MayerBlog: The Web Log of
David N. Mayer

 

Tricks and Treats (2009)

 

 Four years ago, in October 2005, I posted my first “Tricks and Treats” blog essay, in celebration of Halloween season.  It’s time again for me to note some more “tricks” or “treats” – that is, both negatives and positives among the current developments in politics and popular culture.

 

  

n Trick:  B.O.’s Ig-Nobel P.P. 

The announcement that B.O. has won the Nobel Peace Prize predictably generated a storm of outrage, with most commentators pointing out the fact that B.O. had done absolutely nothing to earn the award.  Because he had been nominated on February 1, barely two weeks after his inauguration, obviously it wasn’t his record but his rhetoric that was the basis of the nomination and the award.  In an October 10 editorial the Detroit News observed: 

“When you think about it, it’s not all that remarkable that President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize based on a nomination made just nine days after he took office.  It fits perfectly with the rest of his resume.  Obama was handed the White House by voters after serving just four years in the U.S. Senate, half of which he spent on the presidential campaign trail.  While in the Senate, not a single piece of legislation was passed because of his championship.  Before coming to Washington, Obama spent six unremarkable years in the Illinois Senate, and prior to that he was a law professor and a community organizer.  Obama’s resume has never been his strength.  He has been pushed ahead in leaps and bounds based on his promise and in advance of his actual achievements.  Now he’s been given a Nobel Prize, apparently because the judges felt he talked a good game about a more civil world and, in large part, for not being George W. Bush.”

 

The Europeans who comprise the Nobel Peace Prize committee (mostly left-wing Danish parliamentarians) apparently share the “hope” that B.O.’s presidency would “change” American foreign policy in what they see as a positive direction – but which conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh has aptly characterized as the “emasculation” of the United States.   In his actions so far as president, B.O. apparently has earned the Nobel committee’s confidence.  He has attempted to appease ruthless dictatorial regimes like those in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, making the peoples of those countries and their neighboring countries far less safe.  And he has backed away from plans to install a missile-defense shield in eastern Europe, just to please Russia, in the vain hope that Vladimir Putin might help prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs.  (In so doing, B.O. has alienated the good people of the Czech Republic and Poland.  In a classic instance of bad timing, the administration’s announcement that it would scrap plans for the missile-defense shield program was made on the day that marked the 70^th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II.  Having removed what little leverage the U.S. has against Russia, B.O. has not only ruined whatever chances we had to get Russia’s help in containing Iran but also left these nations of eastern Europe powerless to defend themselves against an increasingly aggressive, nationalistic Russia itself.) 

The Nobel Peace Prize is an unfunny joke, as is demonstrated by past awards to the likes of Palestinian terrorist Yassar Arafat, incompetent boob Jimmy Carter, and fear-mongering hypocrite AlGore.  It’s essentially an award for anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, anti-reason – and hence, its award to the current president of the United States can be considered nothing but an embarrassment.  It’s almost as embarrassing as B.O.’s presidency itself.

  

 

n Treat:  20 Years Without the USSR 

The cover story of the new, November 2009 issue of Reason magazine, “The Unknown War,” celebrates the 20^th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the end of the Cold War.  Editor-in-chief Matt Welch writes about the momentous events that occurred during the last four months of 1989 – a year that “ended communism in Europe, the Soviet empire, the division of Germany, and an ideological and geopolitical struggle . . . that had shaped world politics for half a century.”   

Perhaps the most dramatic event, the event that most dramatically summed up the historic changes that took place in the fall of 1989, was the fall of the Berlin Wall.  On November 9, 1989 a Communist Party spokesman announced that citizens of East Germany were allowed to travel to the West, meaning that the people of East Berlin – for the first time since the 30-mile Wall was erected in 1961 – could freely cross into West Berlin.  Within a few hours, the people of Berlin began demolishing the Wall, by hand, with chisels and hammers.  (Remember the memorable photos of the jubilant crowds of Germans standing on top the Wall, having already torn down whole sections of it, celebrating the end of the Soviet Communists’ post-WWII division of Germany?  One of those magnificent photos is reproduced opposite page 49 in the November Reason.  In the historic speech he gave at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan had challenged Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to liberate the Soviet bloc nations, declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  Just over two years later, the people of Berlin began to tear down the wall themselves.)  In the days that followed, millions of East Germans visited West Berlin for the first time; by June 1990 the official demolition of the Wall began by former East German border guards (many of them the very guards who, before this time, had shot dead anyone who even approached the Wall from its east side).  By October 1990 Germany was officially reunited, and Communist rule of East Germany (the sector seized in the final days of World War II and occupied by the Soviet Union for the next 45 years) finally had come to an end. 

In the fall of 1989 the old Soviet Union itself – the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” that the Leninist-Stalinist Communist regime in Russia had imposed by force on Russia’s neighbors – also came to an end, as its government collapsed, liberating both the people of Russia and these former Soviet satellite states from the yoke of Communist tyranny.  The “Iron Curtain” has rusted away:  countries formerly enslaved by Soviet Communist tyranny are now free and prospering, particularly the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuana) as well as several nations in Eastern Europe (especially the Czech Republic and Hungary).  (Sadly, however, some of the former Soviet satellites have yet to win their freedom – Belarus, for example, is still ruled by a brutal Communist dictator – while others continue to be threatened by Russia’s aggressiveness.  Georgia, still occupied by Russian troops, particularly comes to mind. And, of course, although the Communist Party no longer rules in Russia with its iron fist, the former Communist KGB head, Vlad Putin, effectively rules as dictator still in Russia itself.  On the whole, however, the cause of freedom has tremendously advanced in the past 20 years.  As Matt Welch notes, the global liberty watchdog Freedom House estimated that in 1988 only 36 percent of the world’s 167 independent countries were “free”; 23 percent were “partly free,” and 41 percent were “not free.”  By 2008, not only were there 26 additional countries (including the liberated nations of eastern Europe), but the ratios had reversed: 46 percent were “free,” 32 percent were “partly free,” and just 22 percent were “not free.”) 

As Welch observes, the defeat of Soviet communism in 1989 – as symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 – was one of the most liberating moments in history.  (Indeed, as he puts it, “November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history.”)  Yet today, two decades later as we approach the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the anniversary has been barely noted by the American media.  He found only four newspapers, reprinting a single syndicated column, had noted the anniversary, by the time the November issue of Reason went to press.  (Since then, more recently, on October 23 USA Today printed a feature article – “After the Fall” – that discussed the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall, mostly on Berliners.)  Remarkably, Welch observes, “the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe.”  By the way, B.O. will not travel to Germany to attend the 20^th-anniversary celebration.  As a commentator on the conservative “PowerLine” blog noted, he really should reconsider his decision not to attend because it would an opportunity for B .O. “to give a speech in which he does not apologize for his country but celebrates the triumph of freedom. . . .”  But perhaps that’s why he won’t attend:  he wouldn’t like to give such a speech.  After all, the last time he was in Germany (as Rick Richman has noted), he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.  B.O. wouldn’t want to jeopardize his Nobel Peace Prize by acknowledging the real reasons for the end of the Cold War. 

At the time of Ronald Reagan’s death a few years ago, most political commentators – including both critics and fans alike – did acknowledge the key role that Reagan played in bringing about the end of the Cold War, one of the most important legacies of his presidency.  Reagan’s steadfastness in dealing with Gorbachev – not only his famous 1987 challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!, but also his refusal to appease Soviet demands, in US-Soviet arms-control talks, that the U.S. back down from its planned missile-defense program (Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, as its critics unfairly maligned it) – helped accelerate the collapse of the Soviet empire.  Reagan’s steadfastness will be acknowledged by history as the most important single factor in the collapse of Soviet Communism – whether or not left-wing academics and the current occupant of the White House have the intellectual honesty to admit it.

 

  

n Trick:  Communist “Czars” in the USA 

One of the more controversial members of the B.O. administration, Van Jones, the so-called “green jobs czar,” has resigned from his position as Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council of Environmental Quality.  Jones’ resignation letter was released on midnight, the Sunday night/Monday morning of Labor Day weekend – deliberately orchestrated by the administration to ensure minimal media coverage.  Jones had become controversial because he’s a self-described “communist” (a former Oakland, California street organizer, he founded a communist group called STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), and he’s also a 9/11 “truther” (one of those nuts who actually believes the Bush administration was somehow involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 2001); but it seems that it was one of his “inappropriate” partisan remarks – he called Republicans “assholes” – that was the final straw.  Far more serious, however, were his far-leftist political beliefs and the radical agenda he was planning to push, through his job as “green jobs czar.”  In a 2008 interview with a leftist radio station in Los Angeles, Jones spoke of using the “green economy” to bring about a “complete revolution” away from “gray capitalism” and toward “redistribution of the wealth.” He declared his intent “to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society” – in other words, to use the environmentalist “green” movement as a kind of Trojan horse to socialize the entire economy. 

Two questions remain in the wake of Van Jones’s resignation.  First, because he no doubt will continue his political activism, will Jones continue to still influence administration policy, unofficially, through his friendship with Valerie Jarrett, a top aide (and close Chicago friend) of B.O. who helped hire Jones in the first place?  And, assuming Jones is indeed no longer helping to shape policy, what other radical leftist/Marxists remain in powerful positions in this administration?  Another rather scary “czar” is Mark Lloyd, who was appointed this summer as chief “diversity” officer at the Federal Communications Commission.  Lloyd’s notion of “diversity” is to silence conservative commentary on talk radio and the Internet, which he aims to do by pushing new rules mandating so-called “localism” requirements and “Net neutrality.”  Lloyd has written that we make too much of the constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of speech and press, asserting that “the purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”  He has even spoken admiringly of the what socialist dictator Hugo Chavez did to silence the opposition in Venezuela’s media.  

And White House communications director Anita Dunn delivered a controversial high-school graduation speech, proclaiming her admiration for the philosophy of Communist Chinese dictator Mao Tse-Tung.  In fairness to Ms. Dunn, rather than being a card-carrying Communist, she may be one of those naïve leftists who have blinded themselves to all the evil that Mao wrought.  In her speech extolling Mao’s political philosophy, Ms. Dunn was trying to make a larger point.  But, as Charles Krauthammer noted in a recent column (Oct. 24), critics have missed the “surprising stupidity” of that larger point: “She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices.  Mao, as champion of individuality?  Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?”  As he concludes, “The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities.  She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?”  (Krauthammer was referring to the administration’s war on Fox News, discussed below.)

 

 

n Treat:  Congressman Joe Wilson, Patriotic “Heckler” 

            Congressman Joe Wilson (R.-S.C.) caused some controversy last month, when during President B.O.’s speech to Congress on September 9, he shouted out “You lie!” in response to B.O.’s assertion that his health-care plan would not cover illegal immigrants.  Democrats were appalled, as were many members of Wilson’s party (who pressured him to apologize to the White House).  TV journalists claimed that such “heckling” of a president during his speech to Congress was unprecedented – ignoring, among other things, the many times that Democrats heckled President George W. Bush during his addresses to Congress (for example, during his 2005 State of the Union address, when multiple Democrats booed when Bush warned that Social Security was going bankrupt). 

             The difference between multiple Democrat members of Congress booing Bush and a lone Republican “heckling” B.O.?  Other than the numbers, among the other differences:  B.O. actually was lying (the Democrat health-care proposals have no mechanism for denying coverage to illegal immigrants), one of many lies in a speech that was noteworthy for being filled with bald-faced lies.  The American people are beginning to realize exactly what kind of snake-oil salesman they elected president last year; they’re beginning to realize, as I wrote last fall, that “the Emperor Has No Clothes.”  Congressman Wilson was like the little boy in that classic story by Hans Christian Anderson – the honest little boy who wasn’t deceived by the politically-correct fiction about the emperor’s new suit of clothes and who simply shouted out the truth as he saw it, that the emperor was really naked.  He was merely “speaking truth to power” – something that left-liberals used to admire, until one of their own came into power.

  

 

n Trick:  B.O.’s F’ed-Up Priorities 

At the beginning of October, B.O. and Mrs. O. (along with Oprah!) traveled to Copenhagen, so the president could personally lobby the International Olympics Committee to pick his adopted hometown, Chicago, Illinois, as the host city for the 2012 Summer Games.  B.O.’s lobbying effort failed spectacularly:  in the IOC balloting, Chicago came in dead last – with the least number of votes, Chicago was eliminated in the first round, losing to the other three cities under consideration, Tokyo, Madrid, and Rio de Janiero – with Rio ultimately winning the IOC’s pick.  Matt Drudge announced on his Drudge Report: “The Ego Has Landed; World Rejects Obama: Chicago Out in First Round.”  The London Times, in an Oct. 2 online article, reported:  “Chicago’s dismal showing today, after Mr. Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President.  It cannot be emphasized enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good – but carries no heft.” 

B.O. flew out of Washington at a critical time:  among other crises that ought to have been the focus of the president’s attention were Iran’s defiant nuclear-weapons program and the continuing military quagmire in Afghanistan, where U.S. servicemen and women are dying every day while B.O. remains undecided about whether to boost troop levels, as the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan has recommended.  (Meanwhile, General McChrystal has disclosed that during his first 70 days as commanding general in Afghanistan, he spoke to the Commander-in-Chief only once – a disclosure that shows B.O.’s shameful lack of concern about military matters.  Like his Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton, B.O. seems to have nothing but contempt for the U.S. military, even though they’re engaged in a war in Afghanistan that he himself has characterized as “necessary.”) 

B.O.’s decision to fly to Copenhagen instead of staying in Washington to deal with the urgent problems with Iran and Afghanistan is, sadly, all-too-typical of the fucked-up priorities of this president.  From his first day in office, B.O. has been jumping from issue to issue like a child with attention-deficit disorder might jump from toy to toy in his playroom:  indeed, B.O. looks more and more like our first president with ADD or ADHD.  As I’ve been saying for more than a year, he’s simply not fit to be president.

  

 

n Treat:  The 9/12 Protest in Washington, D.C. 

      On Saturday, September 12, one of the largest “marches on Washington” that have occurred in modern history took place in the nation’s capital, and yet the nation’s major newspapers and news outlets essentially ignored it (except for Fox News and C-SPAN, who covered the event live).  Hundreds of thousands of Americans – estimated by London’s Daily Mail at over one million people, which would rival the size of the crowd gathered for B.O.’s inaugural on January 20 – traveled to Washington to participate in a huge march and a rally on the Mall.  Carrying hand-made signs – with messages such as “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem”; “Subverting the Constitution is Un-American”; “Marxism – Change We Don’t Need”; “Go Green – Recycle Congress”; and “ObamaCare Is Evil” – many of the demonstrators also waved the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, with a libertarian slogan of the American Revolution.  Like those involved in “tea party” protests this past spring and summer, they were expressing their opposition to massive federal spending programs (such as the $787-billion so-called “stimulus” package or the “bailouts” of banks and auto companies), the mushrooming federal deficit and national debt, and the Democrats’ schemes for a federal takeover of the health-care industry.  What the 9/12 demonstrators were protesting weren’t just these massive federal tax-and-spend programs or expanded government regulations; more importantly, what really concerns them is the larger trend these policies signify:  a shift from what remains of the American free-market, capitalist, and limited-government system to a European-style socialist, redistributionist, Big-Government welfare state. 

      The 9/12 anti-tax-and-spend demonstrators weren’t members of special-interest groups, like the more famous “million-man” marches that received lots of publicity in past years.  They were ordinary citizens, many of them participating in such a mass rally for the first time.  Encouraged by conservative and libertarian commentators such as Glenn Beck and organized virtually on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites, the march constituted “the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives ever,” according to a spokesman for FreedomWorks, the advocacy group led by former House majority leader Dick Armey, which helped plan the event.  It was truly a “grass-roots” demonstration by the “silent majority” of Americans concerned about the growing power of the U.S. government – a majority that’s silent no longer, and which politicians from both major political parties would ignore at their own peril (as we’ll see in the 2010 and 2012 elections).

  

 

n Trick:   Jimmying with the Race Card 

            A recent strategy used by the president’s apologists – and a sign of their desperation – is to allege that criticism of B.O. is “racist.”  Maureen Dowd penned another one of her typically bitter screeds aimed at Congressman Joe Wilson, in which she claimed to hear him say the word “Boy” at the end of his “You lie!” comment.  The equally idiotic (and hopelessly doddering former president) Jimmy Carter opined, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”  As Walter Williams commented in a recent column, “This [statement] came from a man [Carter] who earlier referred to Obama as `this black boy’ on Jim Lehrer’s `NewsHour.’”  Walter Williams, as a free-market economist who happens to be black, knows something about race and politics.  In response to the various Democrat politicians and leftist media hacks who claim that racism is behind criticism of B.O. – a group that includes, along with Dowd and Carter, House Ways & Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews – Professor Williams writes: 

“For these people, it is inconceivable that many Americans are outraged by the president’s spending policies, budget deficits and industry takeovers – not to mention the appointment of czars. . . .  So now Carter, Dowd, Rangel, and other race-carders want us to believe that the massive discontent with Obama is racism.  I say nonsense!”

 

(Williams, “Is It Racist To Disagree with the President?”  Investor’s Business Daily, Oct. 1).  The real racism, I would submit, lies with the president’s fanatical supporters, who overlook B.O.’s many serious flaws simply because of his skin color.  That’s a form of bigotry that’s really pernicious.

 

  

n Treat:  “Fair & Balanced” Fox News 

The problem with B.O.’s skin appears to be its thinness rather than its color:  he just cannot take criticism.  And officials in the administration apparently are as thin-skinned as the president himself is – a point that’s rather obvious in the administration’s ongoing “war” against Fox News, the only major news outlet that doesn’t toe the administration line and which therefore seems to be the target of an administration boycott.  When in September B.O. made an unprecedented presidential talk show blitz, appearing on five Sunday TV programs (ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, on CNN’s Late Edition with John King, on NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory, and even on Univision’s Al Punto (To the Point) with Jorge Ramos), the one Sunday talk show on which he did not appear was Fox News Sunday.  B.O. has accused Fox News of conservative bias against his administration; White House spokesman Josh Earnest (yup – that’s really his name!) called Fox News “an ideological outlet.”  In discussing the flap on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace repeated his previous comment that the B.O. White House includes “the biggest bunch of cry babies I’ve ever dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.” 

And earlier this month, White House communications director Anita Dunn (that admirer of Chairman Mao) announced that the B.O. administration would treat Fox News like an “opponent” – which evokes memories of the Nixon White House’s infamous “enemies” list (and Nixon’s “war” against the Washington Post).  (Ms. Dunn also accused Fox of acting like an arm of the Republican Party, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that Fox’s competitors – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, etc. – indeed function as arms of the Democratic Party and willing dupes of the White House propaganda machine.)  The White House’s real complaint seems to be that Fox News is truly living up to its motto, “Fair and Balanced,” because it’s the only major news outlet that takes seriously the press’s obligation to hold accountable those people whom the American people have placed in positions of political power.  Maybe that’s why Fox News is beating its competitors so handily, averaging a viewership on weekday evenings that beats all the other cable channels (CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, etc.) combined.

 

  

n Trick:  Crap-and-Tax, Indeed 

The Senate version of the energy/”climate change” bill – the so-called “cap-and-trade” bill co-sponsored by Democrat Senators Barbara Boxer (Calif.) and John Kerry (Mass.) – isn’t quite as bad as the “cap-and-trade” bill, sponsored by Democrat Congressmen Henry Waxman (Calif.) and Edward Markey (Mass.), that narrowly passed the House in the spring.  The Boxer-Kerry bill is even worse than the Waxman-Markey bill!  The Kerry-Boxer bill sets up a cap-and-trade system supposedly to cut “greenhouse” gas emissions from the use of fossil fuels, although it doesn’t spell out how to allocate allowances (while the House bill would give away 85% of initial permits); Kerry-Boxer also sets a goal of reducing greenhouse emissions 20% by the year 2020 (compared to the House bill’s goal of 15-17%).   

Senator Kerry recently made a remarkable admission when he stated, “I don’t know what cap-and-trade means.”  He’s calling it “pollution reduction and investment” because critics have noted so many problems with the whole cap-and-trade scheme – including problems of political corruption associated with the government creating an artificial commodity and then controlling its allocation among special-interest groups, as well as doubts voiced by many environmentalists about its workability – that the critics, emphasizing that it’s an indirect form of tax, have taken to calling it “cap-and-tax” instead.  In another remarkable statement, Kerry also noted, “The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.”   As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points out, what Kerry is really saying is, “If you enjoyed this year’s recession, just wait for cap-and-trade.”  (A Heritage Foundation study, running the numbers on the less-onerous Waxman-Markey bill, found that imposing cap-and-trade would have devastating costs for the U.S. economy.  Over 23 years, a cap-and-trade plan would slash $9.4 trillion from GDP and kill 2.5 million jobs.  It would hike gasoline prices by 58%, or $1.40 a gallon.  Home electricity rates would soar 90%.  All told, according to the White House’s own estimates, cap-and-trade could cost families an additional $1,761 a year in taxes – a total of $200 billion, or the equivalent of raising everyone’s taxes by roughly 15%.  “Economic costs will be likely to be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal to all existing environmental regulation,” said a confidential White House memo, written last year and recently obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  (“Cap-and-Fade,” Investor’s Business Daily, October 1).) 

Meanwhile, popular support for “climate change” legislation is dropping dramatically, as the supposed “consensus” behind “global warming” theory evaporates:  more and more intelligent people realize that it’s a myth based on “junk science” – that there’s no clear scientific evidence showing that the Earth’s temperature is warming to dangerous levels (some scientists now think that global cooling is the problem, as the Earth again seems poised to enter another little Ice Age phase), let alone any solid evidence in support of the theory than man-made carbon dioxide is the cause of climate change.  CO2 – the naturally-occurring molecule that’s the basis for all life on Earth as well as the fuel for modern civilization – is being unjustly vilified as a “pollutant.”  It’s time for those morons in Congress to junk the junk science and focus instead on the most serious pollution problem in America today:  the way the federal government is polluting the American free-market economic system, with outrageous laws and regulations.

 

  

n Treat:  Tokin’ Rationality 

            Readers of this blog know I’m not shy about criticizing the B.O. administration, but neither am I unwilling to give it credit when credit is due.  The administration finally got something right – something I not only agree with but even applaud – with its policy on medical marijuana.  Attorney General Eric Holder recently instructed federal prosecutors not to go after pot users who comply with state laws, in those states (13 so far) that permit marijuana use for medical purposes.  Thus, for example, federal raids would be stopped on medical-marijuana dispensaries in those states where agents previously had conducted such raids under federal law, which doesn’t provide any exceptions to its pot prohibition.  Had the Bush administration followed this common-sense policy (one that, incidentally, gives minimal recognition to the American federal system of government), the Raich case would not have been brought.  (That case had originated with federal prosecution of two seriously ill women who were using homegrown marijuana for legitimate medicinal purposes, and it resulted in a rather horrible Supreme Court decision in 2005.  For more on Raich, see my discussion – “Reefer Madness Meets Wickard v. Filburn” – in “More Supreme Nonsense,” June 24, 2005.) 

            It’s a small step toward a truly sensible drug policy in the United States (one that would fully decriminalize not just marijuana but all drugs), but at least it’s a step in the right direction, as law professor Jonathan Adler recently observed on the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog (“A Step Toward Sanity on Medical Marijuana,” Oct. 19).

  

 

n Trick:  Another Snowe Job 

            U.S. Senator Olympia Snow (RINO-Maine), a member of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee, cast a critical vote in favor of the health-care bill pushed by Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D.-Mont.) and the other Democrats on the committee – a bill that was approved on October 13 by a 14-9 party-line vote.  (The nine real Republicans on the committee voted against the bill; the thirteen Democrats, plus Ms. Snowe, voted in favor.)  Ms. Snowe’s vote helped move forward a truly horrible piece of legislation – one that would, among other things, use the tax code to punish Americans who choose not to buy health insurance, or who choose health insurance plans that the government deems too expensive, while at the same time increasing the costs of most private insurance premiums paid by Americans, or their employers, with mandates that aim ultimately to destroy the market for private health insurance in the United States.  Moreover, Ms. Snowe’s vote gave political cover to the Democrats, allowing them to claim that their partisan plan, which was crafted entirely by the Dems on the committee with no input from its Republican members, was nevertheless “bipartisan” simply because Ms. Snowe voted with the Democrats.  Well, it’s not “bipartisan” because Ms. Snow isn’t really a Republican. 

            Olympia Snowe epitomizes the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) on Capitol Hill.  She frequently has voted with Democrats on key pieces of legislation and, indeed, by some measures, has a more “liberal” voting record than such Democrats as Mass. Sen. John Kerry.  How did Ms. Snowe justify her recent Finance Committee vote on the Baucus bill?  She explained it merely by speaking in empty cliches:  “My vote today, is my vote today.  It doesn’t forecast what it will be tomorrow.”  And: “Is this bill all that it want.  Far from it.  Is it all that it can be?  Far from it.  But when history calls, history calls.”  The people of Maine must feel ashamed at electing such an idiot to the U.S. Senate.  As Paul Mirengoff noted on the “Power Line” blog (Oct. 13), “I think `history’ got a wrong number.”

  

 

n Treat:  The Return to Standard Time 

            Sunday morning Americans turn their clocks back one hour, as the U.S. changes back from Daylight Saving Time (DST) to Standard time.  Regular readers of this blog know that I detest DST, calling it “Damn Socialist Tinkering,” because I resent Congress passing a law that forces Americans to change their clocks twice a year, inconveniencing everyone, simply because some special-interest groups like longer daytime hours in the fall and because some politicians actually believe their own bullshit rationalizations (like DST “saves energy”).  As I wrote about this “Damn Socialist Tinkering” in my Fall 2008 “Fall-deral” post, Congress’s most recent tinkering with DST – extending the DST season by starting it earlier, in March, and ending it later, in November – was a change in the wrong direction.  “It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.  Whatever benefits some special interests might derive from D.S.T. are not worth the inconveniences it causes all of us by being forced to change all our clocks twice a year.  Americans should stand up and demand that the national government, which is far too big and far too intrusive on far too many aspects of our lives, keep its hands off our clocks!” 

            At least, when we all “Fall back” this weekend, we’ll get back the one hour of time that Congress’s damn socialist tinkering took away from us when we “Spring’d” forward back in March.  Getting back the hour that Congress stole from us is a good start:  If only Congress would start giving back some other things – say, even a small portion of the wealth and the freedoms it also has stolen from the American people!  Now, that would be the kind of “change” worth having!

 

 

n Trick:  Taking Issue with the Issues in Ohio 

            Three statewide referenda appear on the ballot here in Ohio, for the Nov. 3 general election, and all three deserve to be defeated.   

            Issue 1 would amend the Ohio Constitution to permit the sale of bonds to fund bonuses for veterans of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Persian Gulf wars.  It may be popular, for knee-jerk “patriots,” to pay bonuses to war veterans, but it’s not a proper action to be taken by a state government.  Military funding, particularly for foreign wars, falls within the exclusive authority of the federal government – one of its legitimate, enumerated powers under the Constitution.  These days, with the federal government legislating on so many matters that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution leaves to the states or to the people (education, health care, etc.), it seems we’ve turned federalism on its head, with the states now legislating on properly federal matters.  It would be an insult to the service of war veterans for Ohio voters to so disregard our federal system, which after all is one of the key American constitutional principles the veterans supposedly fought to defend. 

            Issue 2 would amend the Ohio constitution to create a Livestock Care Standards Board, composed of “experts” from various special-interest groups (farmers, veterinarians, and local humane societies representatives, among others) to set standards for the “humane” care of livestock.  It would create an unnecessary government board, further eroding the economic freedom of Ohio farmers, in an attempt to forestall even more draconian regulations being pushed by PETA, the Humane Society, and other animal-rights fanatics.  Their irrational agenda should be rejected outright by sensible Ohioans.  (While I understand why farmers and others might support Issue 2 as the less-draconian alternative, I don’t think Ohioans should be so easily intimidated by the animal-rights nuts.) 

            Finally, Issue 3 – the most hotly contested, with expensive (and misleading) ads being run by interest-groups on both sides – would amend the Ohio constitution to allow gambling casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo.  Although legalizing gambling is a good idea, the way it would be done by Issue 3 – adding an enormously-detailed provision to the state constitution that creates a monopoly, regulated by the government – isn’t the way to go.  Rather than creating another monopoly (like the state-run Ohio Lottery), I’d favor a simple constitutional amendment providing merely, “All laws criminalizing gambling, in any form, in the state of Ohio are hereby repealed.”  Then let anyone who wants to open a casino do so, and have the state tax the proceeds just as it does those of any other legitimate business.

 

  

n Treat:  Glenn Beck, “Mad Man” – and Scourge of the Left 

            Glenn Beck, host of both a nationally-syndicated radio talk show and a successful Fox News TV show (weekdays at 5 p.m.), is typically described as a “conservative,” but since the 2008 elections he’s been identifying himself as a “libertarian.”  (He’s really more of a limited-government conservative than a true libertarian, but he’s become too disenchanted with the Republican Party and certain strains of modern conservatism to continue calling himself a conservative.  He’s an impassioned, often openly emotional guy, with strongly-held values in defense of individual liberty against the powers of an out-of-control federal government.)  Whatever one labels him, Glenn Beck is clearly one of the most popular political commentators in America today:  his book Common Sense topped the best-seller lists throughout the summer, and his new book Arguing with Idiots is selling just as well.  Most importantly, Beck is emerging as one of the most vocal and influential advocates of liberty – and critics of the B.O. administration and its nefarious designs on the Constitution and Americans’ freedoms. 

