We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
“In the view of the Left, the state is everything. Why? Because in the progressive belief system, only the state guarantees rights. All of our freedoms and liberties spring from the state. All moral and philosophical and scientific authority is vested in the state. Only the state can enforce the progressive ideology. And so the state must survive and it must grow. The bigger the state, the bigger the rights. Want a right to healthcare? You need an enormous state. Want a right to taxpayer-funded contraceptives? You need a huge state… Our founders agreed, they saw the constitution as a charter of negative liberties — it protects people’s natural rights against the government… The Constitution only gives the state the power to protect rights.”
What kind of club is that, where half the members pay no dues? (chart via Foundry)
To mix metaphors, we believe that every citizen should have some skin in the game. It's only "fair."
Of course, from a political standpoint the Left wants all the free-loaders and dependents they can get. We all get that. (Look at what has been happening to Disability. After some time on Disability, no matter how functional, few will ever work again. It has become the new Welfare. Everybody has some disability, don't they? Nobody's perfect.) Here's a question from Bernie: Can Obama Win Re-Election by Promising Free Stuff?
Mr. Obama says he is not waging class warfare against the wealthy in America. He is, of course. His campaign slogan might as well be: ” Vote for Me … I’ll Give You Free Stuff.” This is enticing. Imagine if you pay no federal income taxes and one of the candidates says, “I’ll take money from rich people and give it to you to pay your mortgage – even if you were irresponsible and bought a house you couldn’t afford. Vote for me, I’ll make sure you get unemployment benefits for almost two full years. And, oh yeah, vote for me and I’ll make sure you get birth control pills — free of charge.
Half of our culture no longer puts death and taxes next to each other, no longer understands that Uncle Sam taking your money is a bad thing, no longer understands what angered Robin Hood and what prompted the Boston Tea Party. This half of our culture has actually reached a point that they view taxes as a noble form of patriotism and charity.
We need to start showing them how it’s affecting their lives on a daily basis. We must get people to hate taxes again and look at it as the absolutely minimal necessary evil that it’s intended to be. We don’t get there by scolding them. We get there by teaching them.
How is it that these environmental “crises” and their multi-trillion-dollar solutions gain so much political traction? Money and politics, of course, are important factors. Government funding for “global warming” research and subsidies for “alternative energy” are attractive inducements to promulgate climate change alarmism. Al Gore has seen his net worth increase from $2 million to $100 million over the last decade as a result of his global-warming advocacy and investments in government-subsidized “green energy” businesses.
A more insidious factor, however, is that emotional myths routinely trump rational science in modern environmentalism. Much of the rhetoric that characterizes environmental arguments indulges two powerful myths in particular, the Noble Savage and the Golden Age. Since the dawn of civilization, these ancient stories have spoken to humanity’s anxieties about living in the complex human world of language, law, culture, cities, trade, and technology.
Long before I knew it was called the "Bennett Hypothesis" I knew that colleges and universities increase tuition to capture increases in federal and state financial aid. I attended numerous meetings of university administrators where the topic of setting next year's tuition was discussed.
The regnant phrase was "Don't leave money sitting on the table."
The Myth of Runaway Health Spending - The growth rate of national health expenditures has been declining for a decade, driven by better medical care and consumer choice.
"The left says we need to “pay our fair share” and we respond indignantly that “we already are! It’s you that aren’t!” The truth of our reply aside, our ability to get people to agree with us is not helped with this tactic. For one thing, we are accepting a premise from the outset: taxes are about “fairness.”"
Let me be perfectly clear: I think it is obvious that Peter Gleick fabricated this document–the only one he posted that makes the Heartland Institute look bad–because the real ones he stole from Heartland didn’t serve his partisan purpose. Or, if he didn’t make it up himself, he got it from an ally who fabricated it. No knowledgeable person could mistake Gleick’s hoax for a legitimate top-secret Heartland memo.
So, Peter Gleick: if I am wrong, sue me. If I am right, apologize for fabricating a document and attempting to perpetrate a hoax, and retire from public life.
Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous.
As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that, even if we had such an understanding, the people who have been doing the modeling have either the competence or the computer power, in terms of both memory and processing speed, necessary to accurately model it with any confidence at all, let alone sufficient confidence to make radical and costly policy changes that will devastate the wealth of our unborn descendants. Similarly, I deny that the people doing such shoddy modeling have even studied, let along understand, economics and the future course of technology sufficiently to justify their demands that we implement such changes (which conveniently just happen to coincide with things that the Left has been wanting to do for…ever). To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.
