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.
There are simple reasons why (relative) poverty persists in America, but the first is most significant: If poverty is defined as roughly the lowest 15% of income then, obviously, it will persist whether the poor have cars, air conditioners, farms, houses, lots of food, iPhones, TVs, a government dwelling, government medical care, government schools, government cheese, etc.
Is there abuse? Of course there is. Welfare Loophole: Sisters Make $540,000 Babysitting Their Kids. Can't help it because the world is full of people who will work any system to their own advantage. It's their loss of dignity and self-respect. Once given up, those things are difficult to ever recover but some people don't care. Dependency can be a trap whether from government or from a trust fund.
The second major part seems to be life choices. If more money is what you want, then you have to make life plans and choices which might make that goal possible and, if you have any sense of honor at all, you will not take it from your neighbors except in desperation. This via Powerline:
Most voters don't know what the heck is going on, and don't care very much. We often forget this although in ordinary life we encounter such ignorance every day. Friend Sissy recently objected to my pointing this out, but I will stand by my first-hand impression.
Our readers seem to be highly-informed and engaged about policy, but pols know that such voters do not matter much.
Ilya discusses informed and uninformed (and uninterested) citizenry in his usual charming and amusing way, below:
Special interest avarice has no natural limits. A generation ago, economist Mancur Olson made the point that a special interest’s appetite has no limit because it gets the benefits while the costs are borne by society at large. This incentive structure means that the interest will keep grabbing even when the costs imposed on society at large far exceed the benefits to the interest. And its Washington representatives have an incentive to be even less reasonable, as they have to juice the troops to keep the stream of dues coming.
Some commentators are under the illusion that the current national crisis will sober up the special interests. But that is not how it works, because a crisis makes special interests less, not more, responsible. The situation becomes, in the language of game theorists, a “last-period problem.” As a game approaches an end, the players have no need to cooperate for the sake of protecting long-term relationships. Their incentive is to grab as much as possible before the game ends, or, to translate to the real world, before the society collapses. Do not look for crisis to bring out a sense of responsibility in the advocates for the interests.
Politics is all about such cases, but here's one for today: Big Sugar Wins in the Senate. Same old Plunder Politics, spreading the sugar around to buy votes and allies.
Well, first for your cigarettes, then salt, then your french fries, then your cokes. Now your cigars.
What next? What next?
The biggest problem with America is a too big, too power-mad, overweening government which refuses to leave the people the heck alone to make their own choices in life.
It's a sickness, the desire to control one's fellow adults. What neurosis motivates such things? A normal American detests such jerks, by homeland instinct.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Democratic institutions have strong incentives to flatter the feelings of the ignorant and greedy among us, who are a large voting constituency. For this reason, Congress and the regulatory agencies treat the inevitable parting of fools and their money as a deficiency in the marketplace. When Granny puts all of her money into baht-denominated commodity swaptions and then loses it, the fault cannot possibly be hers: Surely there is something wrong with the market, surely those marginally employed and penniless borrowers were tricked into thinking they could afford half-million-dollar suburban spreads, surely companies with no profits or assets would have been outstanding investments if only we’d had the right regulations, etc., and we have to figure out a way to give people their money back. But when JPMorgan makes a boneheaded sort-of-a-hedge-sort-of-not investment and takes a $5 billion (and counting) lump, obviously JPMorgan is at fault, and it’s a national scandal.
Aren't investments all about risk? Who is too dumb to know that?
The main enemies of state power are family and religion.
Why do Lefties trust big government over free commerce, free markets, and achievement? I believe it is because they want to be in charge of things, in charge of me. I resent that impulse.
Now we have a stake in protecting crab populations for the future. Because we aren't in such a race against the clock, we're able to get more young and female crabs we don't keep back into the ocean unharmed. When we find an area has too many juvenile crabs, there's time to go somewhere else instead.