            Because he’s been so popular and influential, Beck has been viciously attacked by Democrat apologists in the leftist news media, who have made him the poster-boy for the caricature they’re trying to paint of B.O. critics.  One case in point:  the cover story in the Sept. 28 issue of Time magazine, featuring a not-so-flattering photo of Beck (sticking out his tongue) on the cover, with the heading, “Mad Man: Glenn Beck and the Angry Style of American Politics.”  The article was a classic example of hatchet journalism, unfairly attacking Beck as a leader of the “lunatic fringe,” an “agitator,” stirring up the “fears and anger of Americans who feel left out,” and comparing him to Howard Beale, the “mad anchorman” (brilliantly acted by the late Peter Finch) at the center of the satiric movie Network.  In the movie, Beale energized the nation with his cry, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”  Beck similarly seems to be energizing ordinary Americans (many of them former members of the country’s “silent majority,” who never before had participated in any sort of political activism), who have been showing up by the thousands (indeed, by the hundreds of thousands) to protest B.O.’s policies at Congressional “townhall” meetings, TEA parties, and the Sept. 12 taxpayers’ march on Washington.   

            What Time doesn’t mention, of course, is that unlike the Americans in the fictional story of Network, the real-life coalition of Americans today who are Glenn Beck fans – conservatives, libertarians, and independents of all sorts – are really “mad as hell” for good reasons:  they’re justifiably angry at a far-left president who seems to have only contempt for the American free-enterprise system and whose administration seems determined to undermine the Constitution and the rule of law, and they’re also justifiably fearful for the loss of their individual freedoms to an ever-expanding, out-of-control Big-Brother government.  To the editors of Time, Glenn Beck is an “agitator” for daring to reveal these truths – just as the author of the first Common Sense, Thomas Paine, was an agitator against the tyrannical monarch, George III.

 

  

n Trick:  Casting Perils before Swine (Flu, that is) 

Politicians (like B.O.’s Health secretary Kathleen Sibelius) and the news media have been stirring up paranoia about the so-called “swine flu” (the H1N1 flu) and the “pandemic” that’s breaking out across the USA, now that confirmed cases of the flu strain have been found in over 30 states.  Although this new strain of influenza seems no more deadly than the usual seasonal flu (which typically results in over 30,000 fatalities), it’s likely to infect far more people, especially young people, because they haven’t been exposed to anything quite like it.  Educational institutions – from grade schools to colleges and universities – implemented policies to deal with the likely pandemic; among other things, they’ve urged students, faculty, and staff to frequently wash their hands – one of the simplest yet most effective means of preventing spread of the flu.  The paranoia has been a huge boon for the manufacturers of hand sanitizers. 

Given these circumstances, one would think that lots of people would be getting vaccinated against the H1N1 flu, but that’s not the case.  Thanks to fears about the safety of the vaccine (based mostly on unsubstantiated rumors), many people have decided not to get vaccinated.  (Indeed, a recent AP poll found that 38% of parents said they were unlikely to give permission for their kids to be vaccinated at school.)  But the biggest problem has been the frustratingly long delay in the marketing of the vaccine.  Just this month, vaccines for the H1N1 flu – initially, only in nose spray form, but now in shots as well – have started to become available, first for health-care providers and people in the highest risk groups.  By the time the vaccine is available for the general population of Americans, it may be too late to prevent widespread outbreak of the flu strain – and the pandemic will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The vaccine delay demonstrates the folly of having distribution of vital medical products centralized and controlled by an agency of the federal government, the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  The feds’ obsession with alleged “fairness” in the distribution of the vaccine – carefully doling it out to the states according to their population – is overriding the genuine public health need of speedy distribution to stave off the very pandemic the feds have made Americans so paranoid about.  It’s yet another lesson in the inefficacy of central government planning versus decentralization (leaving public-health protection to the states, which is where the U.S. Constitution vests it) or the efficiency (and fairness) of the free market.

 

  

n Treat:  What a Rush! 

            Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh has hosted his nationally-syndicated radio talk show now for 21 years, and he’s more popular today than ever.  I confess that I frequently listen to Rush’s radio show; I don’t always agree with him (though most of the time I do), but I always find him entertaining – as even his harshest critics concede.   Questioned by NBC’s Jamie Gangel in a two-part interview aired on The Today Show on October 12-13, Rush showed one reason why he’s so popular:  uninhibited by concerns about being “politically incorrect,” he freely speaks his mind – and, most of the time, he voices opinions held by many (if not most) Americans.  Contrary to the negative stereotypes painted by Rush’s enemies in the left-liberal news media, Rush’s fans are not unthinking “Dittoheads.” (The name comes from Rush’s fans who call into the show and rather than repeating the typically gushy introductory comments – “Love you, Rush, and love the show,” etc., etc. – they simply say, “Dittoes, Rush.”)  Rush’s fans come from all walks of life, ranging widely in age, income, occupation, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, and even politics.  (I know for a fact that his audience includes gay atheist libertarians as well as black Christian social conservatives, for example.)  What they have in common is that they identify with the people whom Rush champions, the productive people in America (those who are either producers themselves or who at least admire the producers or aspire to become producers), against the tyranny of the “looters” (as Ayn Rand called them, the parasites who’d live off the productive work of others).  Among the “looter” class whom Rush satirically skewers are the politicians who scheme to wield power over the producers, by pandering to the looters and their resentment against achievement.    

            As important as Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton was, as a foil against whom Rush could rage, the current occupant of the White House, B.O., is an even better foil – a kind of gift that the American people (when they foolishly elected this bullshit artist to be president of the U.S. last fall) have given to Mr. Limbaugh.  May he long continue to rage against both the bullshit and its leading purveyor!

  

 

n Trick:  The NFL’s Racist Politics 

            Rush Limbaugh’s also a huge fan of professional football.  Yet in his bid to be a part-owner of an NFL team, the St. Louis Rams, he has been “sacked,” so to speak, because of the NFL’s intolerance and, yes, racist politics.   Certain critics, including sportswriters like Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press, spoke out against the bid, claiming that Limbaugh was too “divisive” or “polarizing” a public figure to be co-owner of the Rams.  Sharp cited what he called a “litany of incendiary racial comments,” giving as an example a supposed statement made by Rush on his radio program, that slavery “had its merits” – a statement that Rush never made.  One frequently-cited statement that Rush actually did make, back in 2003 – his contention that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the news media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed – had ignited a controversy that forced Limbaugh to resign as an analyst on ESPN’s NFL Countdown pregame show.  Critics might consider that comment “divisive” or “polarizing” because it was controversial – a statement of Rush’s own opinion, for which he ESPN supposedly hired him to speak – but it was hardly “racist”; rather, it was an accusation that the news media themselves were racist in evaluating McNabb not by the quality of his play but by the color of his skin.  Whether or not Rush was right about McNabb, he certainly had the right to say what he said – and not to be blackballed (so to speak) merely for speaking his mind.   

            Other phony statements falsely attributed to Limbaugh were cited by other critics, as they began piling on the sportscaster’s lament:  NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and even those notorious race-hustlers, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, joined in the outcry against Rush as a supposedly “divisive” or “polarizing” figure.  As conservative commentator Mark Steyn noted in an op-ed, “Rush Limbaugh is so `divisive’ that to get him fired, leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth” (Investor’s Business Daily, October 19).   Pressured to withdraw by David Checketts, the investor who originally had invited Rush to join in the bid for the Rams, Rush refused to do so, so Checketts announced that he was dis-inviting Rush, dropping him from the group.  On his radio show and later in an op-ed published in Wall Street Journal (“The Race Card, Football, and Me,” October 17-18), Rush noted that “this spectacle is bigger than I am” (which is especially true, now that he has lost so much weight!).  “This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this country, wherever you find them, in the media, the Democrat Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative” – a political intolerance that reflects “the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson” (who, as Rush demonstrated in his op-ed, really are racists themselves).  What exactly are “my racial views”? Rush asked.  “You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race?  Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race?  Those controversial racial views?” 

            That the leftist racists’ intimidation tactics worked so effectively against someone as popular and influential as Rush Limbaugh should concern all Americans who care about freedom of expression, in our supposedly “free” society.  The tyranny of the leftist “political correctness” police is truly, as Rush wrote in his op-ed, “a cancer on our society.”

  

 

n Treat:  Vampires!   

            For some reason, one of the hottest subjects in American popular culture today is vampires.  The blood-thirsty fanged “undead” creatures of the night are so prevalent in best-selling books, movies, and TV shows that many Americans have to pinch themselves (in lieu of biting themselves) as a reminder that the creatures are really fictional.  In books, there are the best-selling Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (very hot with teens and young women); the less-well-known but far more entertaining Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris (the books are even better than TrueBlood, the hit HBO series based on them); and the just-published sequel to Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula the Undead, co-written by Stoker’s great-grandnephew, Dacre Stoker, and Ian Holt.  In movie theaters, there’s the quirky Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (which premiered Oct. 23), as well as the much-anticipated Twilight sequel, New Moon, which premieres in November.  A big-screen remake of the 1960s cult TV show, Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins, is in the works and may reach theaters next year.  And on TV, in addition to TrueBlood (in its second season on HBO), there’s the CW hit, Vampire Diaries (in which talented actor Ian Somerhalder steals the show as the evil vampire brother).  

            Perhaps it’s not surprising that vampires are so popular in today’s pop culture in America:  with real blood-suckers in Washington, D.C. (the B.O. administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress), Americans find the fictional variety to be a welcome (and entertaining) diversion.

 

 

n Trick:  Michael Moore’s Hypocritical Anti-Capitalism 

            Leftist provocateur Michael Moore has a new anti-capitalist movie, ironically titled Capitalism: A Love Story, now playing in theaters.  From what I’ve read about the film (I refuse to waste even a dollar of my money – let alone the five dollars that would be cheapest price of a bargain matinee at my local movie theater – enriching this left-wing propagandist), Moore’s complaint isn’t really against capitalism, properly considered, but rather the “mixed economy,” part-capitalist, part-socialist, that currently prevails in the U.S.  

            Moore denounces “some truly offensive things,” Sheldon Richman writes in a recent review:  “banks engaging in wild speculation, without concern for the risk, taxpayer bailouts for banks and other businesses [among them, it should be added, the very company that Moore skewered in one of his early films, General Motors, which has now become “Government Motors”], cozy relations between Wall Street and Washington, politicians getting favors from companies that want benefits from government, and big institutions pushing less powerful individuals around.”  Yet virtually all the things he rails against are not the products of capitalism but rather of the “mixed economy” – whether you call it “state capitalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” as some scholars do.  (Richman, “Frustrating Michael Moore,” on the Foundation for Economic Education website, http://fee.org.)    Whatever it is that Moore denounces, it ain’t really capitalism. 

            In denouncing what he calls capitalism, Moore reveals himself to be the worst sort of hypocrite.  As a film-maker in capitalist America, Moore has been free to make a fortune from those people gullible enough to pay money to view his films, in theaters or on TV or DVDs – films that denounce as evil the free-market system that allows him the freedom not only to make his films in the first place, but to earn an income that enables him and his family to live the lifestyle of “the rich and famous,” the Hollywood celebrities whom Moore regards as his peers (despite his phony association with his humble middle-class roots in Davison, Michigan).  (David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke expose Moore’s hypocrisy in their bestselling 2004 book, Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.  There’s also Michael Wilson’s entertaining and revealing documentary, Michael Moore Hates America, available on DVD.)  As Walter Williams notes in an op-ed in Investor’s Business Daily, people in capitalist countries have “far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections” than those in socialist and communist countries”  (“Why Michael Moore Is Dead Wrong,” Sept. 29).  Consider Communist Cuba, whose socialized medicine system Moore naively extolled in his previous movie, Sicko.  Can you imagine Moore attacking the thugs who run Cuba (Fidel Castro and his brother, Raoul), the way he attacked President George W. Bush in his movie Fahrenheit 9/11?  That would be as incredible as Moore’s movies themselves. 

 

 

n Treat:  Ayn Rand, Real Advocate of Capitalism 

            Over 25 years after her death, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand still continues to influence American politics and culture, through her writings passionately defending reason, individualism, and capitalism.  As I’ve noted (see my discussion of “The Summer of Atlas Shrugged” in my previous post), her magnificent novel, Atlas Shrugged, continues to be a best-seller, indeed selling better today than it did when first published 52 years ago.  Yet another sign of the continuing influence and importance of Rand’s ideas is the recent publication of two new biographies, both of them emphasizing Rand’s role as a champion of capitalism – of true capitalism, that is, free-market capitalism.  (As Rand herself once famously stated, the term free-market capitalism is redundant, because capitalism properly understood is the economic system of free markets, based on the voluntary actions of individuals freely trading goods and services among themselves, free of government coercion.  Rand understood more clearly than any major thinker of the 20^th century the moral justification of capitalism: that it was the only social/ economic/ political system based on, and fully compatible with, the rights of the individual.) 

            Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), released in mid-September, has been touted as the first true scholarly biography of Rand.  (Burns writes in the book’s introduction that “until now Rand has not been the subject of a book-length biography,” but that’s simply not true; I could cite at least a half-dozen book length biographies of Rand, most written by Objectivists.)  The book is better described as the first scholarly biography of Rand written by a non-Objectivist (Burns is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia) and published by a major publishing house (Oxford).  Those facts alone nevertheless signify how important Rand’s influence has been in modern American political philosophy.  The title of the book is inappropriate:  Rand was indeed an ardent advocate of free markets, but neither she nor her admirers would consider her a “goddess of the market” (indeed, the whole point of a free market is that it’s spontaneously ordered, not commanded by either humans or “gods”).  The title is also misleading, in its reference to “the American right”: like other left-liberals, Burns tends to view politics in terms of a one-dimensional “left”/”right” dichotomy, lumping together everything that’s non-left – conservatism, libertarianism, and Objectivism – despite the critical differences between these intellectual movements.  Notwithstanding these faults, however, the author is fair in her analysis of both Rand and Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.  (Unlike other non-Objectivist critics of Rand, she at least understands the fundamentals of the philosophy).  And the book benefits greatly from the author’s access to Rand’s personal papers in the archives at the Ayn Rand Institute (and, in an interesting “essay on sources” at the end of the book, she reveals some of the editorial flaws in recently-published collections of Rand’s writings).  The book is a “must-have” for serious students of Rand and her ideas. 

            Anne Heller’s newly-published biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Doubleday, 2009), is just now appearing in bookstores.  It is a much-anticipated biography, on which Ms. Heller has been working for several years (Heller previewed excerpts from the book in her comments at the 2007 Atlas Society conference celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Rand’s greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged.)  Although I have yet to see the book (my copy from Amazon.com is due in the mail any day now), advance reviews – such as Stephen Cox’s, in the October issue of Liberty magazine (“Ayn’s World”) – have been quite favorable.  The advance reviews (along with Ms. Heller’s interview in the October issue of Liberty) show that Heller gives Rand her due as a novelist as well as a philosopher.  Her sympathetic (yet fair) account of Rand, her life and her works, is another “must-have” book, not just for Objectivists but for anyone who’d like to better understand this remarkable woman who so brilliantly championed reason, individualism, and capitalism.

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday,  October 29, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Health Care “Rights” and Wrongs

   

 

            As members of Congress are maneuvering to pass so-called “health care reform” legislation – a major change in the nation’s laws that is overwhelmingly opposed by the American people – the critical questions in the national debate over the country’s health-care system aren’t even being asked.  (They’re certainly not being reported by the major national news outlets, who continue to act as if they’re the propaganda organs for the B.O. administration and for the Democrats who control both houses of Congress.)  Yet the health-care debate raises the most important issues facing Americans today – and arguably, the most important set of issues the nation has faced in the past half-century or more.  What’s at stake here isn’t merely the health – literally, the lives – of all Americans, but also the future of the American constitutional and economic system.   

            The health-care debate dramatically illustrates the historic crossroads at which American policy-makers find themselves today.  In one direction – the direction that Democrats in Congress and in the White House are trying to push their so-called “reform” efforts – there’s the institutionalization of European-style socialized medicine.  With it would come not only the death of the best-quality health care system in the world, but also the end of the American system of market capitalism and limited government, and the individual freedom that system makes possible.  In the other direction – the direction that a small number of courageous Republican members of Congress and a coalition of conservative and libertarian political commentators are advocating – lies true reform, in the right direction:  reform that would solve the problems of American health care by restoring and rejuvenating the free-market, capitalist system that has made American health care the best in the world.  And with that sort of real reform would come a restoration and rejuvenation of our constitutional system of limited government and the individual freedom (and responsibility) that it makes possible. 

            The issue of health care today best illustrates the fundamental truth behind the famous statement that Ronald Reagan made in his First Inaugural Address over 28 years ago, on January 20, 1981:  “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem: GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM” (emphasis added).  What’s wrong with health care in the United States today can be traced back to bad governmental policies and programs that have distorted the free market in health care.  The solution to those problems isn’t more government regulation, more government programs that would further distort and eventually destroy the free market.  Rather, the solution is to repeal the laws that stand in the way of allowing the free market to work.

 

  

The “Right” to Health Care, Real and Imagined

  

Advocates of so-called “universal health care” – that is, monopolization by the federal government of the provision of medical services in the United States – claim that such a radical move is necessary to guarantee that all persons have a “right to health care.”  And many Americans, influenced by the way left-liberal political activists and politicians (from both the left and the right) loosely talk about “rights,” naively believe that if individuals don’t already have a “right” to health care, then they ought to have such a right.  

            There is no such “right,” properly speaking.  A “right to health care,” as meant by the advocates of socialized medicine, is really a perversion of the concept of rights, as that concept is understood under the American constitutional system.  And, ironically, in their effort to guarantee this pseudo-right, the advocates of socialized medicine would bring about the destruction of the genuine right that Americans have, pertaining to health care:  their right to freedom, freedom of choice in the purchase of health-care products and services. 

            According to America’s founding principles – the philosophy of government held by the consensus of America’s founders and expressed so eloquently in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence – the legitimate function of government is not to “protect people” but rather to protect people’s rights.  “Rights,” properly speaking, apply to individuals (there’s no such thing as group rights, for groups have no rights); they pertain to an individual’s freedom of action, in a social context; and they are “compossible,” or capable of equal co-existence, meaning that one person’s exercise of his rights cannot conflict with another’s.   Legitimate rights are all aspects of the fundamental, natural, inalienable rights that human beings have – the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (including property rights).  

The so-called “right to health care,” as advocated by the proponents of socialized medicine, isn’t a legitimate right at all.  It’s a pseudo-right, one of a category of rights that advocates of a paternalistic “nanny state” have been pushing for the past century or so, including such things as the so-called “right” to housing,” or the “right” to “a job,” or to a “fair” wage.  These “welfare rights,” as philosopher David Kelley calls them, pertain not to a person’s freedom of action but to an end-result.  Moreover, such supposed rights “to X” – where X is some material thing that needs to be produced by someone else in society – necessarily involve conflicts with others’ genuine rights.  As Kelley explains in his splendid book A Life of One’s Own, 

“[W]elfare rights impose on others positive obligations to which they did not consent and which cannot be traced to any voluntary act.  If a person has a right to food, come what may, then someone else has an obligation to grow it.  If the first person cannot pay for it, someone else has an obligation to buy it for him.  A welfare right is by nature a right to a guaranteed positive outcome that is not contingent on the success of one’s own efforts.  It must therefore impose on those who can produce the goods the obligation to share them.

 

“Reality cannot be forced; the need to produce a good before it is consumed cannot be legislated out of existence.  Goods can only be redistributed from one person to another. . . . The price of [welfare rights] is the sacrifice of genuine liberty.” 

 

(Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998), pp. 24, 75.) 

            Robert Bidinotto reveals the “moral inversion” involved in the claim that “health care is a right,” in an insightful op-ed posted on the Internet earlier this year.  He begins by doing something that many commentators on this issue fail to do – by defining terms: 

“Health care” means:  goods and services produced by doctors, nurses, hospitals medical equipment manufacturers, medicine R&D companies, pharmacies, nursing homes, etc.  To declare that one has “a right to health care” means: One has a moral-political entitlement to all these goods and services regardless of whether one pays for them.  Translated, this can only mean: One has a “right” to enslave the producers of such goods and services.  The latter, you see, have a boundless duty to provide all these things to the “rightful” claimants, regardless of compensation – or at compensation terms set unilaterally by the claimants (or by the government, acting in their name), without any corresponding right of the providers to say “No!”  The “right to health care,” in other words, denies the rights of all those who are supposed to fulfill it.”

 

Bidinotto adds that the advocates of the “right to health care” really aim to sever any relationship between work and reward:  “Ultimately, they are claiming an entitlement to a guaranteed existence – to a life without want, privation, or injury of any kind, regardless of one’s own actions or inactions.  In their socialist system, no matter how productive or lazy, how rich or poor, one is `entitled’ by `right’ to `equal’ benefits – or privations” (Bidinotto,  “ObamaCare’s Moral Inversion,” Sept. 13, 2009.)  In other words, advocates of such a so-called “right” seek to deny individuals both their freedom of action and the responsibility for the consequences of their actions that such freedom entails. 

            When government uses the coercive force of law to guarantee a “welfare right,” such as the so-called “right to health care,” what it’s really doing is abridging rights, properly speaking – the right to freedom and the right to property (including one’s property in one’s own body and in the wealth produced by one’s own productive efforts).  The right to freedom in health care, furthermore, includes liberty of contract:  the freedom of consumers to enter into contracts for the purchase of health-care goods and services, including health insurance, and the freedom of health-care providers, insurance companies, and other businesses to offer a variety of products and services that best fit individuals’ choices.  These are the genuine rights that would be abridged by the effort to provide “universal” health care. 

As I warned in my 2008 New Year’s essay on “The Prospects for Liberty,”  

the most serious threat posed by nanny-state fascism to individual freedom in the United States  . . . is the imminent threat – the “clear and present danger” (to borrow a phrase from early 20^th-century Supreme Court free-speech decisions) – of socialized medicine.  It’s no longer politically correct to call it socialized medicine, but that’s exactly what the advocates of so-called “universal” health-care coverage are really proposing:  government monopoly over the U.S. health-care industry.  In the name of supposedly guaranteeing a so-called “right” to health care for all Americans, what the advocates of “universal” coverage are really proposing is some form of government takeover of the U.S. healthcare industry – a takeover that will have disastrous results, not only bankrupting the country by further exacerbating the problem of rising healthcare costs, but also destroying what’s best about the U.S. system and, ultimately, endangering the lives of all Americans by taking away their only legitimate “right” with regard to health care, their freedom to enter into contracts for healthcare products and services with providers of their choice. 

 

  

The Wrongs of a Government-Run Health Care System: 

A Brief History of Socialized Medicine

  

Socialized medicine, although advocated by self-styled “progressive” politicians and political activists today, isn’t a new idea.  Nor is it “progressive,” in any true sense of the term.  The dream of today’s left-liberal “progressives” – “cradle-to-grave” government-provided “welfare” – really is a centuries-old idea, paternalism (the “nanny state”), adapted to the circumstances of an industrialized society.  In ancient societies government treated the poor as wards of the state; in the Roman Empire, both in the Roman West and the Byzantine East, emperors stayed in power by placating the masses with bread and circuses (literally).  The “poor law” passed by Parliament during the first Queen Elizabeth’s reign introduced government-mandated (and taxpayer-funded) poverty-relief programs into early modern English society.   

The origins of the modern “welfare state” may be traced to late-19^th-century Germany.  It was in the 1880s that German chancellor Otto von Bismarck first put into practice the concept of “social insurance”:  mandatory government programs that forced workers to pay taxes for government programs providing them with “benefits.”  National health insurance was first:  the German Reichstag in 1883 passed a bill forcing workers and employers to pay a portion of wages into “sickness funds” that had already been created as voluntary private associations.  The German government then in 1886 mandated insurance for industrial accidents (the equivalent of American “workers’ compensation” programs) and in 1889 old-age and disability pensions (the equivalent of Society Security in the United States).  The stated rationale for these programs was to “protect” workers against the costs of industrialization, but the real motive of Bismarck’s government was primarily political.  As David Kelley explains, Bismarck “wanted to curb the growing appeal of socialist parties to the workers by preempting the socialist promise of state-sponsored benefits.  He also sought to limit the growing independence of the industrial workers, who were forming mutual assistance societies, including the sickness funds, and were losing the spirit of deference to paternalistic masters.  Bismarck’s goal, first and last, was to strengthen the state by breeding dependence on it” (Kelley, A Life of One’s Own, p. 39). 

“The newly unified Germany” in the late 19^th century “did not have a deeply rooted liberal, individualist, laissez faire tradition,” Kelley notes, observing that its dominant culture was “Prussian authoritarianism.”  Bismarck adopted older paternalistic, or patriarchal traditions, to the circumstances of an industrial society, creating an absolutist state – one that, not surprisingly, a few decades later, easily morphed into the fascist “National Socialist,” or Nazi, regime of Adolf Hitler. 

The “neoliberal” thinkers and political activists in Britain and America in the early 20^th century “did not share Bismarck’s Prussian aristocratic conservatism, but they did adopt the social insurance programs he introduced,” Kelley adds (p. 40).  By the 1880s in Britain a coalition of paternalistic Tories, or Conservatives, and “pragmatic” Liberals supported expanding the already-established late-Victorian welfare state.  Sir William Harcourt, a Liberal member of Parliament, famously proclaimed in 1889, “We are all socialists now.”  When the Liberal Party came to power in 1906, it moved to create a welfare system on the German model.  Kelley notes that “Winston Churchill, after visiting Germany as head of the Board of Trade, proposed `to thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our economic system.’”  In 1908 Parliament adopted the Old Age Pension Act, providing pensions for the elderly poor – a poverty program that was replaced with a social insurance program, funded through payroll tax “contributions,” in 1925.   The National Insurance Act of 1911 instituted both unemployment insurance and mandatory “contributions” for health insurance.  During the Great Depression, these social insurance programs were further expanded under the Beveridge Plan, which created Britain’s current welfare state, including its system of socialized medicine. 

In the United States during the first two decades of the 20^th century, the so-called “Progressive” movement – a diverse coalition of various special-interest groups – agitated for bigger government, and paternalistic policies, at all levels, local, state, and federal.  Included among the ranks of “Progressive” activists were many German immigrants to sought to institutionalize in America the same sort of Bismarckian “social insurance” programs that had been created in Europe, including socialized medicine.  Yet the German model that so inspired “Progressive” activists also inspired opposition by advocates of American individualism, as Kelley observes.  “At the 1920 convention of the National Association of Manufacturers, compulsory old-age and health insurance was denounced as `one of the vicious German ideas yet existent in this country.’  M. W. Alexander of the General Electric Company argued that social insurance was out of place in a country `founded to secure individual liberty of thought and action with opportunities for working out one’s own salvation.’” (A Life of One’s Own, p. 41).  (It’s ironic that this defense of American individualism was voiced by an officer of GE, which today is the parent corporation of NBC and its affiliated cable channels, including MSNBC, which are in the forefront of the propaganda campaign in support of socialized medicine as proposed by the B.O. administration.) 

Given this history, it’s ironic that advocates of socialized medicine call themselves “progressives.”  As I more fully discuss in a previous blog essay, there’s nothing truly “progressive” about their policies; they’re really quite reactionary (see my “Reactionary Progressives,” March 16, 2006). 

In America the only government welfare programs that enjoyed political success in the early 20^th century were state-level pensions to aid widowed or abandoned mothers.  Not until the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the FDR administration’s “New Deal” programs, did the United States follow Germany, Britain, and other European countries in creating a national welfare state.  The Social Security Act of 1935 created federal pensions for the elderly and disabled as well as a system of unemployment insurance, operated by the states – with both systems funded by payroll taxes.  In addition, the act created a program of public assistance for unmarried mothers, the forerunner to the modern Aid to Families with Dependence Children (AFDC) program (now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). 

Socialized medicine – that is, a government-funded and –controlled health insurance program – was noticeably absent from the American welfare state created in the late 1930s.  There was little political support for socializing medicine in America because the free market – including a wide variety of voluntary mutual-aid societies providing medical insurance benefits to their members – did a remarkably effective job, empowering all Americans (including those in the working class) to have both the means and the incentive to provide for their own health care.  During World War II, however, Congress imposed wage and price controls – a governmental policy that had a profound effect on the American free-market health-care system.   Unable to effectively compete for the best workers because of the wage freeze, employers were able, under the federal tax laws, to offer their employees fringe benefits, including health insurance.  Thus began the employer-based health-insurance system that is both a strength and a weakness of modern American health care (as will be discussed more fully below).  Unfortunately, one unforeseen consequence of these federal wage-and-price controls was that they helped undermine the market, and thus eventually helped destroy, the robust system of mutual-aid societies that had so effectively provided health insurance for millions of American workers.   

Socialized medicine finally did get established in the United States with the LBJ administration’s so-called “Great Society” programs of the mid-1960s.  In 1965 Congress created two massive government health care programs – Medicare and Medicaid.  As Sally C. Pipes (president of the Pacific Research Institute) notes in her splendid book The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 2008), socialized medicine – that is, a government-run “single payer” health-care system – is “already here” in the United States, with these two huge government programs (plus other aspects of socialized medicine also instituted in the USA, as discussed below).  They illustrate most of the disastrous problems associated with “universal” single-payer systems in Canada and Europe today.   

Medicare, the primary insurance program for Americans over the age of 65, is funded entirely by the federal government – that is, by taxpayers.  Sally Pipes reports that in fiscal year 2007, Medicare spent $427 billion, accounting for 16 percent of the federal budget.  By 2017, it is estimated to spend $884 billion, requiring a payroll tax of 6.4 percent just to keep the program afloat.  Although the program is horribly wasteful – with studies showing that Medicare officials waste as much as $1 out of every $3 the program spends – it also imposes price controls by setting low reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals.  Because of these low reimbursement rates, many doctors are refusing to see Medicare patients, causing nearly one in three seniors to struggle in their search for a new doctor (Top Ten Myths, pp. 16-17). 