Here's Gleik's own personal justification for perpetrating a fraud. (His excuse is that the alarmists are losing the debate, so he got upset. What debate?)
I find the ongoing saga of fraud after fraud, deception after deception, to be depressing. As we have said here many times, some good old global warming would be great for the earth and great for people. It certainly has been, in the past. However, I predict that we will not be so lucky.
How rare it is for a government to shut down an entire government program, even if it doesn't work. Or especially if it doesn't work: "We didn't spend enough money on it."
I'm sure Isaac Asimov was not a fan of capitalism, let alone the Republican Party (or even Libertarians). The movie I, Robotwas based on his series, primarily his work on the Three Laws of Robotics and some outcomes that may occur with their implementation. In some ways, the movie was a criticism of corporate culture and government becoming too interlaced. US Robotics becomes an overly powerful organization with deep ties to government, ultimately making the robot takeover very difficult to slow or stop. On the other hand, it's a criticism of Progressive overreach. Perhaps unknowingly.
There is one scene which reminded me of our current government's goals. The idea that we have politicians or bureaucrats who 'know better', and can guide us to a better place. All we have to do is agree to let them, and while many will be harmed, it will be for a 'better good'.
Just a thought about the election: The O cannot run on his record or on his real beliefs about what America should be, so he is going to run mainly as a celeb candidate with a good smile and a good voice. A Hollywood candidate for personal popularity, an American Idol sort of thing?
May your Lent be as self-revealing (if painfully so) and confessional, and yet as grace-filled, as I hope mine will be.
The Lord has already served me up a dose of tough love these recent years through true but unwelcome messages to my soul, and I think I know what I have to address.
Public housing today, even in the post-welfare-reform era, continues to give priority to those of lowest income, which, as a practical matter, means female-headed, single-parent families, who still dominate the projects and the Section 8 housing-voucher program. Census data from the 1950s makes it possible to compare marriage rates in white and black St. Louis neighborhoods. The numbers show that black marriage rates have long lagged behind white rates. In nine predominantly black census tracts, married persons (husbands and wives, not including children) constituted 16.4 percent of the population. In predominantly white census tracts, the number was 24.5 percent—half again higher, before the advent of public housing. Without question, the perverse incentives of public housing and public assistance worsened this situation. In contrast, the incentives created by the private housing market—to maintain two-parent households so as to pool incomes in order to get ahead—would have worked in just the opposite direction.
It's really all about help that wasn't helpful - or even wanted - and perverse incentives.
Related: The Left Is Still Ignoring the Costs of Family Breakdown. In my opinion, the Left ignores it because it creates more household poverty, and thus more government dependency. When has the Left ever championed family values?
The sports news in New York has been dominated the past week and a half by Jeremy Lin. A city overwhelmed by Super Bowl mania has quickly moved on to basketball and a great story in an overlooked point guard who has raised his game and put his team back in the race for the playoffs.
One of the difficulties, however, has been the racism which has been glaringly evident in the coverage. Saturday Night Live did a wonderful send up of this last night, showing the double standard which exists in media today.
Lin is the NBA's Tim Tebow. He has brought a wonderful story to the pros, an inspiring, unlikely, and unexpected story.
..."taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."
Alexis de Toqueville, 1830, quoted here yesterday. Soft tyranny is always for your own good, of course, because you are an idiot and they are smart. Either that, or "for the children."
Good news! The Advantages of the Middle-Aged Brain - Despite news reports about cognitive decline starting at 45, the middle-aged brain actually performs better in other ways
Mr. Weston spoke of how Tony Blair and his British Labor Party set out to destroy traditional Britain by encouraging mass immigration to ensure a majority that would vote for the Welfare State in perpetuity. Millions of people from around the world were invited to move to Britain. Pamphlets were distributed in Pakistan, for example, urging locals to move to England and go on welfare. And both of these actions were facilitated and were, fed, in part, by post-colonial British guilt. Today, although a native British citizen cannot marry more than one spouse, the United Kingdom pays welfare costs for immigrants with up to four wives and their children.
Many commentators have shuddered at the way in which Republican candidates are stupidly making this election about women’s sexual rights. What they miss is that the whole abortion/contraception issue is a tar baby* that Democrats placed squarely in the Republicans’ path, so that it was impossible for Republicans to avoid.
In our times, the advantages of unplanned capitalist innovation and competition are even more valuable than usual. We need an era of social and business experimentation. Many of the bright young people who a generation ago would have gone to work for large corporations or law firms, or moved into tenure track academic positions, need to find new ways of making a living. The young people who would have gone into factory jobs or routine but secure clerical positions must also find new ways of using their skills and talents. The terrain is uncharted; the old systems don’t work.
Government needs to clear unnecessary obstacles out of the paths of the pioneers of the new economy. The single most effective way the government can support the necessary change is to adapt its regulatory and employment policies to the needs of the start ups from whose ranks the leaders of the future will emerge. That is not the only type of change that would help, but it is the most important one.
Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it.
Every time I find myself slipping into the modern statist mindset, the assumptions of which dominate so much political discourse, I try to step back and remind myself that the American experiment was not so much about instituting specific rights for individuals as it was about limiting the power and rights of the Federal state, leaving all the rest of the power to individual people (or the individual states and localities).
The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it makes it appear that those are the peoples' delimited rights. They even decided to stick in the #10, redundantly I think:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
America is not about rights. America is about the locus of power and self-determination. In other words, the government has (or had) strictly limited rights and powers. That sort of freedom from government was the whole point. Rights are for peasants and serfs, grasping for crumbs of freedom and autonomy or, in the "positive rights" lingo, grasping for freebies. American government was meant to be in handcuffs while we, the people, led our lives freely, and as we thought best.
Over time, political freedom has expanded in some ways: emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage. In other ways, the growth of the would-be leviathan state has usurped much individual freedom - albeit with the consent of the people who seek benefit from its growing power and wealth.
The Libertarian side of me would love to see "a new birth of freedom." Who is the greatest enemy of freedom from state power? Us - the voters, who have consistently for 100 years been willing to trade a birthright for a bowl of lentils.
The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.
Our idea of perfection is good old messy individual freedom and responsibility.
Barone today quoted the stunningly perspicacious de Toqueville:
"Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."
That is what House Republicans are fighting to reverse.
One of the most annoying situations you can run into at the office is inertia. The belief that something is done, or happens, just because "that's the way it happens." I've lived my corporate life (for better or worse - usually worse, for me) in a relatively idiosyncratic fashion. I have never enjoyed being a 'Yes Man', and if I sensed groupthink, I'd usually ask a question designed to break the logjam, even if I agreed with the emerging groupthink pattern:
don’t be intimidated by high-level obstructionistswho temporarily impede progress. If it is an idea whose time has come, obstructionists can be overcome by engaging high-level sponsors or they can be circumvented. Bureaucratic inertia yields to an aggressive parallel approach— quick, precise and simultaneous action.
Sometimes these approaches don't work, and you don't win friends this way.
Belmont: For years the European Social Model — and Europe itself — was such an act of faith that to express skepticism would have been blasphemy. It still is.
A lot of Venezuelans worry that one way or another, the country is headed for an implosion. A Capriles win could be contested by pro-Chavez generals; if Chavez wins and dies, a vacuum will open. Either way the economy will likely crash, once the pre-election spending binge ends.
That’s why the very orderliness and moderation of Capriles and the opposition coalition are so striking. Theirs is not so much an ideological or partisan crusade as a desperate effort to restore a semblance of political and social order to a country that is unraveling — a grasp at the modernity they glimpse in Brazil and Chile. Are they too late? The next seven months will tell.
...slow-moving trends don’t account for the dramatic spike in political polarization over the last decade, with Bush and Obama. What else is happening?
and
For decades, Democrats have preferred greater social welfare to low taxes, so they are pleased with his policies. Republicans have preferred the opposite, so they are horrified. And the GOP nominee for 2012, whoever that may be, will undoubtedly promise to undo the Obama innovations, cutting back on the welfare state to keep taxes in line with their historical averages. Accordingly, he will have strong support from Republican voters, while Democrats will view him as the devil incarnate. Without economic growth, there is no middle ground for the two sides to occupy together, so polarization is probably the new normal.
Can humans
Insty found this: 
Unbearably self-revealing
Was the Bill of Rights an error? It is debatable. If you recall, the NY delegation insisted on it. 