The graduates of our social sciences and humanities programs are increasingly found wanting in the workplace. Unless they can find employment in a leftist dominated milieu (e.g., government, academia, public sector union, media conglomerate), the American business world finds them ill-equipped to function successfully in what remains of the US entrepreneurial society.
The costs of a university indoctrination--er, that is, education--have skyrocketed. In light of the previous bullet, consumers-- i.e., the students' parents--find it increasingly hard to justify the expense.
Intense criticism of the faculty is on the rise: they can't teach; or what they teach is garbage or propaganda; they're too busy with their "research"; and they are overpaid.
Administrative policies make no sense--multiculturalism trumps achievement, political correctness outweighs impartiality.
Most damaging, our universities, after a prolonged period of indoctrination, return students to their parents in a form that parents cannot recognize--their opinions, values and behavior have been altered beyond repair. (To be fair, it is encouraging that a not insignificant percentage of college grads manage to resist the brainwashing on campus).
Roger Kimball is one of too few conservative writers who can lend deep erudition to connect the central tenets of Western civilization with today’s immediate events and concerns. Kimball’s influence is not only through his own writings but his featuring of that of others at his The New Criterion and its blog Arma Virumque (I’ve been overhonored to appear at the blog) and his publishing house Encounter Books.
Now, you have the chance to get in depth with Kimball’s learning and lessons in his new book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Order at this link.
Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations.
And…
[T]he fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.
This year's Coming Attractions will include massive and distorted attacks on Mitt Romney's successful business career.
Promising young businesses need funding, and frail tired businesses must be re-built or sold for salvage. Is there a way to talk, politically, about venture capital and business competition in a way that people can relate to? I suppose buggy-whip companies and blacksmiths are a place to start.
The 2012 presidential race will be, in part, a showdown between two different models of economic growth. President Barack Obama and his Democratic administration will defend the once-discredited and now-resurgent theory that government must act as the economy’s “tutor” and use public funds to stimulate it. The Republican nominee, presumably Mitt Romney, will advance the free-market argument that the main source of new growth is the innovative energy of American entrepreneurs and that government needs to get out of the way.
Governments suffer from grandiosity. They think that they can fix everything. Worse they believe that they should fix everything. It never occurs to them to fix themselves except around election time. When they do recognize their own brokenness they treat it as a symptom of the brokenness of the real world.
They conclude that the problem is not that their national health care plans are unworkable, but that there are too many fat people in the country. Bring down the number of fat people and there will be plenty of money left over for everything else. Get everyone to stop smoking, get them to eat their vegetables, floss twice a day and take the best possible care of themselves and the cost of health care will go down.
The Soviet Union similarly concluded that the problem was not with their collective farm system, it was with the people working on them. It didn't matter that wheat had been grown much more plentifully and efficiently before the rise of the red flag. It didn't matter that regions which had once been wheat exporters were now forced to import wheat from capitalist countries. The system was perfect, which meant that the people had to be made perfect enough to allow it to fulfill its potential.
Always enjoyed that Berthold Brecht quote about when a government is displeased with the people, the government should elect a new people.
With the enlargement of federal powers and intrusions into individual’s lives, the 9th Amendment to the US Constitution, part of our Bill Of Rights, may well gain more judicial attention.The 9th Amendment should be elevated to central prominence, as it was intended, in applying judgment of all federal legislation, regulations and actions. Our revolution is based in restriction of central powers and must again be reignited to, no exaggeration, save our liberties. Here's the spare words of the 9th Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The 9th Amendment is the least cited or relied upon in Supreme Court cases. The lack of agreement among constitutional scholars as to the specific meaning of the 9th Amendment is largely the reason. This lack of agreement also exceeds the general lack of agreement – usually along liberal and conservative lines – as to many other sections of the Constitution. Focus on transgressions of the first eight Amendments, more specific as to particular rights, and cases specifically concerned with how broad should be an enumerated (listed) power, was usually enough until now.