Medicaid, the insurance program for poor Americans (as well as long-term nursing home and end-of-life care for the elderly), is administered at the state level and receives about 50 to 70 percent of its funding from the federal government.  Originally set up as a safety net in 1965, Medicaid has grown into an enormous welfare program, serving 53 million Americans – some 15 million more people than those estimated to be living in poverty, and almost 10 million more than Medicare.  As Pipes summarizes Medicaid, it too “is a model of inefficiency.  And there’s an enormous amount of fraud.  The total federal state cost of Medicaid in 2007 was $338 billion and is projected to be $717 billion in 2017.”  In New York State alone, a retired chief fraud investigator estimates that as much as 40 percent of the state’s Medicaid claims are fraudulent, costing the state about $18 billion a year.  The costs of Medicaid are so out of control that it is on the verge of bankrupting state governments around the country, with outlays for Medicaid averaging 22 percent of state spending, surpassing even education as the number one drain on state budgets.  Yet attempts to control costs by imposing price controls, in the form of low reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals (as with Medicare), have prompted just about half of all doctors to stop seeing or limiting the number of new Medicaid patients (pp. 17-18, 95, 99). 

Despite the grim realities of these failed programs, Pipes adds, the expansion of government health care continues in the United States today.  In 1997 the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) program was established with the goal of providing health insurance to low-income children in households with low incomes that nevertheless exceed Medicaid eligibility.  By 2008 SCHIP covered about six million children and was on the verge of spiraling out of control because the program’s funding formula gave states an incentive to add middle-income children and even adults to the SCHIP rolls.  When Congress attempted to expand the program in 2007 – seeking to offer SCHIP to families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level – former President George W. Bush vetoed the bill (pp. 18-19).  However, with the support of the B.O. administration, the current Democrat-controlled Congress succeeded in expanding the program earlier this year. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also runs a government health-care program.  “Like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP, it too is trotted out as evidence that government-run health care can actually work,” Pipes reports, adding that the VA system is hardly a model for anything that’s workable.  “Thus far, the VS has proved inadequate for the many wounded veterans who have returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Better suited to the needs of much older veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, the VA is simply unable to react with the speed and efficiency needed to deal with the injuries of modern warfare.”  She adds that a claim takes between 127 and 177 days to process – well above the private industry average, which is 89.5 days – and that an appeal takes a staggering 657 days (pp. 19-20). 

One additional “myth” about the modern American health care system – and the extent to which it already has been socialized – that Sally Pipes exposes in her book is the widely-held notion that America’s poor are routinely refused treatment.  She notes, “Any poor person can walk into any hospital in America and be treated for an accident, injury, or disease.  According to the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, passed in 1986, hospitals are not allowed to deny treatment to patients with no health insurance.  The costs of such care – given free to poor patients who have neither insurance nor resources to pay – are routinely absorbed into a hospital’s operating costs” (Top Ten Myths, p. 94).  

All told, the U.S. government – that is to say, American taxpayers – already pay for more than half the nation’s health care expenses.  “As lawmakers contemplate expanding that slice of the pie” – expanding these supposedly “excellent” programs to cover all Americans, “Medicare for all,” as the late Sen. Teddy Kennedy liked to call it – Pipes comments, “it’s worth noting that some European and Canadian leaders are pushing their nations to reduce the government’s role” (pp. 16, 138). 

Canada’s health-care system is frequently touted as a model by advocates for “universal” government health care, yet it is “government monopoly health care that is heartless and uncaring,” as summarized by Sally Pipes (who formerly lived in Canada, where she was assistant director of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading free-market think tank, before coming to America to head the Pacific Research Institute in 1991 and becoming an American citizen in 2006).  In Canada today, where slightly more than 33 million people live, more than 800,000 citizens are currently on waiting lists for surgery and other necessary treatments.  Fifteen years ago the average wait between a referral from a primary care doctor and treatment by a specialist was around nine weeks; today the wait is more than 18 weeks – almost double what doctors consider clinically unreasonable.  “As Brian Day, a Canadian physician and immediate past president of the Canadian Medical Association, explained to the New York Times, Canada `is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.’” (pp. 122-25). 

These waits are due in part to a severe doctor shortage.  When the government took over the health care system in the early 1970s, Canada ranked second among nations in doctors per thousand people.  Today, Canada ranks 24^th out of 28 countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).  Over the past decade, about 11 percent of physicians trained in Canadian medical schools have moved to the United States, where doctors’ salaries are not (yet) negotiated, set, and paid for by provincial governments, as they are in Canada.  (Today, the average Canadian doctor earns only 42 percent of what a doctor earns in the United States.)  Many Canadians can’t even find a doctor: about 10 percent are currently seeking a primary care physician, and some provinces (Nova Scotia, for example) have actually resorted to using a lottery to determine who gets to see a doctor (pp. 125-26). 

Other severe problems plague the Canadian health-care system.  Access is limited to common medical technology:  Canada ranks 13^th (out of the 24 OECD countries) in access to MRIs, 18^th in access to CT scanners, and 7^th in access to mammograms.  And although it provides “free” health care, “the Canadian government doesn’t provide universal prescription-drug coverage.  The Canada Health Act, the federal law that guarantees health coverage, only requires each province to cover drugs delivered to patients in the hospital.  Provincial prescription drug coverage plans differ, but about two in three Canadians pay out-of-pocket for drugs.  Private insurance is also available for services not covered under the Canada Health Act” (p. 127). 

Only in recent years have Canadians legally been entitled to purchase private health insurance, thanks to a successful lawsuit by George Zeliotis, a retired salesman from Montreal, who took the Quebec government to court in challenging the constitutionality of socialized medicine.  “Faced with the prospect of waiting an entire year for a hip replacement, Zeliotis attempted to make private arrangements with his doctor, . . . to pay privately for surgery.  But that would have been illegal.  So he went to court, arguing that while his wait saved the government money, it cost him plenty in pain and endangered his life.  Zeliotis lost in two Quebec provincial courts, but the Canadian Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal – and in June 2005, the court ruled in his favor.  The decision overturned the ban on private insurance in Quebec, opening the door to private sector participation – and legal challenges – across Canada” (pp. 127-28).  Canada’s high court found that “delays in the public health care system are widespread and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”  As Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin wrote, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” 

“The problems plaguing Canada’s health care system – long lines, lack of access to the latest technological equipment, and dwindling doctor supply – are unavoidable in a single-payer system,” Pipes observes, adding that Canada’s problems are not unique – “they’re characteristic of all government health care systems” (pp. 127-28). 

In Britain, more than one million people in need of medical care are currently waiting for hospital admission, while another 200,000 are waiting to get on a waiting list.  Each year, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) cancels around 100,000 operations” (Top Ten Myths, p. 129).   In a recent article published in National Review, John C. Goodman reports that Britain has only one-fourth as many CT scanners per capita as the U.S., and one-third as many MRI scanners.  “The rate at which the British provide coronary-bypass-surgery or angioplasty to heart patients is only one-fourth the U.S. rate, and hip replacements are only two-thirds the U.S. rate.  The rate for treating kidney failure (dialysis or transplant) is five times higher in the U.S. for patients between the ages of 45 and 84, and nine times higher for patients 85 years or older.”  Studies show that only 5 percent of Americans wait more than four months for surgery, compared with 36 percent of Britons” (“Socialized Failure,” May 25, 2009). 

Such is the sorry record of countries that have fully socialized medicine – countries whose “universal,” or “single-payer,” government-controlled health care systems are touted by advocates of a similar system in the United States as the “model” we should emulate.

 

 

Health Care in the USA Today: 

What’s Right – and What’s Wrong

 

Measured by quality of care, the U.S. healthcare system is the best in the world; that’s because the portion of it that has not yet been socialized – the free-market portion that covers more than half of Americans – provides the necessary incentives for innovation in care, including new drugs and new technologies for treatment.  For example, America is much better at treating cancer than Europe or Canada:  Americans have a better survival rate for 13 of the most common 16 cancers.  The U.S. market for medical innovation is robust.  “Today, the United States is far and away the world’s leader in medical research and development.”  America produces more than half of the $175 billion of health care technology products purchased globally.  In just a three-year period, from 1997 through 1999, one hundred new drugs were launched in the United States (compared to just 43 in Canada during that same period).  Moreover, while brand-name drugs are generally more expensive in the U.S. than in countries with socialized medicine (and the price controls that accompany their systems), generics – which accounted for 65 percent of the U.S. drug market in 2007 – are dramatically cheaper in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.  U.S. firms are responsible for almost 90 percent of new drugs worldwide.  As Sally Pipes observes, “Perhaps that’s why tens of thousands of foreigners come to the United States every year for medical treatment.  They’re usually seeking advanced and sophisticated procedures that are simply unavailable – or rationed – in their home countries” (Pipes, Top Ten Myths of American Health Care, pp. 9, 27, 55, 62, 135.) 

American health care is, indeed, costly.  In 2006 the average American spent about $7,026 per person on health care, accounting for 16 percent of GDP.  In contrast, in 1950 that cost (in 2006 inflation-adjusted dollars) was only about $500 a year – a mere 5 percent of GDP.   That’s 14 times as many dollars spent on health care in 2006 compared to 1956.  Yet, as Sally Pipes notes, we’ve gotten much value for the high cost, “an amazing return on our investment.”  Since 1950, the average U.S. life expectancy has increased by almost nine years.  From 1950 to 2000, the death rate from heart disease – America’s number-one killer – was reduced by 50 percent.  In a single decade, from 1993 to 2003, heart disease deaths dropped 22 percent.  “If you break down the cost, it comes out to just $1000 per extra year of life.  Most Americans would call that a pretty good deal.” (Top Ten Myths, pp. 22-26.) 

Pipes adds, though, “[t]his isn’t to say that we don’t need reform.  There are many inefficiencies in our health care system that are driving costs up unnessarily” (p. 29).  A significant portion of the cost problem with American health care – and particularly the high cost of health insurance – comes from existing governmental controls.  As Pipes explains, 

Over the last few decades, state and federal lawmakers have instituted a confusing patchwork of restrictions and regulations in an attempt to drive down costs.  However, these moves actually have increased health care costs and made it impossible for private enterprise to work effectively. . . .

 

Today, insurers who want to make health care policies available to the public have to be registered and reviewed by 50 different state insurance administrations.  Consumers are barred from purchasing policies across state lines, making it impossible for individuals and families to get the type of insurance plan that best meets their needs in terms of coverage and cost.

 

And most states force residents to buy one-size –fits-all insurance packages that include all sorts of services that only a small slice of the population needs.  The average state impose 38 mandates on an individual health insurance policy.  In 2007, there were 1,901 different mandates nationwide.  These extraneous mandates increase the price of basic insurance by as much as 50 percent.

 

(Top Ten Myths, p. 13.)  These mandated coverage requirements “severely limit the market’s ability to develop and offer inexpensive plans that meet buyers’ needs.”  Another reason why health insurance is so expensive is that the 60 percent of Americans who get their health insurance tax-free through their employer (as a result of post-World War II federal tax policy) are insulated from the true cost of health care (p. 74).  Americans generally are overinsured, using insurance to cover routine costs rather than hospitalization or other catastrophic costs for which insurance is appropriate (as explained below). 

The chief problems with the American healthcare system are basically two – the rising costs of the system overall, and the wasted time and resources devoted to paperwork and bureaucracy – and both problems would be exacerbated exponentially if the U.S. were to follow the mistaken path taken by other countries in the world, particularly Canada, the U.K., and other European nations, that have some form of government-controlled national health care.  And, inevitably, the higher costs that will result from any sort of fully socialized medicine system will lead to efforts to control costs – which will include some sort of price controls on drug companies and other suppliers of goods/services, as well as rationing of care.  That will mean an end to innovation in drugs and procedures, not only for Americans but for everyone in the world. 

Virtually all new drugs are produced in the United States because we’re the last bastion of capitalism in the health care industry today in the world; the price controls imposed by nationalized health care systems in countries like Canada and the U.K. remove all incentives for pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare companies to develop new products or procedures.  (In the medical field, research costs are enormous; companies depend on the profits they can make from the sale of new drugs, particularly during the first few years they are patented, in order to recoup those costs.  Without profits, companies would have no reason to develop new products, and so research will dry up and technologies stagnate.)  That means that some people will die, waiting for new drugs or treatments that may never come – something that happens already in the U.S. because of delays in FDA approval, and something that frequently happens in other countries with socialized healthcare systems.  And even if the appropriate drugs or procedures are available to treat people’s medical problems, there will be long delays – much like the waiting lists that currently exist for people needing organ transplants – that will jeopardize people’s health or even their lives, just as they do now in Canada, the U.K., and other countries with government-controlled healthcare systems. 

The problems already existing in the U.S. healthcare system have been caused by bad government policies since the end of World War II – bad policies that, again, would be made even worse by any form of “universal,” or socialized, medicine.  Costs are spiraling out of control in the current system because of two basic problems – over-insurance and the lack of incentives to control costs because they’re paid by third parties – and both these problems, again, would be exacerbated by socialized medicine.  

Americans are over-insured when it comes to healthcare costs.  The purpose of insurance, generally, is to cover the risks of unexpected and catastrophic costs, such as hospitalization, expensive surgeries or other treatments, or unusually expensive drugs.  Insurance isn’t supposed to cover ordinary, routine costs such as visits to a doctor’s office or common prescriptions, but Americans are used to having their medical insurance cover these costs – and therefore have no incentive to control them, because a third party (the insurance company) is paying for them – thanks to perverse U.S. tax policies.  Price controls imposed on wages during World War II prevented employers from increasing employees’ salaries, so employers began providing untaxed perks, or fringe benefits, such as health insurance, in order to compete for the best employees, at a time of labor shortages.  After the War, those ill-advise price controls, like other unfortunate wartime policies (such as income-tax withholding) remained, thus giving rise to the uniquely American system that typically ties health-insurance coverage to persons’ employment.  And which typically makes that insurance coverage far more extensive, and therefore expensive, than it ought to have been. 

Both the problems of over-insurance and inefficiency have been made worse by other perverse government policies, namely the addition of some elements of socialized medicine through government-provided healthcare for certain segments of the U.S. population:  Medicare, for elderly persons; Medicaid, for poor persons; the Veterans’ Administration healthcare system, for military veterans; and most recently, the State Children’s Health Insurance (SCHIP) program.  None of these programs, except the VA program, ought to exist, because the Constitution grants Congress no powers to provide health care or health insurance (although granting veterans’ benefits might be rationalized as “necessary and proper” powers linked to Congress’ legitimate powers to raise and support military forces).  And these programs, particularly Medicare, are hemorrhaging out of control in their costs – thanks in no small part to the former Republican-controlled Congress’s expansion of Medicare benefits to include prescription-drug coverage. 

Like Social Security – that other boondoggle of an “entitlement” program that really operates like a gigantic Ponzi scheme (see my essay “Socialist Insecurity,” Feb. 15, 2005) – Medicare is headed for a huge fiscal crisis as the Baby Boom generation retires, over the next few decades.  (80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 could qualify for Medicare and Social Security over the next 22 years.)  Medicare’s hospital insurance fund now pays out more than it takes in; in 2019 it’s projected to run out of funds.  Medicare’s payments for doctors and prescription drugs are projected to rise faster than the nation’s overall economic growth; and beneficiaries’ premiums, deductibles, and co-payments will rise faster than their incomes.  Fixing Medicare solely with higher taxes or cuts in spending will mean a 122% increase in the payroll tax or a 51% reduction in spending, just for hospital care, according to a recent feature article in USA Today (“Social Security Hits First Wave of Boomers,” Oct. 9, 2007).  Unfunded liability under Medicare is six times larger than under Social Security.  Looking even farther into the future, over the next 75 years, scheduled benefits for the elderly will exceed dedicated tax revenues by $33 trillion (measured in current dollars).  “Looking indefinitely into the future, the present value of the additional revenues required by Social Security and Medicare total almost $74 trillion.  To put that number in perspective, obligations to the elderly are more than six times the size of the economy and 18 times the size of the outstanding federal debt.”  (Thomas R. Saving, “$74 Trillion = Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2005.) 

Given the reality of the Medicare and Social Security crisis, the idea of creating yet another massive federal “entitlement” program – “universal” health care – is sheer folly. 

  

 

The “46 Million” Lie

 

Advocates of “universal” government health-care coverage repeatedly cite the supposed fact (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) that some 46 million Americans (sometimes the figure cited is 45 million, sometimes it’s 47 million), or about 15 percent of the people living in the continental U.S., lack health care insurance.  That alleged fact is really a myth – as close scrutiny of the allegedly 46 million uninsured people reveals. 

First, we should note that the Census Bureau itself explains that its estimate of the number of people without health insurance “more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year than the number of people uninsured for the entire year.”  Thus, it’s a gross misrepresentation of this figure to cite it – as advocates of government monopoly health care do – as if all these people were permanently uninsured.  As Sally Pipes notes, “[M]any of the survey respondents who were counted as `uninsured’ may have experienced only a temporary interruption in their insurance.  And, as many know, this circumstance is quite common, especially for people who are starting their first job or who had insurance through their employer.  For those with employer provided coverage, when they quit or lose their job, they are technically uninsured.  But they are simply in transition between one insurer through their employer and another” (Ten Top Myths of American Health Care, p. 34). 

Who are these 46 million people?  They include a surprisingly wide range of people who, for various reasons, do not have health insurance, with many of them deliberately choosing to do without insurance.  Pipes notes that almost 18 million – or 38 percent – of the U.S. uninsured make more than $50,000 a year; almost 10 million of them have an income of more than $75,000 a year.  A great number of financially comfortable young Americans who are not covered by their employer choose not to purchase health insurance.  They’re known in the health care trade as “invincibles,” Pipes reports, “because they’re so sure they’re healthy and unlikely to get sick, these young singles would rather pocket their monthly insurance premiums than shell out for health care coverage” (p. 35). 

Larry Elder argues that nearly half of the 46 million uninsured fall into this category of the voluntarily uninsured, which he colorfully describes by citing the case of his 26-year-old nephew: 

“He smokes cigarettes, dates, eats out, goes to movies, and, like all young people, lives through the cell phone.

 

“With a slight change in priorities, he could afford health insurance, the cost of which at his age and health starts at about $100 a month.  Take a look at a Reason Foundation video (available at http://reason.tv/video/show/560.html) of interviews with a bunch of non-health-insured 20-somethings.

 

“These Gen Xers copped to dropping money on clothes, booze, nightlife, the latest tech gizmos and other things of interest to them.

 

“With a change in priorities, these young folks – far more representative of those without insurance than the forlorn husband and wife sitting on a porch swing – could both afford and qualify for health insurance.  They just consider it a low priority.”

 

(Larry Elder, “Why Scrap a Health Care System That 250 Million Americans Like?” Investor’s Business Daily, June 19, 2009.) 

Of the other half of the supposed 46 million uninsured persons in the U.S., another large number – according to the Census Bureau, more than 10 million of them (or almost 25 percent) – aren’t U.S. citizens, but merely residents of the U.S.  (Pipes, Ten Myths, pp. 36-37.) 

As many as 14 million of the 46 million uninsured are poor and low-income Americans who are fully eligible for existing government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP.  They’re just not enrolling in these programs.  (Pipes, Ten Myths, p. 37.) 

That leaves some eight million people who, as Sally Pipes characterizes them, “really do fall through the cracks.  These are the chronically uninsured working poor.  They are people who hold down jobs and struggle to support families.  They earn less than $50,000 a year, but too much to qualify for government help.  And because government is so expensive, they simply can’t afford it” – although, as Pipes adds, “they can still get emergency room care for, say, a broken leg, visit a community hospital, or a community clinic.  But they aren’t covered for routine check-ups and preventative care” (p. 39). 

“Any attempt to solve the uninsured problem should focus on this narrow slice of the 45.7-million pie,” Pipes concludes.  Unfortunately, the “reform” legislation currently under consideration in Congress does not focus on these eight million truly uninsured poor.  Yet, as Larry Elders notes in his June 19 op-ed, it is supposedly for their sake that Congress is considering a complete government takeover of the section of health care it doesn’t already run.   

Why is this so?  Because the “reformers” in Congress and the White House aren’t really interested in covering the chronically uninsured.  If they were, they’d be considering the market-based reforms – the real reforms – I discuss in the last section of this essay, below, which could easily solve the problem of extending insurance coverage to these eight million people without sacrificing a system that’s working well for virtually everyone else.  Despite the Democrat “reformers” rhetoric, however, it’s not these eight million really needy people – or the entire number of “46 million” currently uninsured people – that concern them:  it’s the entire population of 300 million Americans whose lives they want to control.  

“Universal” government health insurance isn’t about health care at all; it’s all about control – and about egalitarianism.  As the old saying goes, “If you have your health, you have everything” – and similarly, if the politicians and bureaucrats have control over citizens’ health, they would have control over everything, as well.   In the op-ed cited earlier in this essay, Robert Bidinotto quoted a Canadian who was gloating over his country’s nationalized health system, admitting, “We keep people waiting, to limit costs.  But you have to understand something about Canadians.  Canadians don’t mind waiting for elective care all that much, so long as the rich Canadian and the poor Canadian have to wait about the same amount of time” (emphasis added).  Bidinotto points out that this quotation reveals “the ugly essence of socialized medicine:  It is the envy-eaten morality of egalitarianism.” 

As Bidinotto observes, socialized medicine illustrates “the practical fallacy” behind socialism itself: 

[B]efore you can “equalize distribution,” you must first produce something to distribute.  When discouraged producers stop producing as much, what happens to the general availability of goods and services in society?  That’s the practical fallacy in socialism: It encourages unlimited demand, while discouraging supply.

 

The reason there are long waits for medical care in Canada and other socialized states is that there are shortages of medical-care providers.  Sick and tired of endless, unrewarded claims upon their productive energies and incomes, they have decided to stop being so shameless exploited and financially cannibalized.

 

(That’s why Canada has so serious a problem with a shortage of doctors, as discussed above.  That’s also why a recent survey of U.S. doctors, discussed in the section on “The Forgotten Man,” below, revealed that 45 percent would “consider leaving . . . practice or taking an early retirement” if Congress passes the Democrats’ “reform” scheme.) 

Bidinotto concludes,  

“The right to health care” is morality stood on its head.  It proclaims a moral entitlement to live as a parasite and to make unending claims upon the medical system’s productive hosts.  But there is nothing in such a system for the hosts.  Ultimately – and ironically – there is nothing in it for the parasites, either.  As fewer and fewer medical-care providers are willing to produce and offer goods and services that patients require, the only equality will be equality in misery.

 

The alleged virtue of equality is cold comfort when nobody can find a doctor when he needs one – or when there is no longer a single non-socialistic medical system anywhere on earth, where desperate socialists in foreign nations can go for the treatments that their egalitarian systems no longer provide them.

 

That is “the grim, immoral future that ObamaCare will bring us in America, too – if we allow it,” he warns  (Bidinotto, “ObamaCare’s Moral Inversion,” September 13.)

  

 

The “Forgotten Man” of Socialized Medicine   

 

William Graham Sumner, the great 19^th-century classical liberal, or “laissez-faire,” philosopher, wrote a splendid little book, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, first published in 1883.  In his book, Sumner identified the common fallacy that underlay all the legislative “reforms” proposed by the “social doctors,” or (as some would call them today) the “community organizers” of his time, the Populists and Progressives of the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries.  “Their schemes . . . may always be reduced to this type – that A and B decide what C shall do for D.”  A and B are the “social doctors,” or reformers; D is “the poor man,” who is allegedly in need of government aid; and Sumner called C “the Forgotten Man,” because he’s the person whose interest is always overlooked in political discussions.  

Who is C?  He, or she (for, as Sumner reminded his readers, the “Forgotten Man” could be either a man or a woman), is the one “who is threatened by every extension of the paternal theory of government.  It is he who must work and pay” – not just for himself and his own family, but for C, the “poor man” and his family, as well.  The Forgotten Man is industrious and responsible; he practices of virtues of hard work, thrift, and prudence.  “He has behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing”; he’s the man (or woman) “who has watched his own investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing, and educated his own children, and who, just when he wants to enjoy the fruits of his care, is told that it is his duty to go and take care of some of his negligent neighbors.” 

Sumner’s analysis is just as relevant today as it was when he first wrote, over 125 years ago.  Whenever the “social doctors,” A and B, urge that “there ought to be a law,” supposedly to protect the “poor man,” D, the person who is overlooked – and who is truly harmed by the law – is the “forgotten man,” C.  (As I explain to my students, Sumner’s useful model applies to virtually any kind of government “welfare” program or to any law criminalizing so-called “vices,” whether it’s Social Security, federal government bailouts of Wall Street or of auto companies, or the so-called “War on Drugs,” anti-“obscenity” laws, laws criminalizing gambling or prostitution, or laws prohibiting alcohol to adults under the age of 21.  In all these examples, Sumner’s model exposes the “fallacy” – and the injustice – of government paternalism.)   

Who’s the “Forgotten Man” in the Democrats’ proposed health-care “reform” legislation?  Obviously, it’s any one of the millions of Americans – the 85 percent of Americans, or some 255 million Americans – who have some form of health insurance and are reasonably satisfied with it.  (According to a 2006 ABC News-Kaiser Family Foundation – USA Today survey, 89 percent of Americans were satisfied with the quality of their own health care.)  The “Forgotten Man” is the average American consumer of health-care goods and services who, thanks to that portion of the system that’s still funded by private health insurance, is able to access the best-quality health care in the world.  This “Forgotten Man” is also the average American who is likely to lose this superlative health care, and his own health insurance coverage, if the Democrats succeed in pushing any form of their “public option” scheme through legislation enacted by Congress. 

There’s another “Forgotten Man” in the current effort to “reform” out of existence America’s partially-free market system in health care.  It’s the physician, who will suffer – as physicians already do in Canada, Britain, and other countries that have “universal,” single-payer, government-controlled health care systems – because of the cost controls that such systems inevitably impose. 

Doctors, who already face the severe problem of the criminalization of medicine through current efforts to “crack down” on Medicare or Medicaid “fraud,” will be exposed to even more draconian laws that make it crimes for them to provide “unnecessary” healthcare services – “unnecessary,” that is, in the eyes of some government bureaucrat.  What the character of Dr. Hendricks said in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, about “the forgotten man of socialized medicine,” will actually come to pass, as the best doctors will join him in going on strike: 

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control. . . . Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation?  Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?  That was not what I would place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. . . .  I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors.  Men considered only the `welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it.  That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only `to serve.’ . . . I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect me to depend, on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

 

Under such a system, only a fool or a fraud would ever choose to be a doctor.  So, yet another horrible consequence of socialized medicine, is that it will discourage the most able and intelligent men and women from pursuing careers in medicine – meaning that the quality of service will stagnate and deteriorate.  Yes, we will “guarantee” healthcare coverage for “our children”:  but they may have to wait a long time to see a doctor, even for urgent care, and when they finally do see a doctor, he or she is likely to be incompetent. 

It’s not surprising, therefore, that a recent survey by Investor’s Business Daily of over 1300 physicians across the USA revealed that 45 percent would “consider leaving . . . practice or taking an early retirement” if Congress passes the Democrats’ “reform” scheme.  Doctors are not fools (well, except perhaps for those white-coated goons who helped the B.O. White House provide its well-publicized photo-op in favor of “Obamacare” earlier this month).  Of the 1,376 physicians surveyed by IBD/TIPP, when asked whether “government can cover 47 million more people” for less money while improving quality,” fully 71 percent answered “no,” while only 25 percent (some of them the white-coated Obama goons, perhaps) said “yes.”  Respondents opposed Congress’s reform plan by 65 percent to 33 percent.  And when asked, “Under a government plan, do you think drug companies will have incentives to develop as many lifesaving new drugs,” 60 percent said “no.”  (“45% of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul,” Investor’s Business Daily, Sept. 15, 2009; “Poll: Doctors Fear End to Drug Innovation Under Reform,” Investor’s Business Daily, Sept. 22, 2009.) 

Finally, “universal” coverage through some sort of government-controlled healthcare system will also require – as Bill Clinton’s proposed “universal” program did in 1994, and as other countries’ nationalized healthcare systems do – that individuals are not permitted to buy, or to enter into contracts for, healthcare products or services “outside” the government-controlled system.  Such a system, in short, is truly a monopoly – and anyone who tries to circumvent the monopoly would be subject to criminal prosecution.  This is the part of “universal” coverage that even its most diehard advocates are unwilling to admit:  that it will take away all Americans’ freedom to do what they can now do, that is, to privately contract for healthcare goods or services.  That, incidentally, is the only aspect of a so-called “right to healthcare” that’s truly a “right.”  As I’ve discussed above, rights, properly speaking, pertain only to an individual’s freedom to act.  The one legitimate right that all Americans have – part of their basic liberty and property rights guaranteed by the due-process clauses of our constitutions, both state and federal – is their freedom to enter into contracts for medical goods and services.  That freedom – the one truly legitimate “right,” when it comes to healthcare, that all persons have – will be destroyed, by any system of “universal” coverage.

   

 

Restoring a Free Market in Health Care:

The Right Sort of Real Reform

 

As Sally Pipes concludes in the “Solutions” chapter of her Top Ten Myths of American Health Care book, “”true reform of the health care system requires less government interference – not more.  Only with a freer market can we lower costs and achieve quality universal health care” (p. 138).  Both she and political commentator Larry Elders, in his June 19 op-ed (“Why Scrap a Health Care System that 250 Million Americans Like?” I.B.D.) suggest some common-sense reforms that would help unleash the free market and make health care more affordable for all Americans: 

n  Allow greater competition among health-care providers.  Enable consumers to purchase insurance plans across state lines.  (Unlike the various Democrat plans currently under consideration in the House and Senate – including those that involve the Trojan horse of a so-called “public option,” allegedly to foster competition – this simple change could be done by Congress, constitutionally, as a proper exercise of its power to “regulate commerce among the States,” just as the Founders intended that power to be exercised – to reduce state-erected barriers to the free flow of goods and services across state lines.)   

n  Decrease costly regulations that increase the price tag of health care and insurance.  States and Congress should repeal the current mandates they impose on insurance – move away from the one-size-fits-all approach to insurance regulation – and instead allow companies to tailor insurance policies to fit Americans’ individual needs.

n  Change the tax code (again, something that Congress can do constitutionally – by undoing the damage it caused in the wake of its World War II-era wage-and-price controls), by giving individuals the same tax breaks that companies already receive when buying health coverage.  That would make individual insurance coverage “portable,” and help move the U.S. away from the costly employer-provided insurance system.

n    Expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which are tax-free, interest-accruing savings accounts that can be used to pay for routine medical expensive.  They are purchased in tandem with inexpensive, qualified, high-deductible insurance policies designed to cover major health care costs.  “HSA holders can spend their money tax-free on health care, as they see fit, without asking their insurance providers for permission,” Pipes explains.  These plans “put `insurance’ back into health insurance.  Since their creation in 2003 and implementation in January 2004, HSAs have already made insurance more affordable, while giving people control over their health-care dollars.  Today, more than six million Americans have HSA-compatible health insurance plans.”  Congress should make HSAs more attractive by reducing the regulations on them.  (Instead, the Democrats’ “reform” bills currently under consideration would practically eliminate HSAs altogether.) 

n    Implement tort law reforms.  Unreasonably expensive and unjust damage awards in medical malpractice lawsuits have added significant costs to health care:  malpractice insurance can cost specialty doctors over $200,000 a year, and liability concerns prompts physicians to practice “defensive medicine” by ordering unnecessary tests, for example.  Sally Pipes reports that according to a study by the Pacific Research Institute, such costs drain $124 billion from America’s health care system.  Although Congress can do little constitutionally to reform medical malpractice lawsuits (which are largely governed by state tort law), state legislatures can enact reforms such as capping non-economic damage awards, limiting attorney fees, and clarifying standards of reasonable care.

n   Enact real reforms of Medicare and Medicaid.  Congress should start undoing the vast harm it caused to the American free-market system of health care by creating these out-of-control government monopoly programs.  As with Social Security, real reform of Medicare and Medicaid aim at gradual privatization, eventually phasing-out these government programs, allowing them to be replaced by competitive private insurance (much as the market for “supplemental” Medicare insurance now does).  The huge future costs of Medicaid for nursing-home care, for example, could help be prevented today by Congress enacting tax credits encouraging individuals to purchase long-term care insurance.  

n  Allow non-government-licensed paraprofessionals (nurse practitioners and others) – currently prevented by law from offering any medical services – to provide low-cost care.   Across the country, retail health clinics are sprouting up in large stores like Wal-Mart and Target, as well as pharmacies like CVS and in grocery chains like Kroger.  They charge reasonable fees and they’re generally open 24/7.  Lawmakers should remove whatever legal barriers prevent such real competition from being offered in the health-services industry. 

These and other market-oriented reforms, as noted above, would make health care less expensive and more accessible to Americans without destroying the good in the current American health care industry.  They’d also help forestall all the evils associated with socialized medicine – which are evident to anyone who seriously studies the actual state of “universal” care systems in countries like Canada or the U.K. 

Let’s keep the American health care system in line with our fundamental American constitutional values of limited government and individual freedom – and with our free-market capitalist economic system, which is the only just system, one in which individuals are free to get what they bargain and pay for.  A “free,” government-run system is too costly, not only in dollars but in our freedoms.  As libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke once quipped, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Friday,  October 16, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Summer 2009 in Review

  

“In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, . . . he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky. . . . A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below.  In the rusty light of this evening’s sunset, the rectangle said:  September 2.”

                                                            -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)

 

            The start of Fall semester classes means, for me, the end of the summer – and time to give my take on some of the major developments in politics and popular culture over the past three months.

  

 

n    Obamanation:  America’s B.O. Problem 

            What’s the biggest problem in the USA today?   It’s not the economy, with sluggish growth, high unemployment, a shrinking private sector and an expanding government sector, plus the looming inflation crisis – all of which pose serious threats to Americans’ freedom and prosperity.   It’s not the global war against militant Islamic terrorists, which continues to endanger American national security.  Nor is it either the supposed “health care crisis” or the “climate change crisis,” the imagined fears of left-liberals, or the supposed “immigration crisis” or the “war on traditional values,” the imagined fears of some conservatives.  It’s not even the deterioration of the rule of law or the decline in personal responsibility – which, in a broader philosophical sense, can more plausibly be considered the greatest problems facing Americans today. 

            Rather, I submit, the biggest problem in the country today is that the current occupant of the White House – the huckster who fooled the American people on election day last November – is unfit to be president of the United States.  And that his policies, on virtually all major issues, are making our genuine problems far worse.  After six months in office, it’s becoming quite clear that his chief program is to concentrate more and more political power in Washington, D.C., and particularly in a dictatorial White House, destroying both the American free-market economic system and our system of constitutional checks on the power of government.  And, finally, that a large number of incredibly naïve (or stupid) Americans (many of them, unfortunately, in the news media) still fail to realize the truth about B.O., including the threat he poses to the freedoms of all Americans, by his unquenchable thirst for power – the biggest power-grab by an American president since FDR.  But now that we’re in the “dog days” of late summer, it’s getter harder and harder to ignore the stink that rising out of Washington and emanating – or should I say, “Obamanating” – all over the USA.

  

 

n    Honeymoon’s Over 

Although many Americans continue to be fooled by B.O. – especially the “B.O.-bots” (as I call them) in the “state-run” news media (as Rush Limbaugh aptly characterizes it) – there’s clear evidence that, after more than six months in office, his “honeymoon” is over.  

The Rasmussen presidential tracking poll has shown a steady decline in B.O.’s approval rating since mid- June.  The Rasmussen daily presidential tracking poll, which calculates its Presidential Approval Index by subtracting the number who “strongly disapprove” of the way he’s performing his job as president from the number who “strongly approve” began showing negative numbers on June 21 (when, with 34% strongly disapproving and only 33% strongly approving, he had an approval index rating of -1).  Since then, B.O.’s approval index number has gone steadily downhill: by July 7, it slipped to -3 and continued eroding for the next several days, to -5 by July 8, to -8 by July 9;  by July 24, his overall approval rating had fallen below 50% (to 49%) for the first time in his administration, and his approval index remained at -8; just two days later, on July 26, the index fell to a (then) all-time low of -11 (with 40% strongly disapproving).  Throughout the month of August, B.O.’s job approval numbers continued to slide downhill, with his index number staying in the negatives; by September 2, only 28% of voters strongly approved of his presidency, compared to 40% who strongly disapproved, giving him an approval index rating of -12. 

The pundits’ explanations have focused mostly on the unpopularity of B.O.’s policy agenda, particularly the massive increase in federal spending and the hemorrhaging federal budget deficit, which seem to have worsened the nation’s economic troubles.  Several commentators note that although B.O. ran for president as some kind of centrist, his real agenda is radically leftist.  Conservative commentator Ben Stein, for example, speculated that the American people “in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a pig in a poke in 2008” but “are starting to wake up to the truth”: “It is not hard to conclude that Obama has been caught trying to pull off a bait and switch – he ran as a moderate and is governing as a left-winger.”  

But it’s not just B.O.’s leftist policies that are turning off Americans; it’s also his character, particularly his arrogance and his narcissism.  As my friend and colleague Brad Smith noted (posting  on Politico.com on July 29), the bigger issue isn’t the economy but “freedom from an overweening, boorish, nagging, and too often nasty big government.”  Smith adds, “What I notice about growing anti-Obama sentiment is that it is not merely about the economy, but about exactly this issue.  Americans don’t want to be endlessly hectored, and that is a factor in the early onset of Obama fatigue.”   

One sign (quite literally) of the growing anti-Obama sentiment among the American people is the poster showing B.O. as “The Joker” (as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger in the Batman movie, The Dark Knight), with the word “socialism” underneath the image.  The anonymously-produced poster, a form of “guerilla art” (discussed and reproduced on the “classicalvalues.com” website on August 2), first appeared on the streets of L.A., but has spread to the heartland, as Eric Dondero has noted on his “Libertarian Republican” website.

  

 

n    “State-Run” News Media, Indeed 

            Perhaps the most glaring evidence that the major TV network news organizations (ABC, NBC and its affiliates, especially MSNBC, and CBS) are still in the pocket of B.O. is the extraordinary action taken by ABC News on the evening of June 24, when it broadcast, from inside the White House, a propaganda special for “Obamacare,” the administration’s push for nationalized health care.  Matt Drudge, on his “Drudge Report,” quoted a statement from the Republican National Committee calling the program “a glorified infomercial to promote the Democrat agenda”; and Michelle Malkin suggested that ABC, which she dubbed “The All Barack Channel,” should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.  Investor’s Business Daily, in a hard-hitting editorial on June 19, described ABC’s extraordinary shift, crossing the line from journalism to advocacy, as ABC “self-nationalizes for Obama”:    

“The all-day, White House-based coverage itself amounts to a nationalization – this one of a major media outlet in support of an administration that will return the favor for access at the cost of objectivity and the public’s right to know.  . . . This isn’t your grandfather’s propaganda. . . . Under the cover of news, ABC can present the president’s side of the health reform issue as `factual’ and leave out the real costs and concerns about government control and rationing of health care.  . . . This is a disgrace.  Much of the U.S. private sector, from banks to automakers to hospitals, have resisted a government takeover, seeking to maintain their independence.  Only the media, which should be the most independent of all, haven’t.”

 

            Now, as the debate over B.O.’s scheme to nationalize American health care is heating up during Congress’s August recess, both ABC and NBC have refused to air ads created by a conservative group in opposition to “Obamacare.”  (The conservative group is advised by Bill Clinton’s former political adviser, Dick Morris, whose new book, Catastrophe, details how B.O.’s scheme will destroy the U.S. health-care system, the best in the world.)   And when you consider how hostile the three networks’ evening news programs have been to conservative and libertarian protesters at “TEA parties” and town meetings (CBS’s Katie Couric stands out for her leftist partisanship here), it’s not difficult to conclude that B.O.’s the pimp and ABC, NBC, and CBS are his whores. 

 

  

n    “Hey, Big Spender!” 

The massive, $787-billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” (ARRA), the so-called “stimulus” bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed into law by B.O. earlier this year, has become the biggest political mistake made by Democrats in Washington.  ARRA is a massive error – the Dems’ Achilles heel.  It has put the lie to B.O.’s  empty promises about turning Washington around, with a new kind of politics, for it represents one of the worst features of “politics as usual” in the nation’s capital: politicians rewarding the special interests who helped elect them, with porkbarrel spending that’s a massive waste of American taxpayers’ money.  It has renewed popular concern about the size of the federal deficit and the burgeoning national debt.  (It also has deprived both B.O. and Democrats in Congress of their favorite political ploy, blaming everything on George W. Bush.  B.O.’s predecessor in the White House was indeed guilty of cooperating with Congress in significantly increasing federal spending, but Democrats cannot say with a straight face that they “inherited” the deficit problem.  B.O.’s $3.6 trillion budget for 2009 more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents – from George Washington to George W. Bush – combined.  Only in 2008, his last full year in office, did the yearly deficit during Bush’s two terms as president exceed $400 billion; in 2009, B.O.’s first year in office, the yearly budget deficit is estimated at $1.75 trillion by the White House and $1.85 trillion by the Congressional Budget Office.  Government spending as a percentage of GDP is approaching the unprecented levels it set at the end of World War II.  And the B.O. White House recently conceded that it was off by a whopping 30% in its deficit projections for the next ten years:  instead of the $7 trillion it had predicted in May, it’s now projecting the ten-year deficit to be at the “historic” level of a whopping $9 trillion!) 

There are even more ways in which the Democrats’ spending spree at the start of B.O.’s presidency has been their – and his – Achilles heel.  Although they will no doubt try to claim credit for economic recovery, when the recession finally ends (in 2010, perhaps?), asserting that their “stimulus” worked, savvy economists realize that what really ends a recession is the natural process of the market system recovering as it goes through its cycle, correcting those imbalances that caused the recession in the first place.  ARRA should put the final nail in the coffin, of the well-deserved death of Keynesian economics, with its false theory that governments can create prosperity by spending more taxpayer money.  All that government spending accomplishes is to shift capital from out of the private sector (where it would be spent rationally by capitalists, in growing their businesses) and into the “public” sector (where it’s spent irrationally by politicians, in rewarding their friends).   

It’s a perfect model for what the great 19^th-century French economist, Frederic Bastiat, called “the broken window fallacy.”  People ignorant of basic economic principles think that, when a juvenile delinquent breaks a shopkeeper’s window, he’ll help the local economy by forcing the shopkeeper to give a job to the glazier.  They’re considering only “what is seen.”  What they’re not considering is “what is unseen”:  how the money the shopkeeper has to spend to get his window fixed would have been better spent helping his business grow.  The basic rule applies to all government spending programs:  advocates look only at “what is seen,” ignoring the hidden costs of government spending, “what is unseen,” the damage it does to the economy. 

The Detroit News, in an insightful editorial on July 14, “Obama’s stimulus plan is not working,” observed: 

“Proponents of big government spending see the failure of the stimulus package to deliver measurable results not as evidence that the strategy was wrong, but rather than not enough money was placed behind it.  They’re advocating yet another stimulus program, equal to or bigger than the last.  That would compound the mistake and drag the nation even deeper into debt.  Borrowing has already pushed beyond the reckless level – the federal deficit is now nearly 12 percent of total economic output.  Printing or borrowing even more money to fund this failed experiment would devalue the dollar and increase the likelihood of devastating inflation.

 

“Instead of more spending, Obama and Congress should turn to the only proven stimulus strategy: cutting taxes. . . . The president should signal that his No. 1 priority is reviving the economy and set aside those pieces of his agenda – carbon cap-and-trade and health care reform specifically – that carry the serious risk of killing jobs and raising the costs of goods and services.  Particularly, it ought to be clear to everyone in Washington that a nation that has squandered more than a trillion dollars on failed stimulus efforts can’t afford the $100 billion to $200 billion price tag for Obama’s health care proposal.  Obama has taken fiscal irresponsibility to unprecedented heights.  He can’t keep spending like this.”

 

By starting with their massive spending bill, which Democrats easily pushed through Congress on a virtually straight party-line vote (to their credit, House Republicans voted unanimously against the bill, while only a handful of RINOS in the Senate joined the Dems in support), the Democrats overplayed their hand.  As Michael Barone noted in a July 8 op-ed in Washington Examiner, “Americans are getting cold feet over Democratic proposals.”  “The $787 billion stimulus package, the cap-and-trade bill’s utility rate increases, the public health insurance package – all these seem to generate more apprehension than enthusiasm.  So does the prospect of doubling the national debt, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates, from about 40 percent of gross domestic product to about 80 percent,” its level at the end of World War II. 

Finally, and perhaps most important politically, passage of ARRA was a huge error for Democrats because it confirms their reputation as “tax-and-spend” politicians whose only solution to society’s problems is to throw other people’s money at it – to confiscate more of the wealth earned by productive Americans and to redistribute it to the looters – to “spread the wealth,” as B.O. admitted in a rare moment of candor during the presidential campaign.  It’s a policy that’s as bankrupt, intellectually, as it’s making our nation, economically.  So much for “change” and “new ideas.”  The joke during the presidential campaign was that the only “change” B.O. would bring Americans would be what’s left of the dollar after he implements his policies.  Sad, but true.

 

 

n    “Clunker” Economics 

The federal government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program gave buyers up to $4500 of taxpayer dollars (funneled through auto dealers) toward the purchase of a new car if they traded in their old cars (“junkers”) for vehicles with better gas mileage.  The program was such a “success,” according to members of Congress, that when the first $1 billion they appropriated for it had run out of money, they rushed (just before they left Washington for their August recess) to add $2 billion more to the program.  But those members of Congress, and anyone else who thinks this boondoggle was a success, are merely displaying their ignorance of basic principles of economics.  

The program really is just another illustration of the truth of Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy (discussed above), as Jonah Goldberg noted in an August 5 op-ed, “How Much Is that Clunker in the Window?”  “What is seen” by supporters of the program are only the sales of new cars.  “What is not seen” is what the program really does:  divert tax dollars to people with cheap cars so they can buy expensive ones.  As Goldberg notes, “That’s just really inefficient wealth distribution, not wealth creation.”  John Lott, author of Freedomnomics, observed in an August 3 op-ed (“Cash for Clunkers Is No Success”), “Only in Washington could a program that is spending money 13 times faster than planned be labeled a `success.’”  He describes the arbitrary standard set by the government for determining what vehicles qualified for the program –  “Replacing an 18 mpg car with one that offers 22 mpg, gets you a subsidy.  But you cannot get a subsidy if you replace a 19 mpg car with one getting 45 mpg.” – as well as other “weird details” of the program.   

Jeremy Anwyl, in an August 3 column in Wall Street Journal (“More Cash for Clunkers?”) outlined some of the hidden costs of the program.  First, “it’s not clear that cash for clunkers actually increased sales”: it just caused buyers to put their purchases on hold waiting for the program to launch, and then they “crammed three to four months of normal activity into just a few days.”  Then there’s the “ironic unintended consequence” of spot shortages in fuel-efficient cars and buyers using their cash-for-clunker dollars to purchase less-efficient models and “thus crush one of the touted environmental benefits of the program.”  Still more hidden costs have been identified by Gary North, who emphasizes that rule governing disposal of the clunkers (the engines must be destroyed), in effect, “subsidizes the scrap metal industry at the expense of the junk car industry.”  By harming the junk car industry, the program hurts poor Americans (“Hit and Run: How the Government’s Billion-Dollar Cash for Clunkers Boondoggle Hurts the Poor”).

 

  

n    “More Czars Than the Romanovs” 

Back in mid-April, David Rothkopf, a commentator on U.S. foreign policy, noted that with the appointment of “border czar” Alan Bersin, the B.O. administration “has by any reasonable reckoning passed the Romanov Dynasty in the production of czars.”  The Romanovs ruled Russia from 1613 (with the ascension of Michael I) to 1917 (when, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate); during that 300-year period, they produced 18 czars.  With the appointment of Mr. Bersin, the B.O. administration, by most counts, had appointed at least 18 so-called “czars” – presidential appointees who are not subjected to Senate confirmation.  The 18 counted by Rothkopf include “energy czar” Carol Browner, “urban czar” Adolfo Carrion, Jr., “infotech czar” Vivek Kundra, “faith-based czar” Joshua DeBois, “health-reform czar” Nancy-Ann DeParle, “TARP czar” Herb Allison, “stimulus accountability czar” Earl Devaney, “non-proliferation czar” Gary Samore, “terrorism czar” John Brennan, “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein, “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske, and “Guantanamo closure czar” Daniel Fried, as well as several “special envoys” who fall into the “czar” category, including AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, and “climate special envoy” Todd Stern.  It was a “conservative estimate,” as Rothkopf noted, because he did not include the de facto “car czar” Steve Rattner (since replaced by Ron Bloom, a former United Steelworkers union official), or National Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair (often called “the intelligence czar”), or White House science advisor John Holdren, who’s been called the nation’s “science czar” (“It’s Official: Obama Creates More Czars Than the Romanovs,” April 16). (For more on the B.O. administration breaking the Romanovs’ record, see Katherine Mangu-Ward, “The Lure of the Czars,” in Reason Online, May 22.) 

B.O.’s predecessors began this unfortunate practice with the appointment of such officials as director of the White House’s office of drug policy (the chief enforcer of federal anti-drug laws, the so-called “war on drugs” czar) and other special officials, who as “advisors” to the president are not subject to Senate confirmation but who nevertheless exercise executive powers, like Cabinet members and other properly-confirmed executive branch officials.  It’s a gross abuse of executive powers, which B.O. has carried to a far greater level than all his predecessors combined.  By most counts, the number of such “czars” in the B.O. administration has now passed over three dozen – in other words, more than twice the number of czars the Romanov dynasty had. 

Back in February, following B.O.’s appointment of yet another “czar” with massive government power, answering only to him, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd – president pro tempore of the Senate and the longest-serving senator in U.S. History – wrote a letter to the president, criticizing the practice and maintaining that these appointments violate both the constitutional system of checks and balances and the constitutional separation of powers, and were clear attempts to evade congressional oversight.  As legal Ken Klukowski noted in an op-ed posted on Townhall.com (“Senior Democrat Says Obama’s Czars Unconstitutional,” June 15), Senator Byrd was “exactly correct.”  In addition to explaining how the practice of appointing “czars” violates the Constitution, Klukowski notes that, fortunately, there is a remedy:  “Any person on the receiving end of an order from any of these czars” – for example, a Wall Street CEO who finds his salary cut by “executive-pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg – would have the standing to challenge the order (filing a federal suit asserting that it’s an unconstitutional exercise of governmental power).  If the federal courts do their job in enforcing the Constitution, they should both invalidate the order and hold that the position of “czar” doesn’t legally exist. 

Meanwhile, the B.O. administration continues to violate the Constitution, by having these unconfirmed “czars” exercising executive government powers.  And, in many cases, the persons B.O. has appointed to these “czar” positions have plans to pursue dangerously radical left-wing agendas that will further undermine constitutional limits on the powers of government.  Consider, for example, the administration’s appointment of Mark Lloyd, as “chief diversity officer” at the Federal Communications Commission, where Lloyd plans to implement policies that would silence conservative talk radio.  Or consider the “Green Jobs” czar, Van Jones, a self-described “rowdy [black] nationalist” and “communist” who was arrested during the Rodney King riots, then spent ten years of his life working with “revolutionary” Marxists in the group STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement).  Jones presumably would not pass the FBI background check and the scrutiny that Senate confirmation would bring, had he been nominated to a legitimate executive office rather than be appointed as a “czar.”  As one conservative commentator notes, “Perhaps only a left-wing administration incapable of recognizing irony would put a self-described communist in charge of creating jobs.”

 

  

n    A Culture of Corruption 

In an insightful op-ed in mid-June, Michael Barone has aptly described B.O.’s style of governance by outlining what he calls his “Three Rules of Obama.”  First, he notes, “Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate.”  His domestic policy goals have been threatened by voter unease over the huge increases in federal spending; his foreign policy goals of “propitiating America’s enemies” have been undercut by such events as North Korea’s missile launches and demonstrations in Iran against the mullah regime’s election fraud.  Second, “he does not seem to care much about the details of policy,” in effect subcontracting the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markeyu, and his health care program to Max Baucus, resulting in “incoherent public policy”: “indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000.”  Third, and most importantly, “he does business Chicago style.” 

Barone describes B.O.’s “Chicago-style” governance as follows: “From Chicago he brings the assumption that there will always be a bounteous private sector that can be plundered endlessly on behalf of political favorites.  Hence the government takeover of General Motors and Chrysler to bail out the United Auto Workers. . . . Those who stand in the way, like the Chrysler secured creditors, are told that their reputations will be destroyed; those who expose wrongdoing by political allies, like the AmeriCorps inspector general, are fired” (“Dodge Facts, Skip Details, Govern Chicago-Style,” Washington Examiner, June 20). 

Barone’s reference to the firing of the AmeriCorps inspector general highlights perhaps the most dramatic abuse of power by B.O. – and evidence of his administration’s “Chicago-style” corrupt politics – this summer.  Gerald Walpin, as inspector general for AmeriCorps, blew the whistle on an egregious example of political corruption:  investigating a non-profit group, St. HOPE Academy, run by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento, California (and a big B.O. supporter), Walpin discovered that Johnson “had used AmeriCorps grants to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson, and even wash his car,” the AP reported.  In April, although the U.S. attorney declined to file any criminal charges in the matter, Johnson and St. HOPE agreed to repay about half of the $850,000 it had received from AmeriCorps.  Then the administration fired Walpin, alleging that the 77-year-old public servant was not mentally competent to do his job – in other words, by engaging in blatant character assassination.  (Walpin is not only mentally fit – not at all “confused” and “disoriented,” as the administration charged -- but also a real patriot and hero, as he demonstrated during his appearance on Glenn Beck’s TV show.)  And yet, because he blew the whistle on administration corrupt political practices, he’s being unfairly smeared, his reputation destroyed, by White House officials.  (Also see the splendid editorial, “The Smearing of Gerald Walpin,” in Investor’s Business Daily, June 19.) 

            The smearing of Gerald Walpin turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg of political corruption in the B.O. administration.  Two other inspector generals – Neil Baroksky, tasked with watching over the financial “stimulus” spending, and Judith Gwynne, acting inspector general of the International Trade Commission – were also terminated by the administration.  (Yet another important example of new ignored by the “B.O.-bots” in the news media.  As a commentator on American Thinker noted in mid-June, “We have a president and a Democrat-controlled Congress which are spending trillions of dollars as fast as they can, and simultaneously inspectors general charged with keeping the process honest are fired.  Why isn’t this the top story?  The question answers itself.” (“Not just Walpin! Three IGs fired,” June 18). 

Michelle Malkin, in a July 29 op-ed posted on Townhall.com (“Bully Boys: A Brief History of White House Thuggery”), cites the smearing of Walpin of one of several instances of “thuggery” by the B.O. administration.  Other examples include the admininstration’s strong-arming of Chrysler creditors and Chrysler dealers, attempts to intimidate Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf (just after the CBO cast ruinous doubts on the costs of the administration’s proposed health-care reforms), political attacks on fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, and the muzzling of a veteran researcher at the Environmental Protection Agency, Alan Carlin, because he had questioned the “conventional wisdom” on global warming. She also notes that at the Justice Department, administration lawyers “are now blocking a House inquiry into the suspicion decision to dismiss default judgments against radical New Black Panther Party activists who intimidated voters and poll workers on Election Day in Philadelphia.”  Malkin sums up, noting, “six months into the Obama administration, it should now be clear to all Americans:  Hope and Change came to the White House wrapped up in brass knuckles.” 

In her fascinating new book, Culture of Corruption (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2009),  Ms. Malkin more fully describes “Obama and his team of tax cheats, crooks, and cronies,” as the subtitle of the book puts it.  Especially important are her chapters on the president’s links to the ACORN organization (Chapter 8, “ObamACORN: A Community of Organized Racketeers Nationwide”) and on the political activism of the Service Employees International Union (Chapter 7, “SEIU: Look for the Union Label”).  Although Malkin does not go so far in her book, I think the “thuggery” she uncovers gives rise to a reasonable comparison of the B.O. administration to the similarly fascist Nazi regime in Germany:  after all, just as Hitler had his “brown shirts,” B.O. has his “red shirts” from ACORN and his “purple shirts” from SEIU.

 

  

n    Gates-gate 

Earlier this year I commented on B.O.’s propensity to stick his nose into matters that are none of his damn business, matters that do not fall within the constitutional purview of the U. S. government, let alone the office of president (see “Busybody-in Chief,” in “Spring Briefs 2009,” Mar. 19).  Perhaps nothing better illustrates this trait of his than the affair that some pundits have dubbed “Gates-gate”:  the comments made by B.O. during a prime-time presidential news conference, concerning the arrest of his “friend,” black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his own house by a Cambridge, Mass. police officer on in late July.  The white police officer, Sgt. James Crowley (who, ironically, helps train fellow police officers on avoiding “racial profiling”), responding to a call reporting a possible burglary at Gates’ house, got involved in a volatile exchange with Gates – who repeatedly accused the officer of “racism” and told the officer he “had no idea who [he] was messing with” – resulting in Gates’ arrest for disorderly conduct, a charge that was subsequently dropped (but only after Gates was removed from his house in handcuffs).  Prefacing his remarks at the news conference by admitting he “might be a little biased here” because “Skip Gates” is a friend, and by acknowledging, “I don’t know all the facts,” B.O. nevertheless accused the policeman of acting “stupidly” – and thereby alienating public-safety officers across the country (and, according to some commentators, setting back whatever progress in race relations the nation has made since the 2008 election).  

B.O. was right about the incident giving rise to a “teachable moment,” but the one who’s most in need of a lesson is B.O. himself, who needs to learn about the limitations on presidential power as well as some personal humility.  In subsequent remarks (made during a surprise appearance at White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ press briefing), B.O. failed to apologize to Crowley, acknowledging only that he “could have calibrated those words differently” (an example of B.O.’s famous eloquence, I suppose).  As John Hinderaker commented on the “Power Line” blog (“Obama Regrets,” July 24), the lesson B.O. have drawn from the incident was “that he should keep his mouth shut when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

 

 

n    Ponzi Schemes, Great and Small 

In mid-July disgraced financier Bernard Madoff arrived at federal prison in North Carolina, to begin serving a 150-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty in March to charges that his investment advisory business was a multimillion-dollar “Ponzi” scheme that wiped out thousands of investors.  

As Robert Higgs noted on the “Liberty & Power” blog, “President Barack Obama and the sitting members of Congress have not been charged, much less convicted and sentenced, for crimes that make Bernie Madoff’s look like child’s play.”  Madoff  caused people to lose billions of dollars; in comparison, the U.S. government “has caused people to lose trillions of dollars, and it’s not finished yet.”  What is Riggs referring to?  Social Security.  “The leaders of the U.S. government have carried out their Social Security fraud – essentially a Ponzi scheme, in substance exactly the same as Madoff’s scheme – since 1935, and they have yet to confess to their crimes.”  According to one estimate, Social Security has reduced [current] GDP by 5 to 10 percent,” or approximately $1.4 trillion – or about 28 times the maximum amount Madoff is believed to have cost his clients.  Moreover, Higgs adds, Madoff “carried out his fraud in a civilized way,” misrepresenting what he was doing with people who dealt with him voluntarily.  In contrast, the U.S. government claims no prowess in investing the money it forces people to surrender to its Social Security scheme.  “Thus, the government operates its Ponzi scheme in a markedly more thuggish manner than Bernie would ever have dreamed of” (“Bernie Madoff Was Only a Petty Crook Compared with Uncle Sam,” July 14). 

            For my take on the worst Ponzi scheme of them all, see my previous blog entry, “Socialist Insecurity” (Feb. 15, 2005).

  

 

n    Sarah’s Not Palin in Comparison 

Former Alaska governor – and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate – Sarah Palin confounded political pundits with her surprise resignation from the governorship this summer.  Critics of Ms. Palin were quick to write her political obituary, but more astute commentators aren’t writing her off so fast – and indeed are crediting her for political savvy.  My colleague Brad Smith writes in a recent issue of National Review that Republicans could learn a lot from how Palin ran her gubernatorial campaign in Alaska.  He writes, “The Sarah Palin who won Alaska’s governorship in 2006 came perhaps as close as any Republican in recent memory to recapturing the Reagan formula” (“Sarah Studies,” August 24).  Palin has good policy instincts – not just common sense, but a stridently pro-liberty orientation – and she has already made important contributions to the national debate over health-care policy (calling attention to the “death panels” that, in effect, will inevitably result from government rationing) as well as “climate change” (calling attention to the devastating costs of the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” bill, discussed below).  Tammy Bruce, writing (of all places) on the far-left Daily Kos blog, warns that the Left made a horrible mistake in attacking Palin so viciously that they forced her out of the governorship and into full-time political activism.  The “Palin movement” – which Ms. Bruce says will bring together a new coalition of “extremists, Libertarians, Constitution Party members, as well as GOP loyalists” – will be “unstoppable.”  And Jay Valentine, posting on American Thinker, predicts that Palin’s popularity will rise because she is so effective a spokesperson against elitism.  “Palin enters the arena where the fight is not between liberal and conservative; nor is it between Republican and Democrat.  The fight is between the elite and the common person who works every day and continually asks how Washington, D.C. under both parties is so out of control” (“Sarah Palin – All In,” July 5).

 

  

n    A Not-So-“Wise Latina” In-Justice 

As I predicted in my May 25 “Thoughts for the Summer” blog, B.O. made an “affirmative action” appointment to the Supreme Court, to fill the seat of retired Justice David Souter.  I wrote that he would nominate someone “ principally because she’s female and easily confirmable by the Democrat-controlled Senate.  The new justice, whomever she may be, no doubt also will be a left-liberal `activist,’ in the worst sense of that term.  (See my essay, “Judicial Activism, Real and Imagined,” April 4, 2005.)  I nearly missed being perfect prescient by failing to add, as I suspected at the time (when Sonia Sotomayor’s name was cited as being on the administation’s “short list” of Court candidates), that she’d be Hispanic, thereby filling both a “minority” racial quota as well as the sex quota, and that, specifically, B.O.’s pick would be Judge Sotomayor.  And, despite courageous questioning of her record and her judicial philosophy by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor was easily confirmed in early August by a largely partisan 68-31 vote (with 59 Democrats and only 9 of the 40 Republican Senators voting in favor of confirmation). 

The 31 Republican Senators who voted against confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court were right to do so:  Judge Sotomayor is not fit to be a Supreme Court justice.  It’s not just because of her infamous comment that “a wise Latina woman” would make better decisions than a white male judge, which reveals that she is both racist and sexist.  Nor is just because her decisions as an appellate court judge in controversial cases involving property rights, racial discrimination, and gun rights reveal that she truly is a left-liberal judicial activist who shares with other leftist liberals a disdain for individual freedom except for those narrow categories of rights that left-liberals favor.  After all, those qualities make her no less qualified than the three and a half left-liberal justices (Justices Breyer, Ginsberg, and Stevens all the time and Justice Kennedy about half the time) already serving on the Court.  

What really makes Judge (now Justice) Sotomayor unqualified for the Court is her intellectual mediocrity.  Even some left-liberal scholars were appalled at the shallowness of Sotomayor’s answers to questions about important Court cases and constitutional principles, as well as her disingenuousness in explaining away some of her controversial statements, including the “wise Latina woman” remark, by asserting that her philosophy of judging involved nothing more than applying the law to the facts.  Georgetown libertarian law professor Randy Barnett noted on the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog on July 14 that his leftist Geogetown Law colleague Mike Seidman (a cofounder and leader in the Critical Legal Studies movement) was “brutally candid” in giving his opinion of Judge Sotomayor’s testimony:  “If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.  If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified.”  Professor Barnett himself noted, in another post that same day, that in Sotomayor’s exchange with Senator Orrin Hatch about the Second Amendment and its potential application to the states – an issue in one of the most important cases to be decided by the Court in its next term – she “revealed remarkably little about her understanding of how the Supreme Court protects liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment.”   Ilya Somin, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, aptly characterized Sotomayor as “an average judge who apparently gives little thought to the broad swath of law and where her rulings fit into that” (“Sotomayor Displays a Lack of Deep Thinking,” on the Townhall.com blog, July 15).   And, in the bluntest statement I’ve seen about Sotomayor’s unfitness for the job, Thomas Bowden, an analyst for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, argued that what really ought to disqualify Sotomayor from the Court is “a judicial philosophy that explicitly rejects objectivity and impartiality” (“Sotomayor Unqualified for Supreme Court,” May 27).

 

  

n    Russian Roulette 

B.O.’s policy toward the United States’ greatest enemy during the Cold War – the former Soviet Union, now almost just as dangerous as Russia, under the dictatorship of former KGB chief Vladimir Putin – apparently is, just like his policy toward militant Islamic terrorists, a policy of appeasement.  When Hillary Clinton, as B.O.’s secretary of state, pledged to help “reset” U.S.-Russian relations (using a prop “reset” button which was mislabeled, with the Russian word mistaken for “reset” really meaning “overcharge” – a Freudian slip, perhaps?), she was following the administration’s M.O. in bashing the previous Bush administration.  But B.O. has moved from appeasement to downright risk, endangering the national security of the United States, by apparently signaling to Putin his willingness to unilaterally back away from a European missile-defense system, the one effective trump card the U.S. had had in negotiating with Russian thugs.  (But B.O. apparently is either a truly naïve leftist peace-nik or really ignorant of the history of the Cold War.  His comments in early July, mischaracterizing the Cold War and utterly ignoring the vital role Ronald Reagan’s firmness played in helping to end it, demonstrate this, as noted on the “Classical Values” blog on July 9.) 

  

 

n    The Bitch Is Back! 

Speaking of H.R.C. (Her Royal Clinton-ness), the Secretary of State – who’s been generally all smiles since being confirmed a member of B.O.’s cabinet – finally revealed her true self, during a summer visit to the African nation of the Congo.  When asked about “your husband’s” views on a financial issue, her testy reply revealed a bit of the “old” Hillary.  "My husband is not secretary of state, I am," she snapped, adding, “I am not going to be channeling my husband."  Interestingly, it turned out that the question had been mistranslated and that the questioner was really asking, not about Bill Clinton’s views, but about B.O.’s.  I wonder if Hillary would have still been just as angry.  After all, B.O. isn’t secretary of state, either.

  

 

n    Birds of a Feather 

Another shameful episode in U.S. foreign policy under the B.O. administration occurred this summer when the president openly sided with Jose Manual Zelaya, the deposed leftist president of Honduras (and a Hugo Chavez wannabe), who was forced from office and into exile as a result of what most of the U.S. media, echoing the B.O. administration, has erroneously called a “coup.”  What actually happened in Honduras was not “illegal,” much less a “coup,” as several astute commentators have noted.  Indeed, it may be likened to the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89 in England, which deposed the tyrannical king James II and replaced him with the constitutional monarchs William & Mary.  As Mona Charen noted in a column posted on Townhall.com, it was Zelaya himself who initiated an attempted coup, by seeking to unconstitutionally extend his term in office.  The Honduran military, acting on orders of the Honduran supreme court, removed Zelaya from office, enforcing a provision in the Honduran constitution – and thereby preserving constitutional governance and the rule of law.  (“Did Someone Say Coup?,” June 30; see also Hans Bader, “Will Obama Blackmail Honduras into Installing a Bullying Would-Be Dictator? Examiner.com, July 5).  Burwell Stark, further explaining how the Honduran military had “acted to defend the rule of law,” observes, “If this is a coup, then it is unlike almost any other in history” (apparently not seeing the parallel to England’s Glorious Revolution that’s apparent to me).   Also noting how, besides B.O., it has been the Castro brothers in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela who’ve been most vocal in denouncing the so-called Honduran “coup,” Stark adds that “as it stands, the only government leaders labeling this a coup are the ex-president himself and leaders of other countries, especially those with personal socialist or Marxist leanings” (“Saving Democracy in the Honduran `Coup,’” American Thjnker, June 30). 

The unhappy alliance of U.S. foreign policy (under B.O.) with that of Latin American communist thugs Castro, Chavez, and Daniel Ortega (of Nicaragua) was the subject of a hard-hitting editorial, “Banana Democrats,” in Investor’s Business Daily on June 29: 

“There was a coup all right, but it was committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court.  It was committed by Zelaya himself.  He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal. . . . Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal `a coup.’ Obama called the action `a terrible precedent,’ and said Zelaya remains president.  In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.  The U.S. response has been disgraceful.”

 

In a cartoon accompanying the I.B.D. editorial, four parrots – labeled “Castro,” “Chavez,” “Ortega,” and “Obama” – sit on a tree branch, saying, “AAWWWWWCK!  Restore the dictator in Honduras!”

  

 

n    The “New GM”: Government Motors 

A sign that B.O. may be trying to convert the United States into a “banana republic” – and one of the most deplorable and constitutionally questionable actions the B.O. administration has taken (thus far) – has been its manipulation of the bankruptcies of two American auto companies, Chrysler and General Motors, in effect nationalizing the companies.  The formation of the “new GM,” which critics are aptly calling “Government Motors,” is a textbook example of how the B.O. administration is indeed implementing a socialist agenda (under the most basic definition of socialism, as government ownership of the means of production).  Rather than allow the free market and the legal system (through the normal process of the bankruptcy court) handle the reorganization of the failing auto maker in the normal (and lawful) way, the B.O. administrations spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to take control of the company and force the outcome it wanted.  B.O., who received millions in campaign contributions from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, has forced a settlement that will give the UAW far more equity in the company then it comes out of bankruptcy than it was due compared to the secured debt holders (again thwarting bankruptcy law).  The result is that the vast majority of the company will be owned by the federal government and the UAW (with a similar result in the Chysler reorganization).  Despite his claim that he had no interest in running GM, B.O. called the mayor of Detroit the same day he announced the company’s nationalization to assure him that GM would be staying in its downtown headquarters; he previously had fired the old GM’s CEO, and he may have secretly ordered that whoever buys GM’s European auto maker Opel must agree not to export cars to the U.S.  As Hugh Hewitt notes in Townhall.com, “What had been a private company on the verge of bankruptcy is now a government actor competing against private sector companies and using the federal treasury as an enormous unfair advantage in the marketplace.  Even if the cost itself was not so staggering, the idea of the federal government declaring itself on the side of one of many competitors is as distasteful as it is unprecedented” (“Stopping Government Motors,” June 3).  Hewitt could have added that it’s also blatantly unconstitutional, as nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government the power to nationalize any private company – and such action is blatantly a denial of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fifth Amendment. 

Commentators have decried the unprecedented actions taken by the B.O. administration in taking over Chrysler and GM, calling upon Americans to oppose them.  Gary Jason, an instructor in business ethics, wrote an op-ed posted on the American Thinker website earlier this summer, “The Ethical Case for Boycotting Chrysler and GM” (June 10).  Jason shows how the Chrysler and GM schemes violate four major theories of business ethics.  First, from the rights perspective, it violates the secured creditors’ right to a just settlement and unjustly enriches the UAW – a result “drenched in irony,” Jason notes, because “the UAW was a major reason why the companies hit the wall, and now the UAW will be rewarded with major control and ownership.  It is as if a rape victim were forced to marry her rapist.”  Second, under the consistency perspective, B.O.’s deal has not only forced the bankruptcy court to put aside longstanding legal principles but also benefited his supporter and benefactor, the UAW.  Third, from the virtue perspective, such nationalization of a company “will corrupt unions and businesses alike, by leading them to negotiate obviously unsustainable contracts, safe in the knowledge that by paying off the pols the federal government will step in to save them from the consequences of their dishonesty.”  Finally, from the utilitarian perspective, given the way B.O. already has exercised control over them, “the companies will be run by politicians, who will make decisions for the benefit of political agendas rather than on sound business principles.  The result will be that the auto companies and the union will not make the deep changes required to make the companies profitable, so we can anticipate many more cash infusions” – as well as possibly an attempt similarly to nationalize (and to give the UAW equity ownership of) Ford, too. 

In protest against the B.O. administration’s strong-armed actions in taking over GM, many Americans have urged their fellow citizens to boycott GM.  There’s a “boycott GM” Facebook page, and at one of the “Boycott GM” websites, the administrator writes, “Make no mistake, this is the first step toward socializing industries across multiple sectors (health care, energy, transportation), which will ultimately give the federal government absolute control over the means of production. . . . One of the most effective ways we can demonstrate our unified  objection to Obama’s policies is through our checkbooks.  Accordingly, if you are planning on buying a new vehicle in the next two years, I urge you NOT to buy a GM (Government Motors) vehicle.”  And as Hugh Hewitt argues, in the op-ed cited above, “Every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise.  Every car or truck purchased from Government Motors is one not purchased from a private car company that competes fairly against all other car companies.” 

I confess a strong sentimental attachment to General Motors as well as a continued (indirect) financial interest in the company.  I was born in, and grew up in my parents’ home (property that I still own) near, Flint, Michigan – a city that was in effect the birthplace of General Motors (particularly its Buick division) and whose economic livelihood is still quite dependent on the company.  My father was a longtime salaried employee of General Motors; he owned only GM vehicles (usually either a Chevrolet or a Buick), and following his example, all the cars I’ve owned (so far) have been Buicks.  My parents owned General Motors stock, which I inherited and have continued to own, although I did follow the advice of my stockbroker – to some extent – a few years ago and sold all but a token number of shares.  And I’ve been following the financial difficulties of the company over the past several years, clipping and saving news articles in a “General Motors” file.  But my sentimental attachment was to the old GM, the real General Motors (the private company owned by its stockholders) – not to the new GM, which its critics have aptly renamed “Government Motors.”  And although it’s contrary to my financial interests (to the value of the property I own in Michigan), I must – in the greater interests of justice and integrity, for the preservation of American capitalism and the constitutional system of limited government – join in the call for boycotting the “new” GM.  I’ll continue to own and drive my Buick car (which I really like) for as long as that is practical, but my next vehicle will not be a product of Government Motors; it will be a product of one of GM’s competitors, perhaps Ford (the last remaining American private auto manufacturer) or a foreign company (one whose employees are not UAW members), and it will be a big, roomy “gas guzzler.”  And I urge all Americans who value justice and the integrity of American capitalism to join the boycott and NOT buy a GM (Government Motors) vehicle. 

 

 

n    “Green Bullshit” Update 

            There’s a growing consensus that what I’ve called “Green bullshit” – the radical environmentalists’ theory about man-made carbon dioxide endangering the Earth, whether it’s called “global warming” or “climate change” – is indeed bullshit.  A number of excellent books have been published in recent months that have shattered the myth, including Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007), Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr.’s Climate of Extremes (2009), Iaian Murray’s The Really Inconvenient Truths (2008), Roy Spencer’s Climate Confusion (2008), and Christopher Horner’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007) and Red Hot Lies 2008).  Another new book, which I recommended in my previous “Thoughts for the Summer” blog essay and which I also mention below, is Steve Milloy’s Green Hell (2009).  And, as I’ve also mentioned in my previous post, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s excellent site, Cooler Heads Digest, links to new material on the Internet that presents the truth about so-called “climate change” and other radical environmentalist myths. 

Among the encouraging signs that global warming “skeptics” are finally beginning to score some points in the public debate is the news, from USA Today’s “Science Fair” column, that a front line science publication, Nature Geoscience, has published a public debunking of climate models that posit human activity as the main cause of global warming.  As reported by Rick Moran in American Thinker on July 16, the significance of the article is that it shows “reducing [carbon] emissions won’t do a damn thing to reduce warming – which makes cap and trade obsolete.”  He adds, “Of course, that won’t stop Democrats from trying to pass it.  That’s because it has never been about saving the planet.  It’s always been about aggrandizing power into the hands of the government at the expense of the rest of us.”

  

 

n    “Cap-and-Tax,” Indeed 

Arguably the worst bill passed by either house of Congress in its 220-year history – at least until House Democrats push through their health-care nationalization bill this fall – was the massive pile of steaming shit passed by the House of Representatives on June 25.  Known as the Waxman-Markey bill (named after its two chief sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.) and  Edward Markey (D.-Mass.)), the bill is better known as the “cap-and-trade” legislation because it purports to implement the B.O. administration’s policy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions under a so-called “cap and trade” scheme.  Under the scheme, the government creates a commodity (carbon allowances) where none previously existed and then monopolizes that commodity, mandating its purchase (creating demand) and then limiting its supply (raising its price).  The federal government then regulates the new market and, over time, reduces the supply of allowances to reach artificial allowance caps.  In theory, the scheme aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030, and 83 percent by 2050.  But, as even radical environmentalist supporters of the “cap-and-trade” concept now concede, the Waxman-Markey bill will get nowhere near those goals.  That’s in part because a key part of the plan, mandating allowance purchases, was given up by Waxman-Markey, giving away 85 percent of them free – a massive windfall to agribusiness and other special interests that even B.O.’s budget director Peter Orszag has admitted to be “the largest corporate-welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.”  Indeed, one leftist policy group, the Breakthrough Insitute, has claimed that because of the bill’s offset provisions, by 2030 carbon dioxide emissions actually will increase by 9 percent (Justin Danhof, “Cap-and-trade legislation is spinning out of control,” Columbus Dispatch, August 12). 

Many of the original supporters are now joining critics in acknowledging that what the bill will really do is raise the price for generating electricity significantly, amounting to a “massive energy tax.”  The more Americans discover about Waxman-Markey, the more they dislike the bill.  The bill’s true high costs are detailed in a comprehensive article by Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson, entitled “A Garden of Piggish Delights,” listing 50 reasons why the legislation ought to be stopped (National Review.com, July 2).  In addition to all the special-interest “sops,” the article notes that the bill would further encourage use of ethanol and other bio-fuels (thereby raising the cost of food), provide an excuse for trade protectionism, and more fully entrench Davis-Bacon union-wage rules (making it not only harder for non-union firms to compete for projects receiving grants and financing under the bill but also ensuring that these “investments” pay out inflated union wages).  The “renewable electricity” standard the bill would create would require utilities to rely increasingly on expensive (and unreliable) sources of “alternate” energy like wind and solar (but not nuclear or “clean” coal, with are equally taboo with oil and natural gas, under the bill’s “green” mandates), and it would require companies to invest huge amounts of money into “carbon-capture” technologies – again, increased costs that would be passed on to customers’ bills.  In addition, the bill regulates “every light fixture under the sun” (“Actually, the sun might be the only light source that isn’t specifically regulated in this legislation,” the article notes), as well as all kinds of appliances – including clothes washers, dishwashers, and televisions – and require the EPA to establish environmental standards for residences, “which means a federally dictated one-size-fits-all policy for greening every home in America,” plus a “national energy efficiency building code” that will require 50 percent reductions in energy use in all buildings (commercial buildings as well as residences) by 2018, followed by 5 percent reductions in energy use every three years after that through 2030.  As other commentators have noted, ominously, this provision of the bill creates in effect a single national housing code for the United States – one that will add to the cost of every building. “Businesses and homeowners will pay twice – once to retrofit their roosts and again when the energy bill arrives.” 

I’ve summarized a few of only the first 25 “delights” listed in the article.  Other deplorable provisions include yet another handout to the auto industry (to help establish large-scale “vehicle electrification” programs), more handouts for “alternate” energy companies (like GE, owner of NBC and the biggest manufacturer of wind turbines), as well as grants to various left-wing constituencies, including billions in funding from the Department of Energy for “community development organizations” (like ACORN) to “improve energy efficiency.”   

A report by the CBO issued early in August reports that the bill would cost nearly $8 billion over the next decade, just to pay for the expanded federal bureaucracy it would mandate.  One can only hope that the supposedly less-hasty U.S. Senate will see this bill for the massive piece of crap that it is and allow it to get the death it so richly deserves.

  

 

n    Cap-and-Tr8tors 

The best political slang expression coined in the summer of 2009 was “Cap-and-Tr8tors,” the apt phrase used to describe the eight so-called Republican members of the House who voted for the cap-and-trade bill on June 25.   They are: Mary Bono Mack (CA), Mike Castle (DW), Mark Steven Kirk (IL), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), John McHugh (NY), Dave Reicheert (WA), and Chris Smith (NJ).   

If there’s any justice in the world – and if voters are as alert and outraged next year as they are this year – these eight RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) will be successfully challenged in the GOP primary elections by real Republicans who’ll win their seats in the 2010 elections.  (And the Democrat “cap and traitors” too – all those Democratic members of Congress from heartland states, particularly the so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats like Zack Space (Ohio), who sold their constituents down the river by supporting the bill, deserve a similar fate.)

  

 

n    TEA’d Off 

One encouraging sign that the American people still value their freedom, and are not yet ready to become totally dependent wards of the welfare state, is the so-called “Tea Party” movement.  Inspired by Revolutionary-era Americans’ protests against the British Parliament’s tax on tea – and also deriving their name from the acronym used by some organizers to describe themselves (Americans who are TEA – Taxed Enough Already) – the movement held several TEA parties across the USA on April 15, Tax Day.  Building on that success, still more TEA parties were held this summer, mostly on Independence Day.  (Here in Columbus, Ohio, a large crowd gathered at the Statehouse on August 1, to protest a proposed increase in the city income tax.  The featured speaker, Judge Andrew Napolitano, author and Fox News commentator, led the crowd in a “freedom” chant, noting “Remember, the government hates freedom.  It is an obstacle to what everyone there desires.”)  (For more coverage of various TEA party events this spring and summer – including photos from many of the events – scroll through Glenn Reynolds’ “Instapundit” blogsite.)   

The “silent majority” of Americans are silent no more; like Peter Finch’s character in the classic movie Network, they’re “mad as hell” and aren’t “gonna take it any more.”  What has really ticked them off is the loss of their freedom – not only their economic freedom but also (with regard to the various “townhall” meetings being held by members of Congress on the proposed “health-care reform” legislation), freedom to control their own health and lives.   As David Bernstein noted, posting to the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog on August 6, one of the best comments made at one of these so-called townhalls was to Congressman Steny Hoyer:  “Why are you guys trying to stuff a health care bill down our throats in three or four weeks when the President took six months to pick out a dog for his kids?”

  

 

n    Undemocratic Democrats 

Democrat politicians have been whining about the tough questions and protesters they’ve faced at their “townhall meetings” during Congress’ August recess.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrat Leader Steny Hoyer, in a USA Today op-ed, called opponents of the health-care nationalization scheme “un-American,” and the Democrats’ shills in the news media have been repeating Dem “talking points” about the supposed “misinformation” and “mayhem” generated by protesters at the townhalls.  Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid called the protesters “evil-mongers.” 

What upsets Congressional Democrats most is that, instead of silently listening to their propaganda efforts, constituents are daring to ask tough questions and, yes, speak out in opposition to them.   Longtime Detroit-area Rep. John Dingell, for example, a key player in the House health care plan, had said, “I am eager to talk about the bill with anyone who wants to discuss it,” but then he added that “doesn’t open the door” to constituents who “want to demagogue the discussion” (talk about the pot calling the kettle black!)  Dingell found himself shouted down and booed in one of his town halls, where police escorted out two men, including one who said he feared the Dems’ plan wouldn’t cover his son with cerebral palsy.  A constituent from Dearborn, who attended one of Dingell’s town halls, said Dingell and other Democrats are to blame for the backlash.  “The problem is they don’t listen, they lecture,” he said.  “Congressman Dingell told us what they were going to do with health care.  The attitude was pretty much that he knows what’s best, so sit down and shut up” (“Debate gets testy over proposed health care overhaul,” Detroit News, September 8). 

Especially disingenuous and hypocritical are the Democrats’ attempts to portray the opposition to their health-care plan as well-funded and organized by insurance companies and other special-interest groups – denying that they’re truly grass-roots protests, calling them instead “Astroturf” groups.  A look at any photo of any townhall meeting, or of protesters outside the meeting, will quickly reveal who the real “Astroturf” groups are:  the Democrats’ supporters (often consisting of ACORN activists or activists from SEIU or other labor unions) typically have professionally-lettered signs; the hand-painted signs are carried by their opponents and protesters, who are truly members of citizen grass-roots groups or individuals who are justifiably angry and concerned about their government’s efforts to grab more and more control over their lives.  In an important op-ed, Michelle Malkin wrote about “Who’s Funding the Obamacare campaign?” (RealClearPolitics, June 24).  As she notes, most of the funding in support of “Obamacare” comes from a left-wing coalition called Health Care for America Now (HCAN), headquartered at 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C. – “smack dab in the middle of Beltway lobby land” – which is richly funded by left-liberal philanthropist/activists like George Soros and Soros acolyte Gara LaMarche, Herb and Marion Sandler, and billionaire Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance.  HCAN has formed alliances with at least two other left-wing heavyweight organizations, the “corruption plagued” SEIU and “Obama’s old chums at fraud-riddled ACORN.”  (Consider, for example, one incident – well-publicized on Fox News but basically ignored by the “state-run” news media – involving a black conservative protester, Kenneth Gladley, who was beaten up by  SEIU thugs outside a town hall meeting in the St. Louis area.  His offense?  Handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.) 

It should not be surprising that Democrat politicians have such strong disregard for the views of the American people:  like their ideological ancestors in the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 20^th century, they’re basically elitists, as noted above.  As John Stossel succinctly puts it, in a column aptly titled “Arrogance,” “A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system” (Townhall.com, July 22).

  

 

n    “The Most Unkindest Cut of All” 

Given the propensity of so-called “progressives” to attempt to control every detail of Americans’ lives – as well as their desire for to impose one-size-fits-all national government mandates – it should come as no surprise that under the B.O. administration, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) is considering the promotion of “universal circumcision” for all baby boys born in the USA.  Supposedly aiming at reducing the spread of HIV, the virus believed to cause AIDs, the proposal comes after officials analyzed the results of studies showing that in African countries hard hit by HIV, men who were circumcised reduced their infection rate in half.  Never mind that HIV infection in Africa (where heterosexual transmission to men from infected female partners is a big problem) is entirely different from the pattern of infection in the USA, or that one of the most effective ways to protect against transmission of HIV – use of a condom – makes circumcision irrelevant.  To these “progressive” folks at the CDC or in the B.O. administration, a statistically irrelevant gain in “public health” is apparently more than sufficient rationale for imposing what critics say is “medically unnecessary” surgery (and which in fact is nothing but genital mutilation) on millions of American infant boys – and to deprive the boys’ parents of yet another aspect of their freedom of choice. 

So when is B.O. going to appoint his circumcision “czar”? 

 

 

n    Presti-digital-elation – Not! 

On  June 12 U.S. TV broadcast stations were forced by federal law to convert from analog to digital signals.  As I noted in my March 19 “Spring Briefs” and my May 25 “Thoughts for Summer 2009” entries (scroll down to “Presti-digital-delaytion” and “More Presti-digital-delaytion”), the Congressionally-mandated national switch represents in microcosm many of the failures of government paternalism, of the federal “Nanny State.”  It’s not just the principal folly – the erroneous belief that a free market in broadcasting would not better adapt to new technologies, and hence, the rationalization for government control over broadcasting through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – but also the various ways that Congress allegedly has “helped” American consumers weather the transition that it forced upon the market.  As with other government-mandated programs, the folly of this program again reinforced the truth of the saying that one of the most frightening phrases anyone can hear is, “We’re from the government – and we’re here to help you”!   

When the deadline for the switch passed in mid-June, TV viewers – who had been forced to buy digital converter boxes, the prices of which were inflated thanks to the government’s “free” $40 coupons, and then to scan and to re-scan for available local digital signals – found that, if they were lucky, they did indeed have improved video quality.  But if they weren’t lucky (as many Americans, especially viewers in rural areas, discovered), they also found that they could no longer receive the signals of some of their favorite local broadcast stations, because the reception window for digital signals is much narrower than it was for the older analog signals.  Eventually, as antenna technology improves, they may be able to receive those tricky digital signals – or, rather than waiting to buy those expensive new digital-reception antennas, they might spend more money buying a digital-ready TV or subscribing to cable or some other (expensive) alternative to over-the-air broadcast TV.   If the government had just let the market alone – if there were no FCC to regulate broadcasting (that is, if the federal government took seriously the limitations on its powers imposed by the Constitution, including the First Amendment, forbidding Congress from passing any law abridging freedom of speech), broadcast TV’s transition to superior digital technology would have happened – but only when consumer demand and improved technologies made the market ready for the change, not when some politicians arbitrarily decided to forcibly impose it.   

  

 

n    The Summer of Atlas Shrugged – Yes!

            The summer of 2009 indeed was, as I predicted in my May 25 “Thoughts for Summer,” the ideal time for millions of Americans to discover, or rediscover, the relevance of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s magnificent philosophical novel.  52 years after it was first published, Atlas is selling more copies now than ever, as the horrors of the part-capitalist, part-socialist “mixed economy” that Rand portrayed in her novel seem to be coming true.  Indeed, just as the heroes of the novel, led by John Galt, went on strike against the injustices of a moral and legal code that demanded their sacrifice, there is mounting evidence that more and more Americans today are “going Galt.” As described by Ed Hudgins, director of advocacy for the Atlas Society, the phenomenon means, among other things, that many Americans are: 

n      having righteous indignation at the injustice of a political system that bails out individuals and institutions for irresponsible behavior at the expense of those of us who are productive and responsible; 

n      asking, in the face of new taxes and government controls, “Why work at all?” and “For whom am I working?”; 

n      realizing that productive individuals are being punished, not for their vices, but for their virtues; 

n      recognizing that they have a moral right to their own life, the pursuit of their own happiness, and to the rewards they’ve earned with their productive work – and that the supposed “needs” of others do not give them a claim to one’s time, effort, and achievements; and, of course,  

n      shrugging off unearned guilt, refusing to support their own destroyers, and giving them what Rand called “the sanction of the victim.”

   

            In an interesting commentary piece posted on Bloomberg.com (“Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging with a Growing Load,” June 2), Amity Shlaes noted the correlation between the rising tax burden on upper-income Americans and the sales of Atlas Shrugged.  In 1986, a year when Atlas sold between 60,000 and 80,000 copies, the top 1 percent of earners paid 26 percent of total federal income tax revenues.  By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and Atlas sales were at 120,000.  By 2006 the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.  Last year, sales of Atlas Shrugged were about 200,000, higher than any year before that, including 1957, the year the book was first published.  And this year, with a president (and a Democrat-controlled Congress) threatening to further increase the tax burden on the most productive Americans, the book is selling at a faster rate than it did last year.  

            Two friends of mine this summer had the tremendous life-changing experience of reading the novel for the first time, and I used my conversations with them as an excuse (as if I needed one!) for rereading it again (something I like to do every other year or so).  Once again, I was impressed by Rand’s profound insights into not only the worlds of politics and economics but also into human nature, at both its best and its worst, as embodied respectively in the heroes and villains of the novel.  As my friend Justin remarked, it is truly a work of “profound genius.”

  

n    In Defense of Jefferson and Other Noteworthy Books 

            A new book published in June, In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal, by William G. Hyland, Jr. (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2009), helps set straight the historical record by shattering the myth that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of his slave Sally Hemings.  Hyland is a trial lawyer, a former prosecutor with more than 25 years of litigation experience; he brings his legal experience to bear upon the Jefferson-Hemings allegation, demonstrating that the evidence fails to establish the paternity thesis.  Hyland is especially critical of the flawed scholarship of Annette Gordon-Reed, the leading proponent of the paternity thesis, whose latest book, The Hemingses of Monticello, is wholly based on imaginative speculation; in other words, Gordon-Reed’s book is fiction masquerading as history.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Hyland gives due credit to the report of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings matter, which in 2001 concluded that the paternity thesis was without merit.  He cites and quotes from my own concurring report for the Scholars Commission, “The Thomas Jefferson – Sally Hemings Myth and the Politicization of American History” (April 9, 2001), including my own critique of Gordon-Reed. The Scholars Commission report finally will be published this fall, in the book edited by the Commission’s chairman, Robert F. Turner, The Jefferson - Hemings Controversy (Durham. N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming in November 2009.)) 

            Another important book published this year, and among my recommended reading for this summer, is Steven Milloy’s Green Hell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2009).  As I wrote in my “Thoughts for the Summer” entry, the subtitle of the book describes its thesis:  “How Environmentalist Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”  Milloy’s book is a comprehensive takedown of the entire radical environmental movement, the movement “to make America “Green,” which he reveals to be an authoritarian crusade aiming to dictate the very parameters of our daily lives – where we can live, what transportation we can use, what we can eat, how we heat and power our homes, and even how many children we can have.  As the Senate this fall considers following the House in passing some version of an abominable “energy” bill based on the faulty “global warming” or “climate change” premise, Milloy’s book gives Americans the intellectual ammunition they’ll need to help convince their senators that such legislation would only further ruin the U.S. economy.  

            Radio talk show host Glenn Beck (who now calls himself a “libertarian”) authored the surprise hit of the summer, his book Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government (New York: Mutual Radio Arts/Threshold Editions, 2009).  Beck alerts Americans to the true size of our federal government’s debt, which includes nearly $100 trillion dollars in unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare obligations alone – a “$100 trillion bipartisan betrayal” of future generations of Americans.  He expresses justifiable outrage at the way politicians from both major parties have made the financial crisis even worse by spending trillions of more dollars in borrowed funds.  And he traces the historical origins of the modern welfare state to its ideological roots in the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 20^th century.  Notwithstanding the frightening message Beck’s book delivers, the fact that his book took the No. 1 spot on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list on June 25 and has remained a best-seller throughout the summer is an encouraging sign that the American people are waking up from the apathy to which a century of “welfare state” policies had reduced them.  Like the book that inspired it, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) – the text of which is reprinted at the back of the book – Glenn Beck’s Common Sense just may help ignite a revolution.  (By the way, Glenn Beck’s TV show on Fox News (weekdays at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time) is superb – one of the best news shows on TV, especially for coverage of the abuses of power by the B.O. administration.) 

Finally, I’d like to note some of the fictional books that I read this summer, for my pleasure reading:  several of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels and short stories (true classics in the modern mystery genre), as well as Charlene Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels (tales of vampires and other supernatural creatures interacting with humans in north Louisiana, a series of books that are more entertaining – and certainly far more humorous – than True Blood, the HBO series they inspired).  I also read two especially noteworthy new books from my favorite genre of pleasure reading, historical mystery novels:  Lindsey Davis’s Alexandria and Ruth Downie’s Persona Non Grata.  Alexandria is Davis’s latest Marcus Didius Falco novel, in which her protagonist (an “informer” in ancient Rome during the time of the emperor Vespasian) travels to Alexandria, Egypt with his family on a vacation and finds himself embroiled in a mysterious murder that takes place at the famous Library.  Persona Non Grata, Downie’s latest “Medicus” novel, takes its protagonist, Gaius Petreius Ruso (a medical doctor stationed with the Roman army in Britain at the time of the emperor Hadrian), out of Britain and back to his troubled family in southern Gaul, where as paterfamilias he tries both to save the family estate from bankruptcy and to save himself from a murder charge, when the agent of one of his family’s biggest creditors is found dead – poisoned – in his own home.  (For more on these and other novels that I recommend, see my newly-revised “Guide to Historical Mysteries.”)

  

n    Breaking News

            Michael Jackson is still dead.

   

n    Adios 

It may be hard to believe this from the media coverage, but other celebrities died this summer besides the so-called “King of Pop.” (I’ve always regarded Vernor’s ginger ale to be the true king of pop.)   Other celebrities who completed their lives in the summer of 2009 included, in the world of entertainment, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Karl Malden, and John Hughes; in the worlds of economics and free-market public policy, Rose Friedman; in the world of news reporting, Walter Cronkite and Robert Novak; and in the world of politics, Ted Kennedy.  

Ed McMahon was perhaps the best-known “sidekick” on television, superbly functioning as second banana to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show for 30 years, from the time Carson became host in 1962 until Carson’s retirement in 1992.  Ed’s trademark opener for each show – “And now h-e-e-e-e-e-ere’s Johnny!” – is among the most famous phrases in TV history.  Farrah Fawcett will be remembered as one of the original Charlie’s Angels and for her famous pin-up poster, an iconic image of the 1970s; but perhaps her best role was in real life – as she courageously battled cancer during her final years, with her long-time love, Ryan O’Neal, by her side.  Actor Karl Malden also will be remembered for his role in a 1970s TV series, The Streets of San Francisco, but it’s his movie roles that are truly memorable.  My favorite is Dead Ringer, the 1964 mystery thriller where Malden played the policeman/boyfriend of Bette Davis, who played identical twin sisters (one of whom murdered the other).  Writer/director John Hughes created some of the most memorable movies of the 1980s:  among them, the “Brat Pack” teen angst films Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink; the original National Lampoon’s Vacation film and the hilarious John Candy comedies Uncle Buck and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; the original Home Alone film; and my favorite John Hughes movie, 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (the movie that made truancy cool and Matthew Broderick a star).  

Although her Nobel Laureate husband, the late Milton Friedman, received widespread public acclaim, Rose Friedman was in her own right and accomplished economist, author, and champion of liberty.  At her initiative, the couple created the Rose and Milton Friedman Foundation for school vouchers; and with Milton Friedman, she co-authored three major books that explained free markets in laymen’s terms:  Free to Choose (1980), Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984), and Two Lucky People (1999).  The last book, the memoir written when the Friedmans were in their 80s, “is a wonderful book that owes more to Rose than to Milton,” writes Guy Sorman in his Forbes.com commentary, “Remembering Rose Friedman” (Aug. 19).  For the Friedmans, “economics was not a `dismal science’ at all; its purpose was to make people happy.”  And thanks to the splendid work of both Milton and Rose Friedman, more and more people today realize that freedom fosters more happiness, because of the wider array of choices that free markets provide. 

Walter Cronkite, the longtime anchor of the CBS Evening News, was the last from the “golden era” of great network news anchors, which included his rivals on NBC, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.  Cronkite reported on historic events from the early 1960s until his retirement in the early 1980s; and, ironically, he died just two days shy of the 40^th anniversary of one of his most memorable broadcasts, the Apollo 11 moon landing.  (Among those of us old enough to remember watching this extraordinary event live on television, when after the “Eagle” had successfully landed and Neil Armstrong made his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” who could forget Cronkite’s reaction, when he lifted up his eyeglasses, wiped his brow, and said, “whew!”)  Robert Novak, a political columnist and conservative commentator for nearly four decades (spanning presidencies from J.F.K. to B.O.), was a Washington insider nevertheless known for his political independence.  Dubbed “the prince of darkness” by one journalist, Novak relished the moniker, using the phrase as the title of his 2007 memoir.  But the real “princes of darkness” were the politicians whom Novak regularly skewered in his columns and in his commentary on such shows as CNN’s Crossfire or PBS’s The McLaughlin Group (where Novak frequently was the only panelist who made sense).  “I find that politicians as a class are up to no good,” Novak once said.  His blunt honesty will be sorely missed. 

Finally, U.S. Senator Edward M. (Teddy) Kennedy (D.-Mass.) surely was one of those politicians so aptly described by Novak.  Called by some “the Lion of the Senate,” he might be more honestly dubbed “the Liar of the Senate,” except that would be insufficiently specific.  Kennedy’s infamous speech in opposition to Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 – describing in vitriolic, hyperbolic terms “Robert Bork’s America” as every left-liberal’s nightmare – helped usher in the bitter partisanship that has so characterized political debate in Washington, D.C. for the past two decades.  Carried on the political coattails of his popular older brothers Jack and Bobby, Teddy Kennedy was a “blue-blood” member of that class that Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged astutely characterized as “the aristocracy of pull.”  Although he killed Mary Jo Kopechne in a July 1969 auto accident, when after attending a party on Chappaquiddick Island, he recklessly drove his car off a bridge and into the water (he escaped but his passenger, Ms. Kopechne, drowned), Kennedy was charged only with leaving the scene of the accident, to which he plead guilty, thereby evading legal responsibility for her death.  (See Robert P. George and Dermot Quinn, “Chappaquiddick Revisited,” National Review Online, July 31.)  But Kennedy was guilty of far greater crimes, against the American people:  as a leading architect of the modern expansion of the regulatory/”welfare” state, he sponsored numerous pieces of legislation that unconstitutionally enlarged federal government powers and violated the rights of all Americans.  Now left-liberal fascists will try to exploit Kennedy’s “legacy” by using his name to push yet another piece of unconstitutional, liberty-destroying legislation, their scheme for the nationalization of health care in the United States.  Passage of the Democrats’ health-care bill would be an ironic legacy for Teddy Kennedy because, under the system of government rationing of care that will be the inevitable consequence of the law, a 77-year-old with brain cancer like Kennedy would not be given the medical care that allowed him to live as long as he did.  Thus, at its end, his life epitomized the hypocrisy of the political left.

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  September 2, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Thoughts for Summer 2009

 

 

It’s time for another annual tradition:  once again, MayerBlog will be on a summer hiatus, for the next three and a half months (until Labor Day), while I continue writing the manuscript of my book on the U.S. Constitution and other summer writing projects. 

Before going on hiatus, however, I could not resist the temptation to comment on a number of important issues in public policy and popular culture – issues that are in the news today and are likely to remain in the news throughout the summer.  (Also included is my annual preview of summer movies.)

 

  

n    Gas-Price Hysteria, Yet Again? 

As summer begins, it’s time again for what, unfortunately, has become another annual summer tradition – the hysteria over high gasoline prices.  Usually, the annual angst is the natural result of the economic law of supply and demand:  with the supply of oil and refined petroleum products (including gasoline) holding steady at best, while worldwide demand for oil and petroleum products peaking during the summer travel months, it’s only natural that gasoline prices in the U.S.A. tend to skyrocket during the summer.  As I noted in last year’s comments on gas price hysteria, despite politicians’ attempts to scapegoat the oil industry (“Big Oil” and its allegedly “excessive profits”), the blame really falls on the politicians themselves – and especially on members of Congress, for the misguided federal energy policies they have enacted into law.   

With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the White House, we can expect those misguided policies to continue and even to get worse, as Democrats enact the radical environmentalists’ agenda, which is hostile to carbon-based energy such as oil.  With no additional drilling for oil in the United States’ plentiful reserves in Alaska and off the nation’s coasts – in other words, with no further development of U.S. natural resources – Americans will continue to depend on imported oil for their gasoline.  And with no new refining facilities being built in the country, supplies of gasoline and other refined petroleum products will continue to fluctuate, depending on a variety of factors, including the impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters.  Thus, supply will hold steady, at best, while demand grows – resulting inevitably in higher gasoline prices.  Gas may not soar above $4 a gallon as it did last summer, principally because the economic decline has reduced demand below its summer norms, but no one should be surprised if gasoline prices average closer to $3 a gallon instead of $2 for most of the summer.  Nor should we be surprised if politicians again try to evade their well-deserved blame for the problem and again try to demonize businessmen for simply trying to earn profits.

  

 

n    B.O.:  The Continually Rising Stench

                 Readers of this blog realize that since the November 2008 elections, I have referred to the man who is now President of the United States – the current occupant of the White House – by his initials, “B.O.”  Other modern presidents have been known by their initials – TR, FDR, JFK, LBJ – and using this president’s initials in lieu of his name seems appropriate, as I have argued.  It’s because B.O. as president, in a word, stinks.  He is the most unfit man ever to be president:  his limited executive experience – confined to his activities as a political activist on the local level, a so-called “community organizer” in the corrupt world of Chicago politics – plus his limited experience as a U.S. Senator (confined mostly to his campaigning, first for that job and then for the presidency) make him among the least qualified men in U.S. history to serve as chief executive of the government of the United States.  Moreover, his policies are, for the reasons mentioned in the next paragraph, truly bad for America. 

Not all forms of b.o. have an unpleasant smell, even in the summertime.  For example, the healthy smell of manly sweat after mowing the lawn, or making love on a sultry summer night, might be considered downright pleasant (at least to some people, in a raunchy sort of way).  But this particular B.O. has a decidedly unpleasant smell – a truly offensive stench, a noxious stink – that emanates from the current president’s policies.  His policies are undermining all that is great (and good) about America:  the constitutional system of limited, republican government that America’s Founders created, a system that gives more legal protection to individual freedom, in all its aspects (including economic freedom), than any other country’s on earth.  It is this system that has made free-market capitalism thrive, bringing prosperity not only to Americans but to the entire world.   Unfortunately, this limited-government, individualist, capitalist system is what B.O.’s policies seek to undermine, if not destroy:  If B.O. and his power-hungry cronies have their way, the United States will become more of a socialist nation, with the federal government controlling major segments of the nation’s economy – making the U.S., which was once the world’s “last, best hope” for freedom, more like the nations of Europe, ironically, just as Europe is finally moving away from its disastrous 20^th-century experiment with socialism and discovering the virtues of the American free-enterprise, capitalist system.    

Two things, fortunately, stand in the way of America’s fatal decline down the road to serfdom: first, our legal/constitutional system and the protections it provides (albeit incompletely and often inconsistently) for individual rights; and second, B.O.’s own shortcomings and limitations.  As I’ve also noted in my previous blog entries, B.O. is basing his presidential administration on the same strategy that worked so well for him in the 2008 presidential election:  in a word, on bullshit.  So far, B.O.’s bullshit has helped him pull the wool over the eyes of gullible Americans who are fooled by his personal charm or who are afraid to speak out in opposition to him or his policies for fear of being labeled “racist” or some other derogatory term (such as “mean-spirited,” “selfish,” or even “individualist,” which B.O. and his collectivist comrades are trying to turn into a negative).  But I remain optimistic enough to believe that, eventually, enough Americans are sufficiently rational and honest to realize that “the emperor” truly has “no clothes” – the naked truth, so to speak, about B.O.

  

 

n    Testing B.O.: When Will the News Media Notice the Stench? 

Vice President Joe Biden is an idiot, but there’s one thing he’s probably correct about:  foreign enemies of the United States – militant Islamic terrorists, or the rogue regimes that control Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela – will try to “test” the current president of the United States, B.O.  They’re already begun doing so, with the leaders of Iran and North Korea – “Ah’m in a Jihad” and “Kim Jong (Mentally) Ill” – openly announcing their plans to continue developing nuclear weapons and the missile capability to launch them against their enemies (Israel, in the case of Iran, and the Pacific coast of the U.S., in the case of North Korea).  B.O. already has signaled the weakness of his administration’s foreign policy with regard to Russia (offering to unilaterally back off plans to install a missile-defense system in eastern Europe, which would have helped contain Russian expansionism under Vlad Putin’s dictatorship).  B.O.’s attempts to appease thugs all over the world – bowing to the Saudi king, shaking hands and smiling with Hugo Chavez, etc. – will only encourage them to be more aggressive in their anti-Americanism. 

Meanwhile, the left-liberal news media continues its naïve love-fest with B.O., acting more like propaganda arms of the White House or the DNC than like the independent, objective and indeed critical observers of power-wielders that the media ought to be.  When the media’s “slobbering” love affair (to borrow the apt term used by Bernie Goldberg in his latest book) will end is anyone’s guess, but my theory is that even B.O.’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the media will finally begin to realize “the emperor has no clothes” when his shortcomings in foreign policy and defense leadership finally are starkly revealed.  Sadly, that will happen when al-Qaeda or some other militant Islamic group (or one of the anti-American regimes noted above) commits another act of atrocity against America:  another 9-11, or somewhat less ominously, another event like the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.  It took the latter event finally to make most Americans realize how unfit Jimmy Carter was to be president; and, unfortunately, it seems it will take a comparable crisis for most Americans to realize the truth about B.O. and to make him, like Carter, a one-term president.

  

 

n    A Presidency Based on Bullshit 

As I noted in this year’s “Prospects for Liberty” essay, the biggest pile of bullshit being peddled by B.O. is the conceit that his administration is bringing “change” to America, when in fact it’s doing nothing other than continuing – albeit on a radically expanded scale – the failed policies of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.  As I noted there, the snake-oil that B.O.’s trying to sell is the “same old, tired semi-socialist, paternalist policies that the federal government has been tinkering with, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, for the past century or so, since the beginning of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.  All B.O. really promises to do is to expand the welfare state – to increase government and its controls over Americans’ lives, making the U.S. even more of a socialist country – and that’s not any kind of real `change’ in public policy, at all.” 

B.O.’s record as president thus far – his first 100+ days, much touted in the left-wing news media – merely confirms my prediction.  Virtually every day of his presidency, he’s announced some new policy initiative – a policy “change” that’s really nothing new but just an expansion of government regulatory authority over more and more aspects of Americans’ lives, another grab for power by the federal government, typically rationalized by citing the nation’s economic downturn.  (The recession is typically described by B.O. administration officials and their allies in the news media as “the worst since the Great Depression,” but in fact it’s no worse – and by many important measures, actually no where near as bad – as the recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the economic mess caused largely by bad federal policies during the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter years.  That, by the way, was the mess that President Ronald Reagan referred to in his famous First Inaugural statement, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem” – a statement no less relevant today than when he made it over 28 years ago.) 

B.O.’s policies aren’t mere bullshit, however; they’re dangerous bullshit because, by perpetuating and even expanding the same old failed paternalistic policies of the past, they’re making the nation’s problems even worse.  Whatever signs of economic recovery that economists might see today are not the result of any of B.O.’s policies but rather result from the natural working-out of the market system, as the economy moves out of its recessionary phase and back into a growth phase, following the normal business cycle.  No doubt (being the master purveyor of bullshit that he is), B.O. will try to claim credit for the recovery – attributing it to the so-called “stimulus” legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress earlier this year – but the economic effects of that massive increase in federal government spending have yet to be felt in the nation’s economy.  Whatever recovery is occurring, is doing so in spite of, rather than because of, the administration’s policies.  And when the effects of the massive increase in federal spending and the size of the national debt do finally play out, they will be disastrous – bringing back the problems of inflation and high interest rates, coupled with continuing sluggish economic growth and high unemployment; to put it simply, the infamous “stagflation” of the 1970s will return.  And that’s the best case scenario of what will result from the Democrats’ failed economic policies. 

Perhaps nothing better epitomizes B.O.’s “tyranny of bullshit,” as I call it, than his attempted sleight-of-hand with the federal budget.  After unveiling an unprecedented-high $3.6 trillion budget in early May, B.O. then announced – with much media-covered hoopla – that he was proposing $17 billion in cuts.  The 121 programs B.O. wants to kill or shrink account for less than one-half of 1 per cent of the budget (and less than 10% of the interest due next year on the $11.2 trillion federal debt).   Significantly, 56% of the proposed cuts are in military spending (one of the few legitimate concerns of the federal government), including major cuts in weapons systems and other Pentagon programs.  Meanwhile, the administration wants to increase spending on veterans’ medical care, environmental protection, low-income housing, early-childhood education, and global health initiatives (doubling U.S. spending on foreign aid by 2015).  Emphasizing how truly miniscule B.O.’s proposed spending cuts are, compared to these increases and the overall size of his proposed budget, Senator Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.), the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, likened it to “taking a teaspoon of water out of a bathtub while you keep the spigot on at full speed.”

 

  

n    Putting the “Bully” into the “Bully Pulpit” 

Another aspect of B.O.’s bullshit-based presidency that’s been noteworthy has been its hypocritical efforts to distinguish itself from the previous Bush administration, typically by focusing media attention on superficial policy differences while obscuring the ways in which B.O.’s presidency actually merely continues many Bush policies, usually the worst Bush policies (those that Democrats liked).  Consider, for example, B.O.’s announced intention of not only continuing but even expanding Bush’s infamous “faith-based initiative,” tying the federal welfare state to churches; or the previously-mentioned proposal to further expand U.S. spending on global heath programs (building on the Bush administration’s record-high U.S. spending in Africa to combat AIDS); or the B.O. administration’s plans to expand the war in Afghanistan.  One other way in which B.O.’s presidency thus far seems to offer more continuity than “change,” compared with his predecessors, is in the way it threatens not only limited, constitutional government but more generally the rule of law.  Clinton’s presidency greatly undermined the rule of law in America (see the excellent collection of essays, The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, edited by Roger Pilon and published by Cato Institute in 2000) – a horrid legacy that, in the eyes of many libertarian critics, was matched and even exceeded in many respects by George W. Bush’s presidency.  B.O., though, may set new lows in the undermining of the rule of law. 

Instead of following the law (what he took an oath – albeit a flubbed oath – at his Inaugural to do), B.O. has not hesitated to use the coercive power of government, or threats of coercion, to force businesses to follow his dictates.  That dangerous pattern of intimidation has been evident not only in the administration’s partial nationalization, or “bailout,” of banks and other major financial institutions but also in its efforts to nationalize the automobile companies, Chrysler and GM.  As public-policy researcher John Lott notes in a recent op-ed, “Thugs in the White House” (May 8), the standard m.o. used by the administration to force its control over financial institutions that have accepted government bailouts has been to threaten to impose unnecessarily costly public audits and to replace disobedient CEOs with political cronies willing to do B.O.’s bidding.  Even those institutions that the government has failed to take over through bailouts have been threatened by the power-grabbing B.O. administration, which has not hesitated to use the White House press corps to destroy the reputations of opponents.   

Consider, for example, the way the administration brokered the Chrysler bankruptcy, a deal made possible by bullying tactics that used the power of government coercion as the ultimate threat to bring the owners of Chrysler’s debt to the table.  Clifford Asness, co-founder of the $20 billion hedge fund AQR Capital Management, posted an open letter detailing the dirty politics being employed by B.O., shortly after the president publicly scolded Chrysler bond-holders for not making enough “sacrifices”:  “The President is screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large.  Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out.  Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one.  In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying.”  As law professor Todd Zywicki observed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (“Chrysler and the Rule of Law,” May 13), the B.O. administration’s behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy “is a profound challenge to the rule of law.  Secured creditors – entitled to first priority payment under the `absolute priority rule’ – have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims.  Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.”  As Cliff Asness suggests, the administration brokered the company’s bankruptcy so that a favorite Democratic donor group, the UAW, can seize control of it.  Todd Zywicki notes that B.O. “may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election.  But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?”

  

 

n    “A Time for Choosing” 

On May 7, I participated in a panel discussion sponsored by the Columbus Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, on the topic “The Future of the Conservative Movement.”  Although I’m not a conservative – rather, I describe myself as economist Walter E. Williams describes himself, as a “radical for liberty,” a “liberal” in the true, classical sense of the word, a radical individualist and advocate for limited government and free-market capitalism – nevertheless, for several years now I’ve been urging my fellow libertarians to ally themselves with limited-government conservatives in order to promote their shared principles.  Noting how the Bush presidency nearly destroyed both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with a president who compromised far too much with leftist Democrats (and who pursued the “big government” policies urged by his “neoconservative” and “compassionate conservative” advisors), I suggested that the proverbial “silver lining” in the current dark political cloud over Washington, D.C. (with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress and with B.O. in the White House) is that, in their opposition to B.O.’s policies, Republican politicians and conservative political activists might again return to those limited-government principles on which they may find common ground with libertarians and political independents who value individual freedom.  To do so, however, Republicans and conservatives must disregard the advice they’re getting from RINOs (those “moderate” Republicans and certain types of “big government” conservatives who’d like to turn the GOP into a pale imitation of the Democrats, kind of “socialists light”).  As I said in my talk, “the antidote for the poison being spewed by the collectivists of the left isn’t a collectivism of the right” – rather, it’s a principled defense of individualism. 

There is indeed a battle now raging, within both the GOP and the conservative movement, for the “soul” of both the Party and the movement.   In my May 7 talk, I suggested that the political situation today is rather similar to the situation 44 years ago, in the months following Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in the 1964 presidential election, when Goldwater’s limited-government conservative principles seemed dead, politically.  Yet in a mere 16 years, in the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan won, by leading a coalition of limited-government conservatives, libertarians, and independents.  And in 1980 Reagan’s successful campaign used rhetoric astonishingly similar to that used by Goldwater, whom Reagan supported in 1964 in his famous speech, “A Time for Choosing.”  Among other things, Reagan observed: 

"It‘s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers.  James Madison said, ‘We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government‘  This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man‘s relation to man.  This is the issue of this election:  Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves."

 

Those words are just as relevant today as they were 45 years ago.  Today we – not just conservatives and the GOP, but all Americans – are again at a crossroads, at a “time for choosing.”  One road, the one advocated by Democrats and “moderate” Republicans, leads to total government takeover of the American economy and, with it, the end of “the American dream”; the other road, the one that Republicans and conservatives need to rediscover, leads us forward along the journey envisioned by America’s Founders, who dared to imagine a free society in which individuals governed themselves and order came not from the coercive power of government but from the free operations of the marketplace. 

The famous saying is true:  Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.  By the same token, however, those who remember the past – those who know history – are not likely to be surprised by anything, especially in the world of politics.

 

  

n    The Pernicious Babbling Brooks 

One of those RINOS whose advice ought to be ignored by Republican Party strategists is David Brooks, the New York Times’ favorite “conservative” columnist (which is to say he’s not really a conservative at all).  In a recent column, Brooks urged that the GOP should cease being “the party of individualism and freedom” and should become instead “the party of civil order.”  What exactly does he mean by civic order?  Apparently he means using the coercive power of government to deny individuals the freedom to choose how to live their own lives – in other words, the paternalistic regulatory/welfare state.  Brooks’ complaint is that Republicans are too different from the Democrats, the party of the welfare state:  he argues that Republicans need to be more “community-oriented” to get in touch with “the young,” to be less devoted to capitalism in order to have something to say to “the lower middle class,” and to be more devoted to radical environmentalism in order to have something to say to “the upper middle class.”  So, according to Brooks, young people aren’t interested in individual freedom, the “lower middle class” isn’t interested in bettering themselves through free-market capitalism but just want more government handouts, and the “upper middle class” would willingly forego their SUVs in order to save the world from “global warming.”  That sounds more like a Democrat political strategist’s view of the world than that of a so-called “conservative.”  If the GOP wants a political comeback, it needs to do precisely the opposite of what Mr. Brooks recommends:  it needs to become truly the party of individualism and freedom and leave paternalism to the Democrats.

   

 

n    A “Renaissance of the Free-Market Movement”? 

David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, offers some words of optimism in the May 2009 issue of Liberty magazine.  First, he describes the sad state of political affairs prior to the 2008 elections: 

            “Back in September and October, I think that libertarians, conservatives, and even Republican politicians were shell-shocked by one blow to free-market capitalism after another: the federal `takeover’ of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, the all-power-to-Paulson plan, the collapse of Washington Mutual, congressional passage of the power-to-Paulson-plus-pork plan, the 22% drop in the Dow Jones average in one week, the Federal Reserve Board’s unprecedented decision to lend directly to nonfinancial companies, the government’s partial nationalization of major banks, Paulson’s announcement that he would use his bailout money for something other than what he asked Congress to authorize, the auto bailout in direct defiance of a congressional vote, and so on and so on.

 

            “There was no time to fight these measures.  Most of them were announced as done deals, others as measures to be taken by the Treasury or the Fed without any request for Congressional authorization.  With the incumbent president in charge, both [major-party] presidential candidates going along, and most of Congress afraid to challenge the dire warnings of catastrophe, it was impossible to create any real political debate.  Defenders of capitalism were reeling.”

 

But now, with B.O. in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, things are quite different, Boaz notes.  “Smaller-government folks feel no compunction about vigorously taking on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid government,” especially when all it has to offer is “an old-fashioned, Keynesian, throw-money-at-the-problem spending bill described as `economic stimulus.’  Most free-market economists felt no ambivalence about opposing that bill.  Robert Barro of Harvard called it `probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.’” 

Boaz sees in the reaction against against the so-called stimulus bill what he describes, hopefully, as “the beginning of the renaissance of the free-market movement”:   

“Freed from the burden of feeling some connection to a big-government Republican president, Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the bill in both houses of Congress.  Libertarians played leading roles in galvanizing the opposition.  The Cato Institute ran full-page ads in almost every major newspaper in the country, with the names of more than 200 economists who `do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.’  The ad was talked about on television, was waved by Republican senators at a press conference, and seemed to energize free-marketers who felt their voice hadn’t been heard in national debates over the past few months.”

 

“So,” he concludes, “the bad news is that the federal government has now committed at least $7.8 trillion in loans, investments, and guarantees since the beginning of last year.  But the good news is that the free-market movement is back in gear,” and in fact “in much better shape than it was in the FDR era.”

 

  

n    Real Progress 

There are at least two other fronts on which free-market, or libertarian, political activists may have room for optimism:  medical marijuana and same-sex marriage.   Both are examples of a trend toward real progress – not that kind advocated by today’s so-called “progressives,” who like their predecessors in the early 20^th-century Progressive movement are advocates for greater governmental control, or paternalism.  Rather, it’s the kind of real progress championed by true “liberals,” in the classic sense of the term: advocates of maximizing individual freedom and limiting governmental control over people’s lives, whether it’s their choice of a marriage partner or their choice of a substance to ingest into their bodies. 

There is a definite trend to liberalize laws criminalizing the possession and use of marijuana, particularly to allow for its medicinal use.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that California policymakers begin debating whether to legalize marijuana, while over a dozen states (including California) already permit medical use of marijuana under state law.  (While the Bush administration insisted that the federal “war on drugs” trumped such liberal state laws – resulting in the unfortunate Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Raich (2005) – B.O.’s attorney general Eric Holder announced in mid-March that federal agents now will seek criminal charges only when both state and federal laws are violated, a rare instance of meaningful, pro-liberty “change” in policy by the B.O. administration.)  While neither Democrat nor Republican politicians seem willing to reconsider drug criminalization as a general policy (Gil Kerlikowske, B.O.’s “drug czar” recently stated that “legalization isn’t in the president’s vocabulary, and it certainly isn’t in mine”), a more lenient policy toward marijuana (or at least its medical use) finally might prompt policymakers to realize the failure of prohibition.  In November voters in both Massachusetts and Michigan adopted liberalized marijuana laws, and medical marijuana bills have been introduced in the legislatures of several states, including New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota. 

Meanwhile, in recent months, four states have joined Massachusetts in giving legal recognition to same-sex marriage.  In Connecticut, Vermont, and Iowa decisions by the state supreme courts changed the law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples; in Maine, legislation allowing same-sex marriage was passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.  Similar legislation has been passed by the New Hampshire legislature and is being considered by legislatures in New York and New Jersey.  Outside of New England (where, as USA Today suggested in a March 26 article, religious opposition to same-sex marriage is the weakest), prospects for expanding the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples may be bleak, at least for the near future:  in California, for example, the state supreme court is likely to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.  But the momentum is starting to build in favor of same-sex marriage, as American popular culture seems to be shifting from homophobia (outright fear or hatred of homosexuality) to mere heterocentrism (bias in favor of heterosexuality).  As I noted in my May 2004 blog essay on “Marriage, American Style,” I’d like to think that legal recognition of same-sex marriage ultimately will be seen by most Americans as in keeping with our “traditional” values of individualism and equal treatment under law.

 

  

n    A Fucked-Up Decision and More Supreme Folly 

Near the end of April a divided Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on the one-time use of expletives, in a case arising from Cher’s outburst at an awards show televised in 2002.  (As she waved her lifetime achievement trophy, Cher said, “People have been telling me on the way out every year, right?  So, fuck `em.”)  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), applying a new policy banning even “fleeting expletives” (brief use of vulgarities association with sexual or excretory functions), had fined Fox Television Stations, which had broadcast the 2002 Billboard Awards ceremony featuring Cher.  A federal appeals court had agreed with Fox that the FCC policy was arbitrary, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, overturned the lower court’s decision.  Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the five-justice majority (comprised of the Court’s four conservatives, joined by moderately conservative Justice Kennedy), maintaining that “[e]ven isolated utterances can be . . . vulgar and shocking” and harm children, the FCC’s supposed rationale for the ban.  As he read the majority opinion on April 28, Justice Scalia referred to the forbidden utterances as the “f-word” (i.e., fuck) and the “s-word” (i.e., shit). 

Justice Clarence Thomas (the best of the Supreme Court’s nine justices) concurred with the majority but wrote a separate opinion criticizing the Court’s rationale for more FCC regulation of broadcast TV than cable because of the assumed scarcity of airwaves, an assumption that has been proved false by the development of new communications technologies.  Commentators speculate that if another case involving FCC regulation of broadcasts should come before the Court, Thomas might – as he has done in the past – join with the Court’s four “liberal” justices (who in this case dissented, maintaining that the FCC policy was not sufficiently justified and may violate First Amendment free-speech rights), in creating a majority to void the expletives ban under the First Amendment. 

As I’ve argued previously on MayerBlog (see my essay “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!,” Feb. 8, 2006), FCC regulation of speech is not only silly – words like fuck and shit are fine Anglo-Saxon words that ought to be freely expressed, along with all the other so-called “Dirty Words” that the late comedian George Carlin mentioned in his classic monologue from the late 1970s – but, more importantly, FCC regulation of broadcast content is blatantly unconstitutional, for it cannot be squared with the explicit language of the First Amendment, which provides that Congress shall pass “no law abridging freedom of speech.”  As I argued in my previous blog, the mere existence of the FCC is inconsistent with the absolute language of the First Amendment. 

Meanwhile, as the Supreme Court’s 2008 term draws to a close, news about other major Court decisions this year has been overshadowed in the media by speculation over whom B.O. will nominate as a new justice, to succeed Justice David Souter, who has announced his retirement at the end of the current term.   The president has said he wants to appoint someone who will have “empathy” for the problem of common people – which sounds like a qualification more appropriate for a social worker than for a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose chief responsibility is to apply the law impartially, and to uphold the limits the Constitution imposes on governmental power.  B.O. is also under political pressure from left-wing activist groups and others to appoint another woman to the Court; even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court’s lone female member (since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement), has joined the chorus calling for a selection based primarily on sex.   Don’t be surprised if our “affirmative-action” president (who owes his election to deft manipulation of racism) makes a selection based on “affirmative-action” policies, under which superficial traits (like sex or race) trump individual qualifications – in other words, if he selects a new justice principally because she’s female and easily confirmable by the Democrat-controlled Senate.  The new justice, whomever she may be, no doubt also will be a left-liberal “activist,” in the worst sense of that term.  (See my essay, “Judicial Activism, Real and Imagined,” April 4, 2005.)

  

 

n    Tortured Rationalizations 

Many Democrats in Congress – egged on by leftists in their party and left-wing activist groups like the ACLU, and anxious to help the B.O. administration’s continuing efforts to distinguish itself from its predecessor – are pushing for a so-called “truth commission,” to investigate the CIA’s alleged use of “torture” in interrogating militant Islamic terrorist prisoners.  Whether so-called waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques constitute torture, as that term is defined and prohibited under U.S. and international law, or whether they are legitimate “enhanced interrogation” techniques justified when used against terrorists whose criminal conspiracies may pose imminent dangers to American lives – that is a question about which reasonable minds, equally committed to the rule of law, might differ.  The Bush administration approved such harsh interrogations; the current administration has repudiated them, just as it has bowed to the left-wing “political correctness” police in refusing to even use the term terrorist to describe militant Islamic criminals.   Yet certain Democrats seem eager to pursue a witch hunt (a modern variant of the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s), targeting certain key officials in the Bush administration, including the authors of the Justice Department memos approving harsh interrogation methods (including John Yoo, now a law professor at UC-Berkley, and Jay Bybee, now a federal judge), and perhaps even higher-ranking officials, all the way up to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been vocal in his criticisms of B.O. administration policies.    

To its credit, thus far the B.O. administration has rejected the idea of an independent commission, recognizing it would “just become a political back-and-forth,” in the words of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.  An internal Justice Department study also has recommended that Bush administration lawyers who approved harsh interrogation methods should not be prosecuted for their misjudgments – which is about as close a recognition from the current administration that one could expect that the proposal is nothing but a political witch hunt, an effort to criminalize policy differences.    

Undeterred, certain Democrat leaders in Congress nevertheless continue to push for an investigation – an effort that may bounce back and bite them in their butts.  Nancy Pelosi – the moron who, as House Speaker, holds the No. 3 position in the U.S. government – may have jeopardized her own leadership position by continuing to insist, contrary to the evidence, that the CIA misled her in a long series of CIA briefings she received about the interrogation methods.  As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, “Now, when disclosure of the details of those briefings undermines the Democrats’ political game, Mrs. Pelosi tries to dump responsibility back onto the CIA. . . . Whatever one’s politics may be, there has to be some recognition that Washington – the U.S. government – simply can’t function if it is endlessly entangled in the exquisitely argued, one might say absurd, blame-games that she and some Democrats are running against former Bush officials, and that now threaten the political standing of the Speaker herself”  (“Pelosi’s Self-Torture,” May 15).

  

 

n    The Tyranny of “Green Bullshit”: An Update 

In the second part of my annual “Prospects for Liberty” essay for 2009 (posted January 26),  I maintained that “[p]erhaps the greatest threat to the freedom and prosperity of the industrialized Western world today is the threat posed by radical environmental activists and the politicians who follow their bullshit, pseudo-scientific theories.”  Chief among this “green bullshit,” as I call it, is the theory of “global warming” – or “climate change,” as it’s now euphemistically called – in other words, the theory that the average global temperatures are increasing, and that the Earth’s warming will lead to disastrous consequences, and most importantly, that this dangerous global warming is caused by human activity, namely, by man-made carbon dioxide (a so-called “greenhouse gas”) created by the burning of carbon-based “fossil fuels” such as coal, oil (and other petroleum products), and natural gas.  The best scientific evidence is that this theory is nothing but “junk science,” maintained and propagated by forces of “political correctness,” and that sound scientific evidence and theory refutes it in virtually all its major points:  there isn’t even a consensus about global warming (some scientists still fear global cooling instead), let alone that it’s caused by man-made carbon dioxide.  Indeed, the best evidence is that whatever climate changes occur on Earth do so as a result of naturally-occurring forces (such as sunspot activity) beyond human control.  Rather than debating how to try to change climate trends, we should be debating how best to adjust to them – what human beings have been doing since they first appeared on the planet. 

Nevertheless, a coalition of radical environmentalists and other special interests (including the burgeoning “alternative energy” industry that has come into being thanks to government subsidies) generally has been remarkably successful in lobbying the Democrats who control Congress and the White House to enact laws and to implement federal government regulations and other policies, all premised on the global warming myth, or hoax, and designed to replace carbon-based fuels with other energy sources.  This so-called “green” movement indeed does pose the greatest current threat to Americans’ freedom and prosperity.   

The policies being pushed by advocates of “green” bullshit are not only unnecessary, based on fatally flawed “junk science” theories, but also dangerously threatening to our economic freedom and to our lifestyles.  As for the threats to our freedom, what’s at stake are both the freedom of businesses and consumers:  for businesses, such as electric utility companies, it’s the freedom to use the most readily-available, efficient and reliable fuels (which are carbon-based fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas) to generate power; or for vehicle manufacturers, the freedom to manufacture and sell vehicles (cars, trucks, and SUVs) which are popular with consumers despite the fact that they are relative “guzzlers” of gasoline.  For consumers, of course, what’s at stake includes the freedom to buy electricity from companies that generate it at lowest cost, as well as the freedom to drive whatever sort of vehicle one prefers (as well as other freedoms already limited by the “green” police, such as the freedom to purchase certain kinds of clothes washing machines, or toilets, or even electric light bulbs).  Yet, so long as Americans are gullible enough to be taken in by all the “green” bullshit, they will continue to see both their freedoms and their living standards erode, as the “green police” push for more government policies designed to force carbon-based energy out of the marketplace.   

            A number of good books shattering the “global warming” myth have been published in recent years, several of which I’ve already recommended here:  among them, Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007), Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr.’s Climate of Extremes (2009), Iaian Murray’s The Really Inconvenient Truths (2008), Roy Spencer’s Climate Confusion (2008), and Christopher Horner’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007) and Red Hot Lies 2008).  A new book, which I highly recommend, is Steve Milloy’s Green Hell, which I discuss below.  Finally, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the premiere libertarian think tanks in the U.S., has an excellent site, Cooler Heads Digest, which links to new material on the Internet that presents the truth about so-called “climate change” and other radical environmentalist myths.

 

 

n    The Coming Energy Crisis 

The most imminent “green bullshit” threat to Americans’ freedoms – one that merits close attention to Washington politics, before Congress adjourns for its summer recess – is the legislation proposed by U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D.-Mass.), co-chairmen of the panel’s energy and environment subcommittee.  The Waxman-Markey bill would mandate a reduction in U.S. emissions of so-called “greenhouse gases” (i.e., carbon dioxide) to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent below by 2050.  In April, former vice president Al Gore called the bill “one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in Congress” – which alone should cause alarm to all rational persons (as Gore is the most extreme alarmist and fear-monger on this issue).  What the legislation will do is to make it much more difficult and expensive for utility companies to generate electricity, by forcing them to shift from readily-available, economical and dependable carbon-based fuels to the new “alternative” energy sources (wind, solar, etc.) which are expensive (so expensive they exist only by virtue of heavy government subsidies) and very unreliable.  As a result, electricity will become not only significantly more expensive throughout the United States – having devastating ripple effects on the nation’s economy, fueling inflation, among other problems – but also unreliable, raising the specter of more black outs and “brown outs,” the kind of problem the state of California had several years ago, except throughout the United States.   

The Waxman-Markey “energy” bill is more aptly called an energy-rationing bill, because it will inevitably lead to more expensive and less available energy.  Republicans in both houses of Congress should oppose the bill, as should many common-sense Democrats, such as freshman Democratic Congressman Zack Space, from Ohio, who is now being subjected to a barrage of TV and radio ads (sponsored by radical environmentalists, organized labor, and the alternative-energy special interests groups), designed to pressure him into supporting this horrid piece of legislation.  (Ohio moderate Democrats are being targeted because much of the state’s electricity is generated from coal, an industry that is critically important to Rep. Space’s district in southeast Ohio.) 

  

 

n    CAFÉ Lunacy 

Yet another example of bad public policy being pushed by the tyranny of “green” bullshit – as well as an example of the power-grabbing tendencies of the president – is the administration’s  sweeping revision of auto-emission and fuel-economy standards.  In mid-May B.O. proposed the most dramatic change in federal regulations over autos since the Clean Air Act of 1970, which set auto-pollution standards for the first time and banned lead from gasolines.  But the new regulations do not target pollutants, in the true sense of the word; rather, they follow the radical environmentalist “green” agenda, based on the global-warming myth, by targeting carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring gas that poses no health harms to humans other than in the fantasies of global-warming alarmists).   The new regulations would, for the first time, limit the amount of carbon dioxide vehicles could emit, by mandating that vehicles burn less fuel.  In the name of reducing gasoline consumption, the federal government for years has mandated fuel economy standards, through so-called “corporate average fuel economy,” or CAFÉ, standards.  But now, those standards are becoming not only far more draconian but also are being revised deliberately to pander to the radical environmentalist, or “green,” anti-carbon agenda.   According to an administration official, the new regulations are designed to mandate a 30 percent reduction in so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions of cars and trucks by 2016; cars would have to average 39 miles per gallon and trucks, 30 mpg.  And, in an effort to push implementation of the new regulations, the administration also has proposed a streamlined rulemaking process, including unprecedented coordination by the two agencies mostly responsible – the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation – working jointly to ramrod the new rules through. 

These new regulations will not only limit the freedom of Americans to purchase the kind of motor vehicles they prefer – they will effectively outlaw SUVs and other “gas-guzzling” vehicles – but will also endanger Americans’ safety on the nation’s highways.  Current CAFÉ standards already have had that result, for the most economical way for auto makers to improve fuel economy is to reduce the size and weight of vehicles, making them less safe in crashes – as recently-released studies have verified.  

The new CAFÉ standards proposed by B.O. would make “a very bad situation even worse,” as recently noted by Sam Kazman, general counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Noting that existing fuel-economy standards already have had a negative impact on consumers by “raising car prices and reducing the availability of models,” he added that they tend to make cars less crash-worthy.  “You make these standards more stringent, you’re going to make them even more lethal,” Kazman warned.  “The research and development burden that these new standards are imposing on the industry are incredibly expensive with very little payoff, and so you’ve got this ironic standard that you have regulations that are killing both people and car companies.”  (“Killing both people and car companies,” WorldNet Daily, May 19).   

The “help” the B.O. administration has given American auto manufacturers – the bankruptcy it has forced on Chrysler and is about to force on General Motors – so far has been avoided by Ford Motor Company, which has managed to stay in business without federal handouts.  But now, thanks to the new CAFÉ standards, it seems that B.O. is determined to put Ford out of business, too.

 

  

n    More Presti-digital-delaytion 

Congress, in its far-from-infinite wisdom, has delayed until June 12 the deadline to force U.S. TV broadcast stations to convert from analog to digital signals.  As I noted in one of my March 19 “Spring Briefs” entries (scroll down to “Presti-digital-delaytion”), the Congressionally-mandated national switch represents in microcosm many of the failures of government paternalism, of the federal “Nanny State.”  It’s not just the principal folly – the erroneous belief that a free market in broadcasting would not better adapt to new technologies, and hence, the rationalization for government control over broadcasting through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – but also the various ways that Congress allegedly has “helped” American consumers weather the transition that it forced upon the market.  Core to the government’s plan to turn the USA into an all-digital TV market was its coupon program -- $40 coupons, two per household – which mainly has resulted in inflating the cost of digital converter boxes (by, shall we say, about $40, the cost of the indirect government subsidy).  Not surprisingly, the $1.34 billion program ran out of money by the end of 2008 (the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), the agency established to administer the program, exhausted its budget in just ten months):  the government grossly miscalculated the demand for the “free” coupons, resulting in a first-come, first-served system.  Conscientious, prudent consumers applied for their coupons, while imprudent ones – not coincidentally, many of them also the “neediest,” the poor, elderly or disabled Americans that Congress claimed to be “helping” in the first place – failed to request them in time (despite the government-mandated broadcaster warnings about the February deadline for the switch).   

Not surprisingly, the current Democrat-controlled Congress not only extended the deadline to June but also, as part of the massive spending legislation passed earlier this year, also appropriated $650 million in funding for new coupons.  At the request of Congressional Democrats, the NTIA is now sending out coupons via first-class mail, in hopes that households that have yet to purchase digital converters will get them before June 12.  (Only Americans who receive “free TV” via antennas will be affected by the switch to digital broadcasting; subscribers to cable and satellite TV services aren’t affected and will continue to receive channels via those services.)  Wanna bet that, because some pathologically imprudent consumers will still not buy converters by June 12, some members of Congress will sponsor a bill to delay implementation of the transition yet again?   (The FCC is spending millions of dollars in its DTV budget to buy the help of dozens of organizations – including AARP, AmeriCorps’ federally-paid “volunteers,” and the national association of volunteer firefighter – for “DTV outreach,” to help consumers install their converter boxes.  Apparently, the federal government knows no bounds in its assumption that Americans are a bunch of idiots who cannot do even the simplest task without government assistance.)

 

  

n    Casting Perils Before Swine (Flu, That Is) 

The media-hyped scare over the so-called “swine flu” (the new variant of the H1N1 influenza virus) has proved to be mostly a bust.  Although the disease has spread from Mexico (apparently its country of origin) throughout most of the U.S. states and many nations around the world, the epidemic is not increasingly as much as many experts feared and this particular strain of flu seems to be relatively mild (no more deadly than the typical winter-season flu which annually results in the deaths of tens of thousands of people from flu-related complications).  Some observers have likened the hysteria over this year’s H1N1 flu to the “swine flu” scare of 1976, which resulted in fatal overreaction by the U.S. government.  (Fearing a replay of the 1918 flu pandemic, the most deadly in modern history, the government urged all Americans to be vaccinated.  Over 40 million Americans – almost 25 percent of the population – received the swine flu vaccine before the program was halted in December 1976.  But the pandemic, which some experts at the time had estimated could infect 50 to 60 million Americans, never materialized; only about 200 cases of swine flu and one death were ultimately reported in the U.S.  The vaccine proved to be deadlier than the flu:  more than 500 people are thought to have developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, after receiving the vaccine; and 25 people died.  The episode triggered an enduring public backlash against flu vaccination, embarrassed the federal government, and cost the director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control his job.)  

This year’s hype over the H1N1 flu is even more reminiscent of the exaggerated scare over the so-called “bird flu,” the avian H5N1 influenza virus, about three years ago, in 2006.  Once again, epidemiologists and other supposed public-health experts expressed fears that the virus could mutate, begin spreading from human to human and cause a global pandemic; but those fears never materialized, either.  The bird flu remained confined largely to those areas in southeast Asia, and even in the hardest-hit countries it had weakened by May 2006.  (Vietnam, which had almost half of the human cases of H5N1 flu in the world, as of mid-May 2006 had not had a single case in humans or a single outbreak in poultry reported that year.  Thailand, the second-hardest hit nation until Indonesia overtook it, had not had a human case reported in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months.)  With warm weather approaching, the number of new countries with bird flu cases in either birds or humans had declined drastically by May 2006.  Good hygiene and common sense (travelers getting vaccinated before visiting hard-hit countries, properly cooking poultry meat or eggs, and washing hands often with soap and water or sanitizing with alcohol-based hand gels) successfully combated the bird flu.  Apparently, similar common-sense techniques (particularly hand washing) are now successfully combating this year’s “swine flu” outbreak, as well.  Once again, it seems the supposed “cure” (government “protection” of public health) is worse than the disease.

 

  

n    The Summer of Atlas Shrugged 

Something is very wrong.  The “American Dream” seems a relic of bygone days, and the United States seems no longer the world’s “best, last hope” for freedom, as the nation suffers from a crippled economy caused by more and more federal government regulation of business, as the U.S. seems to be emulating the socialist “people’s states” around the world.   Once successful businesses are closing, as the men and women who run them – the productive people who keep the “motors of the world,” the nation’s key business enterprises, working – quit, realizing that instead of protecting their rights, the government is instead helping facilitate the “looters” who would live off the wealth they’ve earned.  Instead of standing up for the rights of productive persons, the nation’s leading intellectuals are leading the charge calling for even more government-coerced looting, claiming that everyone has a duty to “sacrifice” for the sake of others (especially those “less fortunate,” or more needy, than oneself).  Even more ominously, whenever anyone speaks out in defense of individual rights, the intellectuals not only denounce them for being “selfish” but also maintain (however logically inconsistent their arguments may be) that there are no longer any moral absolutes, that everything’s relative, and therefore that everyone ought to blithely accept the nation’s economic and cultural collapse. 

Sound familiar?  That scenario, which nicely describes the most pressing problems currently facing Americans, also describes the plot of Atlas Shrugged, the magnificent novel written by Ayn Rand.  First published nearly 52 years ago, in October 1957, the novel continues to be a best-seller: indeed, it’s selling better now than at any time during the half-century it’s been published.  Stephen Moore, in an op-ed published earlier this year, theorized that the novel has special relevance today because of the recent massive growth in the federal regulatory/welfare state:  “Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957,” he wrote  (“Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2009).  And Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, in a mid-March op-ed in the Journal’s weekend edition, explained the novel’s “relevance” to today’s problems in terms of Rand’s philosophical message: 

"The book's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence.  . . . Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society – particularly its dominant moral ideas.

 

"Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state?  Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy.  Why do so few people test the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen?  Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral.  Why did the government go on a crusade to promote `affordable housing,' which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers?  Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

 

"The message is always the same: `Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.'  But Rand said this message is wrong -- selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue.  . . . Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily for mutual benefit.

 

"Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imagineable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster.  Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

 

"Rand offered us a way out -- to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression.  And that is the source of her relevance today."

 

("Is Rand Relevant?" (Mar. 14)). 

Ever since I first read Atlas Shrugged, 35 years ago (when I was only 19 years old), I’ve regarded the book as the most important I ever read.  Indeed, I regard it as the most important book written in the 20^th century and one of the most important books ever written – a book that has more profound insights into human nature than does the Bible (and a book that’s far more relevant to life in modern society than is that book written by various anonymous authors in a primitive dessert culture thousands of years ago).  For more on my take on why Atlas Shrugged is so important, see my three essays in celebration of the book’s 50^th anniversary, especially Part I, “Courage To Face a Lifetime” (Sept. 27, 2007).  (Part II, “Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus,” discusses my favorite passages of the book and is recommended for people who have already read the novel; otherwise, it might contain some “spoilers.”  Part III, my report on the 50^th anniversary conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Atlas Society in October 2007, also contains the text of my talk, on the significance of Atlas Shrugged in terms of “Completing the American Revolution.”) 

Anyone who hasn’t yet read Ayn Rand’s magnificent novel should do so; and everyone who has read it, should read it again.  It’s the single most important book to read this summer.

 

  

n    Green Hell, Murder Mysteries, and Other Recommended Summer Reading 

Another book that I highly recommend for reading this summer, because of its relevance to current issues in politics and public policy (the above-discussed “tyranny of green bullshit”), is Steven Milloy’s Green Hell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2009).  The subtitle of the book describes its thesis:  “How Environmentalist Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”  Milloy is the founder and publisher of JunkScience.com and is an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Milloy reveals the dark agenda behind the movement to make America “Green”:  an authoritarian crusade to dictate the very parameters of our daily lives – where we can live, what transportation we can use, what we can eat, how we heat and power our homes, and even how many children we can have.  He shows how the Green movement has gained so much power:  “Steamrolling nearly all opposition with its apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom,” it has gained influence throughout American society, from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country.”  Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is Milloy’s expose of how big businesses have knuckled under to the Greens, even aggressively promoting the green agenda to the detriment of their own stockholders – as well as how Green elites (hypocrites like Al Gore) stand to profit enormously from the restrictions and regulations they seek to impose on the rest of us.  As the publisher’s summary describes it, the book is a “comprehensive takedown of the entire environmental movement,” a book that (I hope) will indeed help open Americans’ eyes to “a looming threat to our economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.” 

Summer is also the perfect season for reading my favorite genre of fiction:  historical murder mysteries.  Some recently- or newly-published books that are on my “To Read” list this summer include:  Lindsey Davis’s Alexandria, her latest Marcus Didius Falco novel (in which her protagonist, a private “informer” in ancient Rome during the time of the emperor Vespasian, travels to Alexandria, Egypt with his family, on a working vacation); Anne Perry’s Execution Dock, her latest William Monk novel (in which Monk, a former policeman and private detective and now an officer in the Thames River police, investigates a sex-slavery ring involving children and aristocratic pedophiles); and C. J. Samsom’s Revelation (his latest novel in the Matthew Shardlake series, set during the reign of Henry VIII, this one at the time of his sixth and last marriage to Catherine Parr).   For more on these books and other historical mysteries that I recommend, see my revised “Guide to Historical Mysteries.” 

Finally, summer’s also a good season for reading more contemporary mystery novels.  And I plan, for my pleasure reading, also to continue reading several books in two “classic” series that are also favorites of mine, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.

 

  

n    Summer Movies: A Preview 

In the classic early-1980s comedy skit TV show, SCTV (with Toronto’s talented Second City comedy troupe), one of the most memorable skits was “The Great White North,” a mock talk show hosted by two beer-drinking Canadian “average Joes” (or should that be, “average Joes, eh?”), the McKenzie brothers, Bob (Rick Moranis) and Doug (Dave Thomas).  Bob and Doug frequently did film reviews, judging movies mostly by how explosive they were (literally).  Their favorite movies not only “blew `em up,” but really “blew `em up good.” 

Bob and Doug would be really happy at the movies in the summer of 2009:  As USA Today noted in its annual preview, LOUD explosions will be the main theme in this summer’s movies:  “Among the titles packed with fire and falling debris over the next few months [are] J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek, with whole planets consumed by cosmic weaponry; Quentin Tarantino’s World War II campfest Inglorious Basterds, blowing up the placid French countryside; the fantasy soldier saga G.I. Joe; and sequels to Transformers, Terminator and X-Men, which threaten to wipe out life on earth” (“Yay, it’s the end of the world! Upcoming movies promise to blow the lid off summer,” April 24).  (Another theme, identified in a more recent USA Today article, is that of the “origin” story – which also characterizes both the X-Men and Star Trek films – and the hidden sequels.  “Nervous that moviegoers are weary of sequels, studios are downplaying the continuing stories entirely.  For this summer’s franchise pictures, numerals have been retired . . . . There’s this week’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (the second installment), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (also Part 2, June 24), and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (the third chapter, July 1).” (“Film franchises successfully turning back time,” May 21).  

Some of the new action movies are worth seeing.  These include the first two big box-office successes of the season, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which debuted May 1) and Star Trek (which debuted May 8).  Wolverine is a worthy addition to the X-Men movie series, featuring the personable (and incredibly versatile actor) Hugh Jackman as the most intriguing of the “mutants.”  And director J.J. Abrams’ “reimagining” (to use Hollywood lingo) of the origins of Star Trek: The Original Series, the maiden voyage of NCC 1701, the starship Enterprise, is an interesting film that should appeal to both fans and neophytes alike.  (Although some Trekker purists may object – or, at the very least, raise both eyebrows, a la Spock – to the way the story plays fast and loose with the Gene Roddenberry canon, the liberties can be rationalized by the movie’s time travel/alternate universe main plot line, a staple of the Star Trek genre of films.  And the actors who portray the young original crew of the Enterprise are inspired choices, led by Chris Pine as the young James T. Kirk and Zachary Pinto as the young Spock.  My favorite was the 20-year-old Anton Yelchin as the young Chekhov, who nearly steals the movie with his over-the-top Russian accent – even though he’s a genuine Russian-American.) 

Most of this summer’s blockbuster action films, however, aren’t worth seeing (except perhaps at a bargain matinee if one has nothing better to do); they’re merely big-budget exercises in gratuitous violence and special effects.  Movies on my “not-worth-seeing” list include: Terminator Salvation (May 21) (a prequel to the Terminator series, which despite no-doubt solid performances by Christian Bale as Connor and Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese, unfortunately will showcase much too much violence); Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (June 26) (in the original, the huge special effects almost overwhelmed lead actor Shia LaBeouf’s charm, and in the sequel the even-huger effects and violence are almost sure to do so); G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7) (I wasn’t a fan of the toy, so I have no interest in the movie).  And, of course, the film that surely will epitomize gratuitous violence this summer:  Quentin Tarantino’s WWII flick, Inglorious Basterds (August 21) (a more appropriate misspelling in the title would use a “u” instead of an “e”).  

Movies that I do look forward to seeing include, at the top of the list, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (July 15), the sixth installment in the Harry Potter film series which promises to be, like its five predecessors, a remarkably faithful adaptation of J.K. Rowlings’ magical book.  Some comedies that promise to be amusing, in a light-hearted summer kind of way, include Land of the Lost (June 5), a big-budget update of the campy `70s show for kids, starring the amusing Will Ferrell; The Proposal (June 19), a romantic comedy starring the likeable Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock (and featuring Betty White as – surprise! surprise! – a dirty old lady); Bruno (July 10), a quirky comedy starring the versatile Sacha Baron Cohen (star and co-creator of Borat) as a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion expert; and Funny People (July 31), Judd Apatow’s latest combination of bawdy humor tempered with sentiment, starring Adam Sandler as a famous stand-up comedian dying of a blood disorder, with Seth Rogan as the man’s protégé and friend.  Finally, one film that no doubt will have much violence but which will probably be worth seeing nevertheless is the real-crime drama Public Enemies (July 1), with Johnny Depp as the notorious criminal John Dillinger and Christian Bale as his nemesis, G-man Melvin Purvis.   

 

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Monday,  May 25, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Those Damn Taxes!

 

 

April 15 is popularly known as “Tax Day,” for it is the day that personal income tax forms (and payments) are due at the Internal Revenue Service (or “Infernal Revenue Service,” as I often call it).  The truly significant day, however, is so-called “Tax Freedom Day” – the day marking the lifting of the burden of taxation on the average American’s income.  In 2000, Tax Freedom Day was celebrated May 3, the latest date ever.  That meant that in that year, the average American had to work from January 1 to May 3 – a full five months of the year – in order to pay all his taxes (federal, state, and local), leaving to himself just the last seven months of his yearly earnings.  A series of tax cuts between 2001 and 2003 – the “Bush tax cuts,” recommended by former President George W. Bush to Congress, which Democrats love to decry – pushed Tax Freedom Day up by more than two weeks, so it fell on April 16 in 2003 and April 17 in 2004.  For the next three years, incomes and tax collections soared, pushing Tax Freedom Day back to April 26 in 2007. 

This year, according to the Tax Foundation (in its Special Report No. 165), Tax Freedom Day fell on April 13 – eight days earlier than in 2008, and a full two weeks earlier than 2007 – because of recently-enacted tax cuts and the reduction in income resulting from the recession.  Nevertheless, Americans this year still will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined.  Moreover, an earlier Tax Freedom Day isn’t a trend that’s likely to continue.  When federal budget deficit figures are calculated into the determination of Tax Freedom Day (in other words, if the projected deficit were counted as a tax), in 2009 it falls on May 29 – the latest date ever, under this alternative calculation, thanks to this year’s unprecedented $1.5 trillion deficit.  (The only previous years when taxes and deficit spending comprised a similarly large share of national income were 1944 and 1945, at the peak of World War II.  In the postwar era, this date has never fallen later than May 9 (in 1992).) 

With Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress (and with a president who has publicly stated his goal to use the federal government’s taxing and spending powers to “spread the wealth”), the future trend is indeed alarming.   The $787 billion so-called “stimulus” legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed into law by B.O. – a.k.a. H.R. 1, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” – will result in a massive increase in federal government spending this year and in future years.  More ominously, B.O.’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will produce record-breaking deficits of $9.3 trillion over ten years. 

This massive increase in federal government spending and, concomitantly, the national debt, raises the specter of burdensome taxation on future generations of Americans.  Never in U.S. history has the future looked so bleak as it does now, as national policy-makers finally seem to be realizing the nightmare scenario that Thomas Jefferson warned about in 1816.  To preserve Americans’ independence, he cautioned, “we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt”: 

“We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.  If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

. . .  This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.  And this is the tendency of all human governments.  A departure form principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.”

 

The “fore horse of this frightful team,” Jefferson warned, is “public debt.  Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”  (Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.) 

Thankfully, a large number of Americans who do not want to be enslaved by their ever-growing government – Americans who refuse to be reduced to “mere automatons of misery,” with nothing left but “sinning and suffering,” as Jefferson put it – are participating in a nationwide tax protest on April 15 this year.  Billed as a modern-day Boston “Tea Party” revolt by its organizers, the nationwide protest is scheduled to take place in 500 cities and towns all over the country.  According to a recent article in USA Today (“Tax revolt a recipe for tea parties,” April 13), “What started out as a handful of people blogging about their anger over federal spending – the bailouts, the $787 billion stimulus package, and Obama’s budget – has grown into scores of so-called tea parties across the country.”  The biggest demonstration so far drew 6,000 people in Cincinnati.  The goal, as stated in the article and in a Heritage Foundation website focused on the “tea-party” movement (“Stop Spending Our Future”), is to pressure Congress and the states to reject government spending as a supposed way out of the recession and to build a national anti-spending grassroots coalition of taxpayers. 

It’s indeed time for Americans to stand up in opposition to the mushrooming growth of government – and to demand urgently-needed reform in the massive, bloated, unjust (and illegitimate) taxation system that threatens to tyrannize not just the people today but also future generations of Americans, in the years to come.

 

 

Taxation, Consent, and Legitimacy (and Illegitimacy)

 

The historic Boston “Tea Party” of December 1773 involved a group of Bostonian Patriots dumping chests of tea from East India Company ships into Boston Harbor, as a protest against the monopoly granted by the British government to the Company as well as against the British Parliament’s levying of a tax on tea imported into the American colonies.  The American Revolutionaries’ argument, “no taxation without representation,” is justifiably famous, as a slogan of the Revolution – and one of the founding principles of the United States – but is often misunderstood or taken out of context.   

“No taxation without representation” is a corollary of the foundational principle of American government, stated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from “the consent of the governed.”  Government is not a natural entity; it is created by human beings, for a specific purpose – to safeguard, or “secure” their rights.  Their rights, in turn, do not derive from government but from their nature as human beings; they exist independently of government, which is founded to “secure” (as the Declaration puts it) these natural rights of individuals.  Yet even when exercising its legitimate function of securing rights, government cannot do whatever those in power want to do:  it must exercise its power – the power to use force, or coercion, to compel people to do certain things or to refrain from doing certain things – according to law.  Even before Revolutionary-era Americans created the device of a written constitution to limit government’s power, the rule of law (a bundle of associated principles constraining how government acts, how it wields its power) limited the exercise of political power.  Written constitutions, like the Constitution of the United States with respect to both the national and state governments, and the various state constitutions with respect to state and local governments, provided simply an additional device for ensuring that government operated according to the rule of law.  And for ensuring that government exercised only those powers that were legitimate – powers relating necessarily to government’s legitimate function of protecting individuals’ rights, and powers to which the people have consented to have government exercise, through the power-granting clauses of the constitutions.

In the centuries-old Anglo-American constitutional tradition, the power to tax has always been regarded as a special governmental power, one that required not only “consent” by the people generally but also required the specific consent of those people paying the tax.  Indeed, one of the complaints against King John in Magna Carta (1215) was that he had attempted to levy taxes beyond the bounds of his legitimate authority as feudal overlord of England, without the “common counsel” of the realm.  Under his successors, especially under King Edward I, Parliament itself was created as an institution in order to provide a mechanism for the king to obtain the tax revenues he needed to fight his wars in Wales and Scotland, from the people who had “liquid capital” (as we would say today) in the early 14^th century, the middle class, or the “commons” of England.  In the parliaments held during Edward I’s reign, aristocrats were represented personally in the King’s Great Council, the institution that evolved into the House of Lords, while representatives of the middle class – the knights in the counties, the merchants in towns – joined the lords in an extraordinary assembly, a “parliament.”  These representatives of the middle class eventually became known as the House of Commons.  Together with the House of Lords, their consent to taxes or to a change in the laws (legislation through Parliamentary statutes) gave the king authority backed up by the “common counsel of the realm” – the aristocrats, represented personally in the Lords, and the middle class, represented by their chosen representatives in the Commons.  That gave rise to the principle, by the 16^th century, that whatever the King and Parliament jointly did, was done by the consent of “every Englishman,” actually (in the case of the personal assent of the King and the Lords) or “virtually,” by representatives in the House of Commons, who in theory were to represent the interests of the middle class throughout England.  When the early Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, attempted to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, Parliament objected – and eventually, during the English Civil War of the 1640s, levied war against the King himself, defeating Charles I and putting him on trial, and executing him, for treason against the people of England, for violating their rights (among them, their right not to be taxed except by their own consent, given in Parliament).

The people who settled in the English colonies in America derived from English common law the fundamental right – a “constitutional right,” we would call it – not to be taxed, by the king or the king’s government, except by their own consent.  Revolutionary-era Americans, however, went further than the traditional English concept of “no taxation without consent” by insisting on “no taxation without representation,” that is, consent given by their own representatives, personally chosen by them.  The American understanding of representation differed from the “mainstream” 18^th-century English view, which relied on the theory of “virtual” representation (the theory that all members of the middle class, no matter where they were situated in England, or indeed in the British empire, were “virtually” represented by the members of the House of Commons, even if they had no right to elect them).  For nearly 150 years prior to the Revolution, colonial Americans had become used to the practice of “actual” representation – of directly electing their own representatives, in their own colonial assemblies or legislatures, and even of instructing their chosen representatives how to vote.  Thus, when the Parliament of Great Britain in the years following the French and Indian War (that is, in the mid-1760s), attempted to levy taxes directly on people in the American colonies, Americans – through their delegates at the First Continental Congress in 1774 – objected that Parliament was violating their right, under the English constitution, not to be taxed except by their own consent.  Because they elected no member of Parliament to represent them (and because they understood the British House of Commons to represent only the interests of the middle class in Britain itself and not in the colonies), they maintained that they could give their consent to taxes only through their actual representatives, in the various colonial assemblies (men who were their neighbors, whom they chose to represent them in the legislature because they trusted them to look out for their interests).

Thus, by the time of the adoption of the earliest state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution, the principle had been established in American constitutional law that government may not tax the people without obtaining their consent, given either directly (by popular vote) or indirectly (by vote of the people’s representatives in the legislature).  The framers of the U.S. Constitution, for example, assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives the exclusive power to originate revenue bills (that is, proposed tax laws) because the British House of Commons had – in recognition of this centuries-old principle of “no taxation without consent” – similarly the exclusive power to originate tax bills.  The members of the U.S. House were meant to represent “the people” – that is, the people of the several states.

Given this historical background, it is easy to see why consent of the people – and, specifically, the consent of those (or at least of a majority of those) on whom a given tax is to be levied – is a prerequisite for the government’s exercise of its taxation power, if it is to do so legitimately.  Through the written constitutions, “the people” generally may authorize the government to levy taxes, to pay for the costs of government’s legitimate functions.  But in addition to this general authority to levy taxes, government needs the specific authority of the people – that is, of the majority of the people (or of their representatives in the legislature) – to legitimize any particular tax levy.

The necessity of consent to legitimize taxes does not fall entirely on this historical argument, however.  It is also based on the fundamental principle that government is created in order to “secure” the people’s rights.  One of the most important rights – certainly, one of the most fundamental, and arguably, the most fundamental right – is the right of private property, a right that is violated by the very act of taxation itself (because when governments collect taxes, they forcibly deprive individuals of their property), unless those on whom the tax is levied give their consent.  That’s why – and here the historical practice in Anglo-American society meets the theoretical argument of the Declaration of Independence – government can legitimately tax the people only when they have authorized it to do so, by their own actual consent.  As John Locke recognized in his classic Second Treatise on Government (1690) – a book that America’s Founders regarded as a textbook of fundamental principles of government –

“The Reason why Men enter into Society, is the preservation of their Property; and the End why they chuse and authorize a Legislative, is, that there may be Laws made, and Rules set, as Guards and Fences to the Properties of all the Members of the Society, to limit the Power, and moderate the Dominion of every part and member of the Society.  For since it can never be supposed to be the will of the Society, that the Legislative should have a Power to destroy that, which every one designs to secure, by entering into Society, for which the People submitted themselves of Legislators of their own making, whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any further Obedience. . . .” (emphasis in original)

Locke concluded that in such a situation, where the legislature levies taxes in an arbitrary way that in effect enslaves the people to the government, the legislature “by this breach of trust . . . forfeit[s] the Power the People had put into their Hands,” and the ultimate political power – the sovereign power – then “devolves” back to the people.

Of course, by adopting written constitutions embodying the people’s sovereign power, America’s Founders sought to make unnecessary a resort to violent revolt, or revolution, in order for the people to take back the power they had entrusted to government.  Through the process of constitutional change, or amendments, the people could peaceably alter, or even abolish and re-institute government, as we (the people of the United States) did in adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1787-88, or in the various amendments added to the Constitution in the two centuries since.  Moreover, by allowing American judges to enforce the limits the Constitution (or the various state constitutions) placed on the government, through exercise of their power of “judicial review” (the power to void unconstitutional laws), America’s Founders sought to give the people an additional check against tyrannical laws, including arbitrary or tyrannical taxes.

 

 

The Pernicious, Invidious Personal Income Tax

 

The current occupant of the White House, B.O., said in his first address to Congress that the tax cuts enacted under his predecessor, “W.,” amounted to a massive “transfer [of] wealth to the wealthy.”  This comment, the opening salvo in the president’s campaign to impose higher taxes on the wealthiest – that is, the most productive – Americans, is wrong (it is in fact a grossly misleading statement, a blatant lie), on at least two important counts.

First, a cut in tax rates is not a “transfer” of wealth to taxpayers, for the simple and obvious reason that it’s not the government’s money, it’s the taxpayers’ own money, income they created by their own productive work.  (It’s perhaps not surprising that B.O. fails to understand this simple fact, because he – like most professional politicians – hasn’t the faintest idea how wealth actually is created by the nation’s business-owners.  His political constituency obviously aren’t productive Americans, the producers of wealth, but rather the “looters,” unproductive Americans who live off the wealth produced by others and redistributed to them by the forceful hand of government.) 

Second, “the wealthy” – that is, the most productive, upper-income Americans – already pay a disproportionately heavy burden of federal personal income tax revenues, under the so-called “progressive” rate structure of the income tax law.  For years now, opponents of tax-relief proposals have continued to voice the tired objection that an across-the-board cut in income-tax rates would "favor the rich." Of course it would: it’s their money.  The wealthiest 5% of taxpayers earn 36% of the nation’s income but pay a majority (60%) of federal income taxes, and the top 25% pay more than 80% of income taxes, according to the Internal Revenue Service. In contrast, those in the bottom 50% pay a mere 4% of all federal income taxes. So naturally the wealthy would get the most relief from a rate cut – and they should, because they pay a vastly disproportionate share.

If the tax cuts enacted during former President Bush’s administration can be faulted for anything, it would be for not doing enough to redress this great imbalance.  The Bush tax cuts in fact exacerbated the imbalance.  As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial written after the Congressional Budget Office and IRS released tax numbers for 2005 (“Taxes and Income,” Dec. 17, 2007), the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 actually resulted in “the rich” paying an even greater share of the nation’s tax burden:  their share of taxes paid rose “at a faster rate than their share of income.”  The richest 1% of Americans in 1990 earned 14% of the nation’s income but paid 25% of federal income taxes; by 2005, the richest 1% earned a greater share of the nation’s income (21%) but paid a disproportionately even greater share of federal income taxes (39%).  For the richest 5%, who earned 27% of the nation’s income in 1990 and 36% of the nation’s income in 2005, the tax burden increased from 44% of federal income taxes in 1990 to 60% of federal income taxes in 2005. 

Yes, as the political left and the news media like to observe, this means “the rich are getting richer” – but they’re also paying an even more disproportionately heavy share of federal income taxes.  How could this be?  The Journal editors give two plausible explanations.  First, the Bush tax cuts reduced the income tax liability of middle and lower income households by more proportionately than wealthier households.  “The average family of four with an income of $40,000 saw its income tax liability fall by almost $2.052 a year from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.”  Second, as the IRS statistics verify, America continues to be a society of upward mobility.  “Over the past decade, millions of Americans have joined the once highly exclusive club of six- and seven-figure earners.  Some 304,000 Americans earned $1 million or more in annual income in 2005, compared to 110,000 in 1996 and 176,000 in 2000.  Because there is no cap on the top income share, this increase in millionaires pushes the top income (and taxes paid) share higher.”  Left-liberals might decry this as proof of a new “gilded age,” the Journal editors note, but what it really means is that Americans are free to earn their way into the ranks of the affluent.  “This is the kind of upward mobility that a dynamic society should want because it means that incomes aren’t stagnant and opportunity continues to exist.”

The tax-cut debate has focused attention on the issue of fairness, and all Americans should seriously question whether the federal income tax is really "fair" at all.  Under its so-called "progressive" rate structure, a minority of taxpayers in the upper income brackets are forced to pay the lion’s share of federal income taxes.  Moreover, there is no correlation between the amount of taxes an American pays and whatever benefits, if any, he receives; indeed, a wealthy person may get fewer government services than a poorer person.  As H. L. Mencken noted in 1925, "The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him."

The history of federal income tax rates shows a constant temptation to raise tax rates on productive citizens to pay for new government programs.  At the limit, persons with the highest incomes may face a marginal tax rate of 100%, while those with low incomes pay nothing.  During the 1950s, indeed, top marginal tax rates exceeded 90% in the United States.  The confiscatory nature of the federal income tax was lessened somewhat by the tax reforms of the 1980s, but it is still true that wealthy Americans pay a highly disproportionate share.

Federal income taxes today are at an all-time high.  The tax receipts of the federal government in 1998 were 26.4% of national income (and nearly 22% of gross domestic product), the highest level in American history.  At their peak in 1945, the final year of World War II, federal tax receipts amounted to 23.4% of the national income—13% less than in 1998.  And federal tax receipts rose sharply during the Clinton administration, thanks not only to the legislated tax increase in 1995 but also to the "unlegislated tax increase" which economist Milton Friedman attributed to "bracket creep" and to inflation.  Wealthier Americans thus not only shoulder the vast bulk of the tax burden, but that burden increases disproportionately as the economy grows.

A "progressive" income tax is not only unfair; it’s also contrary to America’s founding principles.  Those principles include consent of the governed and equality under the law.

As noted above, when the Patriots uttered their famous cry—"No taxation without representation!"— they were following the principles of John Locke, who recognized that consent was a necessary condition to legitimate government.  Because the end of government is to protect individual rights, government must be formed by a procedure that does not itself violate those rights.  "Men being ... by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent," Locke wrote in the Second Treatise of Government.  Moreover, he argued that consent was especially necessary to "take from any man any part of his property," given that the purpose of government is to preserve property.  Taxes, to be legitimate, must be imposed with the consent of the people on whom they will be levied.

Progressive income taxes, by their very nature, violate this fundamental principle of legitimacy.  They represent the very worst sort of "tyranny of the majority," for they subject a small portion of citizens—those with the highest incomes—to taxes imposed by the "consent" of other citizens, the majority of voters, who do not pay taxes.  Indeed, that was the story of the origin of the Sixteenth Amendment, which empowered Congress to levy taxes on income.  When the Amendment was ratified in 1913, it was sold to voters in the western states as a way to soak "the luxurious incomes" of industrialists in the East.  And very few people paid the first income tax, which was only 1% on the first $20,000 of taxable income, with the rate raised to only 7% on income above $500,000.  As late as 1939, only 5% of the population filed returns.  As journalist David Brinkley noted, the income tax "was voted into law by people who were confident it would punish the rich they despised while they themselves would never have to pay it.  Envy and resentment [of wealth] carried the day."  (Brinkley, “The Long Road to Tax Reform,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 1995.)  It’s not surprising, then, that public opinion polls usually show little support among voters generally for easing the federal tax burden:  a large portion of Americans continue to pay little or no income taxes at all!

Because it discriminates against individuals simply because they have higher incomes, a progressive income tax also violates another fundamental principle of our constitutional government:  that individuals are equal under the law.  The minority of Americans who shoulder the federal income tax burden are denied the equal protection of laws.  Moreover, when we consider the full impact of the federal budget, it is clear that the federal income tax is an integral part of a massive redistribution of Americans’ wealth.  Thus, it constitutes "class legislation"—the type of law that "takes property from A. and gives it to B."—which, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase noted in 1798, violates "the great first principles of the social compact."

If we really care about fairness, legitimacy, and equality under the law, we need to abolish progressive taxation and institute a flat-rate tax, preferably applied to consumption rather than income.  Proponents of the so-called “Fair Tax” – a flat-rate national sales tax, to replace the income tax – have strong arguments in support of their proposal.  It would not only be fairer but also would be far less intrusive on the personal lives of Americans.  Even the left-leaning USA Today, in a remarkable recent editorial (“Tax code: Too complicated, too costly, too unfair,” April 10, 2009), decried the complexity of the income tax – noting that the number of pages in the U.S. tax code has ballooned, from 400 in 1913 to 70,320 in 2000, and that the percentage of tax returns signed by paid preparers has increased from 46% in 1985 to 60% in 2006 – suggesting that the complexity has resulted from the lobbying efforts of “special interests” who have put various deductions into the law, or from politicians’ attempts to manipulate Americans’ behavior with various deductions or credits.  It’s certainly an abuse of the tax laws to use them to try to manipulate people’s behavior, but elimination of all the special credits or deductions would still go only part way toward true tax simplification.  Much of the complexity of the income tax code results from the difficulty in defining “income” itself and thus is inherent in the code, as is the government’s intrusiveness into the nature and sources of that income.  A national sales tax, implemented through “piggybacking” on the mechanisms already existing in most of the states for the collection of state and local sales taxes, would make possible the elimination of both the incredibly complex income tax laws and the meddlesome I.R.S. that enforces them.

True tax reform, by implementation of a national sales tax to replace the income tax, must also include the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which grants Congress the power to levy a tax on income.  Otherwise, members of Congress are likely to enact a national sales tax as just an additional source of revenue, on top of the existing income tax – an even more burdensome national tax regime than we have now.  Again, H. L. Mencken has some important words of wisdom we must bear in mind as we consider major reform of the U.S. tax laws.  He warned, “Where a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned.  It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.”  (Mencken, in the [Baltimore] Evening Sun, Nov. 13, 1925.) 

 

 

The Worst Ponzi Scheme of All

 

A “Ponzi scheme” is defined in Wikipedia as “a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned.”   It “usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going,” until its eventual – and inevitable – collapse.  Named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who notoriously practiced the scheme in the early years of the 20^th century, the Ponzi scheme has been in the news often over the past several months, as modern counterparts of Mr. Ponzi have bilked many gullible Americans of their hard-earned wealth – most notably, Bernard Madoff, who has been convicted of defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars.

Although some commentators have called Bernie Madoff’s operation not only the largest investment fraud ever committed by a single person but also the largest Ponzi scheme ever perpetrated, there’s one that’s even bigger.  And it has been perpetrated by the U.S. Government for over 70 years, ever since Congress created it in 1935:  Social Security.

            The Social Security program came into being in the late 1930s as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “New Deal” – the huge con game that FDR and his advisers put over on the American people.  For the past three-quarters of a century, leftists have perpetuated the myth that New Deal policies and programs helped alleviate the economic woes of the Great Depression.  Today, fortunately, the myth has been shattered:  historians and other social scientists are beginning to acknowledge what conservative and libertarian critics of FDR have been arguing all these years – that the New Deal, rather than alleviating the Depression, actually prolonged and exacerbated it.  (See, for example, Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly (2003).)

            Social Security epitomizes the New Deal con game, at its worst.  To disguise its true nature, the Roosevelt administration sold it to the American people by calling it an “insurance” program, masking the fact that it’s really a wealth-redistribution scheme.  True insurance programs involve people voluntarily contracting for benefits based on the premiums they paid.  As Jim Powell notes,  

With true insurance, premiums varied according to the policyholder’s age and how much retirement income they wanted.  Insurance companies invested the premiums long term in productive assets, principally stocks, bonds, and real estate, so that individuals could cover the costs of their own retirement.  In contrast, every “social insurance” scheme [like Social Security] had some people subsidizing others.  Often such schemes started out or became pay-as-you go, meaning that current taxpayers covered the costs of people currently receiving pensions.  Individuals, as taxpayers, didn’t contribute anything for their own retirement.  The cost of their retirement became a burden for future generations.  The assumption was that there would be enough taxpayers in the future to take care of all the retirees and that future generations would be willing to bear burdens.  Nobody seems to have considered that such burdens might become heavier over time if the number of retired people grew faster than the number of taxpayers. 

 

Indeed, as Powell also notes, FDR repeatedly misrepresented Social Security as an insurance program.  The Roosevelt administration proposed paying for Social Security benefits with a payroll tax, even though such a tax is regressive, taking a higher portion of the earnings of lower-income people than higher-income people.  “FDR apparently wanted a payroll tax because it made Social Security seem more like a self-financing insurance plan and politically more difficult to later repeal.”  As FDR himself said, candidly, “`With those taxes in place, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.’” (FDR’s Folly, pp. 174, 179-80.)

In my previous essay “Socialist Insecurity” (Feb. 15, 2005), I maintained that instead of being called “Social Security,” the program ought instead to be called “socialist, insecure, shitty” because it is each of those things.

First, Social Security is socialist both in its origins and in its character.  “Social insurance” programs like Social Security originated in one of Europe’s most autocratic regimes, Germany in the 1870s.  As Jim Powell notes, “German socialists demanded that their government gain more power in the name of social justice, and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw that expanded government power would suit his very different purposes.  In 1881, Bismarck said, `Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect.’  Bismarck’s biographer A. J. P. Taylor added that `Social Security has certainly made the masses less independent everywhere.’”  Germany’s government-run retirement system began in 1889; by the early 20^th century, socialist governments in other European countries followed suit.  In the United States, many European immigrants agitated for the same kind of government-run pension systems they had known in their “old country”; Russian immigrant Isaac Rubinow was the most prolific and influential author promoting “social insurance” as a scheme for redistributing income in the name of “social justice.”  (FDR’s Folly, pp. 173-75.)

            Not only were the movers behind Social Security themselves socialist, but the program established by Congress in 1935 epitomizes socialism.  Rather than being a true insurance program, where individual Americans own their own pension funds, Social Security is a government-run monopoly that is funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, taking the money paid in taxes by working Americans and redistributing it to retirees.   No one “owns” their Social Security “account”; the “lock-box” that some demagogues imagine doesn’t exist, and the so-called “trust fund” also is a misrepresentation.  In reality, the so-called “trust fund” is completely controlled by the government, which uses the fund to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on the government for their basic needs in their retirement years.  The system uses force (the coercive power of government) to take money earned by some Americans (younger workers paying FICA taxes) and redistribute it to other Americans (retirees and other “beneficiaries”).  It is the epitome of a government program that takes property from A (one group of citizens) and redistributes it to B (another group of citizens).  Architects of the system deliberately used the terminology of private pension plans – terms like contributions, benefits, trust fund, etc. – to mask the true nature of Social Security, to create the myth that it is an insurance program rather than being what it really is, a socialist wealth-redistribution scheme. 

Second, Social Security is insecure because it is a government-run scheme in which no American owns his or her own retirement fund.  Rather, the entire scheme is at the mercy of politicians.  As Alex Epstein wrote in a 2005 op-ed: 

Under Social Security, every aspect of the government’s “promise” to provide financial security is at the mercy of political whim.  The government can change how much of an individual’s money it takes – it has increased the payroll tax 17 times since 1935.  The government can spend his money on anything he wants – observe the long-time practice of spending any annual Social Security surplus on other entitlement programs.  The government can change when (and therefore if) it chooses to pay him benefits and how much they consist of – witness the current proposals to raise the age cutoff or lower future benefits.  Under Social Security, whether an individual gets twice as much from others as was taken from him, or half as much, or nothing at all, is entirely at the discretion of politicians.  He cannot count on Social Security for anything – except a massive drain on his income.

 (Alex Epstein, “End Social Security,” The Ayn Rand Institute, January 18, 2005.)   

What could be more insecure than this Ponzi scheme that can be changed, by law, whenever Congress wishes!  (In two landmark cases, