Maggie's Farm

Readers know that I am opposed to death taxes - estate taxes. The wealthy find ways around them (how long has it been since a Kennedy or a Rockefeller held a real job as opposed to an optional job?), but merchants, the middle class, and farmers get screwed by them.

My friend in southern CT recently told me about a third-generation (the grandpa was an Italian immigrant) family-owned flower shop in their town which had to close up shop last month when Mom died. Why? They had to sell their small building to pay the estate taxes. Like a family farm, that is generations of dedication, good will, hard work, and a long-established part of a community down the drain.

Furthermore, I like the idea of middle-class families being able to build wealth over generations - and most people who work hard like that too. People like to feel that they are building something for the family's future, and for their family's independence from the kindness of strangers - and the government.

I do advise everyone, even if not wealthy, to do the best that they can to avoid the crushing effects of death taxes by getting the best estate-planning advice you can afford.

Brit Ted Dalrymple takes on the Fabians on the topic, in Let Them Inherit Debt. One quote:

There are many unfairnesses in life that we must learn to put up with, if we are to have any chance of happiness or even of tolerable contentment. For example, I should like to be taller, better-looking and more intelligent and gifted than I am. Every time I meet someone better-looking than I, taller than I, or more talented than I, which I do very regularly, I experience a brief spark of envy. What did they do to be as they are, my superiors? Why did providence, or chance, endow them with characteristics so much more attractive than my own? Needless to say, I never stop to think that, just possibly, some people might ask the same of me when they meet me.

    But the differential endowments of nature are unfair, not unjust, because (at least as yet) no human intervention can prevent them. The inheritance of wealth is not like this: it is a human arrangement that could be abrogated if not easily, for political reasons, at least with some effort. And if injustice is unfairness brought about by human means, then inheritance of wealth is unjust. Ergo, inheritance of wealth ought to be forbidden because it is unjust, and we must always seek justice.

    The question, then, is whether we should always seek justice to the exclusion of other desiderata. Is it true that justice always and everywhere trumps other considerations? I think the answer is no.

Local Man Claims Responsibility For Own Problems. h/t, Insty

Via Protein's Progressive utopia — enemy of Liberty:

If liberals are so disturbed by Congress dictating whether abortion is
a legitimate health care issue or not, it only makes sense that they
should be equally troubled by government management of other health
care decisions.
Undoubtedly, this is zealously naive thinking on my part. Reaching
such a conclusion demands a modicum of consistency. And as we’ve seen,
health care “reform” is an ideological crusade immune from logic. 

From Legal Insurrection, via Tiger: 100% Plus Taxation Key To Permanent Dem Majority.

One quote:

To say that antipoverty programs in the United States are perverted may
be an understatement. When you take into account the loss of
means-tested benefits (e.g., cash assistance, food stamps, housing
subsidies, and health insurance), and the taxes that people pay on
earned income, the return to working is essentially zero for those in
the lower two quintiles of the income distribution.

For many of
the working poor, the implicit marginal tax rate is greater than 100
percent. The long-run consequence of undermining the positive incentive
to work is, of course, the creation of an underclass acclimated to not
working...

From Ace's excellent (and serious) essay Pelosi: It's Very Fair That We Jail You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance:

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and
unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or
in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are
claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never
before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such
behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80%
of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or
another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people
for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or
harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the
Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and
well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first
of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost.

 Read the whole thing.

From Patriot Post:

Our Constitution's principle author, James Madison, wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce."

Concerning the legislature's authority, Thomas Jefferson asserted: "[G]iving [Congress] a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole [Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly, no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."

Via Shaw at PJ:

...too many modern liberals bristle when we suggest that checks, limits, and restrictions must be placed on this government largess. “Why,” I have been asked, “should I have to provide proof for some sort of means test in order to receive assistance funded by tax dollars?” Indeed, these same people will question why there should be limits on welfare payments or how we can expect recipients to begin working after a period of time in order to receive such benefits.

