slave Power vote, allowed for Thomas Jefferson’s victory in 1800 — and yet, another constitutional quirk, in addition to his apparent calculating ambition, precipitated a constitutional crisis in that election. He found a strong opponent in Federalist politician Alexander Hamilton, whom he killed in a duel during his vice presidency. Later, Burr gathered an army west of the Appalachians, ostensibly to conquer Mexico. The army was captured, and Burr was put on trial for treason, with Thomas Jefferson moving heaven and earth to see a conviction. Burr was found not guilty, traveled to Europe, and then returned to America for a long life in the private sector.
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Frédéric Bastiat
[T]o curse machines is to curse the spirit of humanity.
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Frédéric Bastiat
The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion?
Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice.
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Robert Peel, Feb 5
On February 5, 1788, Robert Peel was born. He would become one of the most important of the United Kingdom’s prime ministers, ushering in some reforms that led to the liberalization of England in the 19th century.
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February 4
On February 4, 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States, under the new constitution, by the U.S. Electoral College. On the same date five years later, the French legislature abolished slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic.
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Frédéric Bastiat
Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice. The law can only produce one of these results.
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Protecting the Guilty at IRS
Should a spurious inalienable right to Employee Confidentiality protect IRS personnel from being held accountable when they commit crimes?
In 2010, Christine O’Donnell, then running for U.S. Senate, had to fend off false accusations about tax liabilities on property she no longer owned — after her tax returns had been released to political opponents. No one broke into her home and stole a copy of the returns. Some IRS guy had divulged them.
Other citizens too, as we’ve noted, have been targeted by IRS and other agencies for ruffling the feathers of the powers that be.
Congressional committees looking into the Internal Revenue Service’s diverse assaults on persons with inconvenient political views have tossed O’Donnell’s case onto their slush pile. But IRS is not cooperating with these investigations. IRS says that openly naming perpetrators would violate Employee Confidentiality. (Which apparently bears a family resemblance to Diplomatic Immunity.)
This is par. A few IRS officers have been transferred or even resigned following revelations about how IRS harassed conservative applicants for tax-exempt status. But the FBI has dropped its non-investigation of evil deeds with respect to which a perpetrator like Lois Lerner feels she must plead the Fifth and depart the scene with only her freedom and her $50,000 pension. Others also see nothing to see.
If our laws allow IRS to stonewall to protect the guilty, they should be changed. Such governmental targeting of us should be both illegal and punishable. Do you agree?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photograph courtesy of scismgenie, some rights reserved.
Why is schooling so expensive? Government makes it so.
Take the recent example, in California, of “coder boot camps.” These are “schools” where computer coders receive training. We now learn that the Golden State’s education bureaucrats are cracking down on this unlicensed and unregulated form of learning.
Unless they comply, these organizations face imminent closure and a hefty $50,000 fine. These organizations have two weeks to start coming into compliance.
In mid-January, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) sent cease and desist letters to Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, App Academy, Zipfian Academy, and others.
The regulators insist that these private enterprises fall under their regulatory domain, and they are going to do their job, dangit, even if it helps . . . no one.
Reaction from the coder academy heads has been boilerplate. They’ve attested to their will to co-operate with regulators, but worry that current regulations do not really have much to do with what they are up to.
Hey, regulators, rather than shut these academies down, or cook up new regs, why not just let the operations go on as before?
Worried about quality control in a consumer-protection sense? Then make one requirement: The schools should notify paying students that the academy’s services and education contracts are unregulated by the state. Make do, students, with caveat emptor, as before. That is, by the principles of market supply and demand, and undergirding laws against fraud.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.