But constitutional scholars do agree on a basic point: the 9th Amendment was intended to be a guiding construct to interpretation of the rest of the Constitution, although specifics may be either lacking or in contention. After all, the 9th Amendment was considered necessary to be part of our Bill Of Rights without which the Constitution would not have been ratified.
Today, there are new factors requiring more attention to the 9th Amendment: the cumulative and continuing expansion of federal legislation into territories formerly outside its enumerated reserve, the almost unchecked latitude claimed by federal regulatory rules, and technologies’ facilitation of increased central controls and uniformity. The runaway employment of the federal purse and tax to compel obedience is, simply, out of control at the same time that it is evident that the economic security of the nation is imperiled by it.
Any power that government has to do something you like will invariably be used for something you abhor. Today’s decision interpreting the Commerce Clause to justify snatching home-grown medical marijuana from patients in California becomes the justification for tomorrow’s federal mandate to buy health insurance. Reduce the scope of government, and we reduce the culture war, while promoting true tolerance of divergent viewpoints.
If the Federalist Papers are ignored or given inadequate attention in today's colleges, the Anti-Federalist Papers are consigned to the memory hole as a challenge to prevailing liberal thought.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of The Federalist for understanding the principles of American government and the challenges that liberal democracies confront early in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can't be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds. Small wonder it took so long for progressives to realize that arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare are indeed serious.
For the full answer, if Berkowitz offers one, you'd have to be a paid subscriber to the Wall Street Journal. A lawyer before becoming a columnist, Jennifer Rubin offers explanations, "The first has to do with the transformation of law schools from intellectual institutions to professional trade schools. Especially with the astronomically high tuition at most law schools, the emphasis, by necessity, is on preparing students for the practice of the law....Second, law schools have given way to the notion that the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is." She concludes:
The reason in large part is the defect in legal and collegiate education, and the mindset behind the indifference to seminal documents that reveal the ingenious and enduring structure of our Constitution.
The story of Newark, New Jersey is a classic of the Northeast's Blue City woes with corrupt, plunder-oriented politicians, corrupt and greedy unions, the Mafia, unskilled blacks from the South coming for industrial opportunities which disappeared, drugs and drug gangs, welfare, white flight - all of it.
You can see the same sad story in Bridgeport, CT, Camden, NJ, or Hartford, CT. Newark Mayor Cory Booker has sought the chance to turn things around.
Is Booker a Don Quixote or a Rudy Giuliani? Time will tell.
For 70 years, since the court in 1942 said the government could limit the amount of wheat farmer Roscoe Filburn could grow on his own land to feed his own animals, it has been generally assumed that the federal government's power to regulate the economy had no limits.
That assumption survived in liberal precincts even though the court in 1995 overturned a law banning guns in schools and in 2000 ruled unconstitutional parts of the Violence Against Women Act.
But the arguments, developed by Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett and others, that it is beyond the powers conferred by the Constitution for Congress to mandate the purchase of a commercial product -- health insurance in Obamacare -- were certainly taken seriously by a majority of Supreme Court justices last week.
And the government's lawyers were unable to answer the questions of both liberal and conservative justices: If Congress can do this, what can't it do?
That question is likely to linger even if the court upholds Obamcare.
Economists say that diet and exercise have a greater effect on taxpayer spending on healthcare than rates of ownership of insurance, so if anything healthy-food and gym-membership mandates have greater constitutional warrant than what we’re dealing with now.
So when will the Feds try to mandate gym membership? For the greater good, of course?
You don't have to coerce people to follow sound advice. The government at all levels is all coercion, all the time, about everything, and in their hearts most government functionaries of both parties have a profound contempt for their constituents, and get elected solely on assembling a coalition of voters with a profound contempt of just less than half their fellow citizens.
The more governments prove themselves incompetent to do something, the more resources they demand to do it. From Hubris heading for a fall:
Until the 1930s, or perhaps the 1960s, there was a "legitimacy barrier" to federal government activism: When new policies were proposed, the first debate was about whether the federal government could properly act at all on the subject. Today, there is no barrier to the promiscuous multiplication of programs, because no program is really new. Rather, it is an extension, modification or enlargement of something government is already doing.
and
James Q. Wilson, America's late, great social scientist, noted that until relatively recently, "politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything." Until the 1930s, or perhaps the 1960s, there was a "legitimacy barrier" to federal government activism: When new policies were proposed, the first debate was about whether the federal government could properly act at all on the subject. Today, there is no barrier to the promiscuous multiplication of programs, because no program is really new. Rather, it is an extension, modification or enlargement of something government is already doing.
And
"There has been," Wilson writes, "a transformation of public expectations about the scope of federal action, one that has put virtually everything on Washington's agenda and left nothing off." Try, Wilson suggests, to think "of a human want or difficulty that is not now defined as a 'public policy problem.'"
The inner-ring suburbs around a major city collectively have a much greater area than the city itself. Hence, even modest reductions in density regulations in these areas--replacing large lots with small ones, single-family homes with townhouses--would have a larger effect on the housing supply than allowing a few more 50-story apartment towers downtown.
Matt points out that housing deregulation would have a number of benefits. High-density living is better for the environment. It promotes a more diverse and efficient service sector. It makes reliable and convenient mass transit feasible. But I think the most important message of Matt's book, and others like Ryan Avent's The Gated City, is that it makes clear that astronomical rents are a result of specific regulatory decisions, not an inevitable malady of urban life.
Mark Levin made a good point on the radio recently. While pointing out that government takes 25% of all income in the US - and still cannot come close to paying their bills, he said what I felt was important: We're all at fault.
Well, maybe not individually, but all at fault as a voting mass because, since FDR, we have been demanding and taking more and more goodies from the government - ie from eachother. The candy bowl was emptied, so we started borrowing candy from China.
China is making money from those loans, from our labor. But as our commenter Bob said here this morning:
The reality is that a majority of Americans want socialism. They want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, and regulations on the environment, work, housing, food and drugs, zoning, etc etc etc. All that is modern, parliamentary socialism. The old socialism of worker dictatorship and state ownership of the means of production died in WWI when the workers supported the war instead of revolting.
But Americans have been conditioned to hate the word socialism.
Also, Americans, like people everywhere, don't want to pay for it. They keep trying pass the costs on to someone else. There is no one else. The American middle class and working class will have to pay a lot more in taxes to get what they want. A very lot more. Probably at least double.
If taxes aren't raised dramatically, benefits will have to be cut. That will not happen until economic collapse occurs. Greece is everyone's future. Most of the welfare state benefits go to the elderly. If you cut benefits, you will reduce your own grandparents to poverty and you will deny them medical care. In other words, welcome to 1910.
Or are you totally retarded, and still need elected dingbats to tell you how to live? Efforts to intrude into our lives and choices are becoming absurd. Nannie Bloomberg is one of the worst.
Now he's worried that food donated to the homeless might have too much salt. Kosher food, no less. This guy has some weird obsession with what other people eat. It's not a normal concern, especially for a male. Does he think he's my mother?
The endgame is just that no one actually pays for anything; the government, or a co-opted government-controlled industry which provides the functions of a socialist government ("insurance companies" which no longer insure anything, but merely send checks to people), simply takes over almost all costs in life.
As long as they call it "insurance," people can pretend they aren't mooching off their neighbors.
From DeLong in
Well, first for your cigarettes, then salt, then your french fries, then your cokes. Now 
Who is the better steward of the land: a robber, a plunderer, a squatter, a renter, or an owner?
Mark Levin made a good point on the radio recently. While pointing out that government takes 25% of all income in the US - and still cannot come close to paying their bills, he said what I felt was important: We're all at fault.