From Nyquist's What the Founding Fathers Would Say from last year:

The United States is a great country, even now. But the country has followed a path of degeneration via political correctness. To recognize this truth one only has to read Mariam Grossman’s Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. Grossman is a psychiatrist who works at an American university. “Radical politics pervades my profession,” she explains, “and common sense has vanished.” According to Grossman, “There is a tacit approval of promiscuity and experimentation…. Infection with one of the sexually transmitted viruses is a rite of passage; it comes with the territory. Abortion is the removal of unwanted tissue, sort of like a tonsillectomy.”

The main threat to any great country, quite naturally, comes from within.

Read the whole thing.

The WSJ notes:

Germany's health-care system was brought to life in 1883 by Otto von Bismarck and became the model for virtually every such state-directed national insurance plan since. Alas, the German system is starting to come apart at the financial seams. Germany's system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.

Read the whole thing about how it all went wrong.

This site reminds us of Bismarck's role in the creation of the modern Fascist-Welfare state.

- The FTC and the internet: Insanity, inanity - and danger.

- Also Insty: YOU CAN’T SAY THAT: At the UN, Obama Administration backs limits on free speech. As the piece in the Weekly Standard begins:

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.

That is creepy.

- And in Ottowa, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testify to the Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Monday (h/t, SDA). Videos at YouTube. Here's one of them (the second one):

James Capretta makes the case that the real national economic crisis is the growth of middle class entitlements in his excellent essay, The New Middle Class Contract.

The danger as he sees it (and as I see it) is to risk suffocating the goose that lays the golden eggs which have (not really) paid for our existing middle-class entitlements.

One quote from his essay:

Some liberal politicians, including the president, have sought to use this moment of instability — when all past certainties seem suddenly in question — to advance their longstanding agenda and expand the role of the state in health care, energy, education, and other sectors, taking on new spending commitments and in effect exacerbating the dangers of the old middle-class contract. As Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in November 2008: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

But the shock of the economic crisis may also make Americans more open to serious entitlement reforms that Emanuel, President Obama, and many other Democrats have long resisted. The logic of the case for reform is much like that of the case for the recent emergency interventions: the need for a bold response to an enormous problem, aimed at regaining some equilibrium and allowing again for sustainable economic growth and prosperity. This is the time to explain to the public just how grave the prospects for our entitlement system — and therefore for our larger economy — really are, and to argue for a serious and sensible change of course.

The impulse to insulate the middle class from the cost consequences of their choices — an impulse that has defined our longstanding ­middle-class contract — has done great harm and stands to do far more. The remedy must be to redesign our entitlements so that the choices the middle class makes in terms of work, family, and health care will promote more productivity, efficiency, and wealth, rather than the shrinking of the labor force and the growth of government.

Done right, a new arrangement would both strengthen our fiscal outlook and improve the economic standing of American families.

Yes, he is an idealist. His whole essay at National Affairs.

At First Principles. Just one quote:

The British, seeking to adapt to the aspirations of a modern, democratizing age, weaned themselves from Magna Carta. The Americans, “born equal, instead of becoming so,” in Tocqueville’s phrase, found in Magna Carta a symbol of political liberty, silently ignoring its feudal excrescences and adopting the common law insofar as it was, in the later words of Joseph Story, “applicable to the situation of the colony, and . . . not . . . altered, repealed, or modified by any of our subsequent legislation.” The Americans eventually established many of the Charter’s provisions in written constitutions of their own.

Nothing at all against eggheads. There is a place for them, but not in roles of power.

Academics and eggheads spend their professional lives insulated from the realities that most of us deal with every day. They play with ideas, and are not familiar with running a business and making a payroll, for example, while most normal folks spend their days dealing with tough realities and unsecure, demanding, worrisome, and often unpleasant jobs. 

This from Why eggheads shouldn't be running things:

Making government policy from radical, unfiltered, untested ideas turns citizens into guinea pigs and puts the country at high risk for destabilization and other unpredictable consequences.  

Part of what allows academia to produce radical ideas is the absence of failure. Their ideas are rarely applied to real world problems. You don't have to "go back to the drawing board" unless you have a reason to do so.

Academia isn't a mill for practical solutions. It is intended as an environment for expanding thought to open the mind to new possibilities unbridled by law, ethics, morality, practicality and other elements of civilized society. "Eggheads" in academia are on the far side of the spectrum from those who should make policy to govern.

The(se) maps were not used as navigation tools but instead served as visual histories, teaching objects, and illustrations of religious or philosophic ways of understanding the world and what was seen as God’s creation.

Collect your best debating points here: Hawk vs. Dove on crime and punishment. Dalrymple.

As a retired prison shrink, Dalrymple knows whereof he opines. 

What good is democracy if it doesn't give us the stuff I want? Sort-of from Thomas Friedman. A quote:

That's what you get with one-party democracy: a country run by a bunch of screaming, arguing Appalachian retards, all of whom get the same vote as Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion leaders. Say what you want about China, but they have sensible pre-screening rules to keep these divisive morons away from voting booths in the first place.

Our hero Ted Dalrymple (photo) encounters some PC censorship, and is not pleased about it. But his annoyance does not interfere with his ability to think about it intelligently. One quote:

...who, after all, is this ‘per’ whose son has given his name to everyone in the world? Surely, to be absolutely egalitarian between the sexes, it should be ‘peroffspring’?

John McAfee of the famous software company has seen his net worth go from $100 million to $4 million. He is just one of many of the wealthy who have experienced similar things over the past couple of years.

The NYT recounts some of these stories. (h/t, Mankiw). I have seen quite a bit of this happening in clients at the firm - none on the scale of McAfee, but plenty of folks who have dropped from, say, $4 million to $700,000 or $1 million. A few folks who were heavy in Citibank, for example, and a couple of families in Madoff. That hurts if you are 70 and thought you were all set for a comfortable retirement.

The collapse of the value of stocks, real estate, and other investments has led to greater "equality." Achieving greater financial equality in this way doubtless evokes schadenfreude in the envious, happiness in the hate-the-rich populists, and delight in those who erroneously believe that money and wealth are zero-sum games.

But does it do any good for anybody? Probably not. When the rich lose money, government revenues drop, requiring higher taxes on the middle class. When the rich lose money, those who provide the goods and services they enjoy end up in trouble too - like boatmakers, travel companies, landscaping businesses, interior decorators, masseuses, restaurants, furniture-makers, hospital employees, government employees - and lawyers (our firm's income is down 27% thus far this year).

I believe that the Lefty notion of economic equality is insane. If anything, we need more rich people - the more, the better. I want everybody to be rich - if that is what they want in life.

My plan, after today, is to stay away from the news until Labor Day. Not other interesting subjects, just news.

I'd never read the news if my American freedoms were not under daily threat by government (of any or either political party).

I need a short sabbatical (sitting by the pool hallucinating by watching the mermaids in my pool and letting my blood pressure return to normal) from my active membership in the highly-organized mob, from our secret cabal of hate-spewing, un-American evil ones who worry about too much Federal government power over our lives and who have the intolerable audacity of hope to say so, and to question our Dear Leaders.

(As I said the other day, in a mixed economy as the US has (if we can keep it), government becomes just one more special interest with their own goals and agendas, their own desires for money and power and chicks, their careerists, their criminals, their corruption, their cupidity, their influence-peddling, and their hordes of dependent bureacratic employees. Their only difference from most other organizations is that they do not have to show a profit and they do not have to be smart.)

However, given the attempted government take-over of medical care in the US (see list of their tactics, and dig this about how much they are spending on ads), this seemed an important cautionary tale:

Canadian Health Care "Imploding"-- Doctors Meet & Discuss Private Options

What a genius idea! A private option! As in freedom to pay for the medical care you want, and to buy whatever insurance you might want? Like in America?

Maybe the government-centric view of life isn't all it's cracked up to be. I am an adult. I am a man, I spell M-A-N. If government is supposed to be my parent, I prefer to be an orphan. Nor do I want a Philosopher-King. I am my own Philosopher-King of my own life, thank you very much. That's the whole point of America.

Our friend Ace has a remarkably serious post on the topic of medical insurance. I wish I had written it, but I was too busy having fun with the horses. He says - and I totally agree -

The reason that employees at companies that pay for insurance get most of this paid for is that their employer is merely paying them wages in a different form; i.e., rather than pay you an extra $10 a week or $500 per year, they'll pay $500 of medical expenses you would otherwise have to pay yourself.

They're not "insuring" you. You cannot be "insured" against a "risk" 100% guaranteed to occur.

They're just delivering wages in a roundabout fashion.

and

Individual mandates, for one.

To be perfectly honest with you, I personally am not completely opposed to this one, in principle, assuming it would take a tolerable form.

But I don't assume that. It will take an intolerable form. I assume it will take the form of the stupidest, vote-buyingest, most socialistic scheme possible, so I oppose it in fact.

So long as it's not greatly socialist -- e.g., young people, with barely any need for insurance at all (which is why they skip it) are overcharged ludicrously so they are forced to subsidize the elderly, who use a lot of insurance dollars. Or rich people are forced to pay money for the poor. In that case, I could kinda get behind it, or at least not bother myself to oppose it strenuously.

Or it covers anything except unpredictable, rare, catastrophic health crises.

This idea that taxpayers ought to pay for someone's eyeglasses or routine visits to the doctor or utterly-predictable need of antibiotics or flu immunizations is, well, two words; In. Sane.

As my final point on the topic for a few weeks, I see the WSJ is repeating what I always say: Who has a better use for their money than to treat their disease or to keep their health? It's what prosperous people do. One quote:

Though it hasn't been widely realized, the desire for shelter was a major driver of the U.S. economy during the second half of the 20th century and the first several years of the 21st. About one-third of the new jobs created during the latter period were directly or indirectly related to housing, as the stupendous ripple effect of the bursting housing bubble should make painfully obvious.

Once these material needs are substantially met, desire for health care—without which there can be no enjoyment of food, clothing or shelter—becomes a significant, perhaps a principal, driver of the economy. A little-noticed feature of the current recession is the role of the health-care industry as a resilient driver of the general economy.

Yes, spending on medical treatment is a wonderful thing and a great privilege. People should want to spend more on it. Just check out my dental implants, or read my (stainless steel) left hip. Good stuff, but not cheap - but worth every penny, and only easily available in the good old USA.

Government is the most powerful and dangerous "special interest" that exists. Everybody knows that. George Washington predicted it.

Government power is the flaw of democracy. That's why they wanted a Constitutional Republic, but Lincoln and FDR erased that ideal for most purposes. What "Constitution"?

It's the businesses, poverty pimps, and unions (so they do not have to fuss about it) that support government medical care (but the poor already have Medicaid). It's the people who do not support a government take-over. They are not impressed by how government runs things, for good reason.

I heard on the radio today that the Prez admitted that he has never read the latest medical care bill. Well, a good salesman can sell ice to Eskimos.

It is wonderful to see that Americans still want freedom from government control, aka "government help." Kudlow points out today that, in Georgia, you can get good medical insurance (including Major Dental - wow! My teeth are a mess) for $120/month. Of course, federal law forbids interstate medical insurance.

Why? It's supporting some friends of some politicians. Government is the most insidious and potent "special interest."

Toon via S,C &A;

We have frequently opined here that too many Americans go to college, wasting time and money and extending adolescence in those who could and should be doing real things in the real world, and getting life experience instead of mastering beer pong and Leftist theory about how to remain a dependent throughout life on the effort of others. A solid high school education was good enough for Bill Gates, and ought to be a good platform for lifetime learning for them as wants it.

Anybody can go to the library and find a free book to guide them through Aristotle, Plato, Aquinus, Locke, Burke, and Hume. Anybody who doesn't feel moved to do so does not belong in college anyway: for them, it's just expensive day care as it was for Sebastian Flight.

Knowledge is cheap and readily accessible these days for all (thank God) - but learning is never easy.

The smart people I know just used their silly academic credentials so they could get a good apprenticeship in some useful and profitable line of work. That's what I had to do. My fancy law degree (which cost me lots of money) just gave me the chance to learn law afterwards. It is a dumb and/or corrupt system in which academic credentials, however empty or enriching, are required. Monopolistic, I believe, on the part of the Big Academia industry/cartel.

I have no trust in Big Academia. Like the tort bar, Big Academia is bought off and in the pocket of the Lefties. Follow the money...

Reason agrees (with a Reason video).

Photo: Harvard Yard. They can give you a pricey credential, but what you can do with it or chose to do with it, in the end, depends on you.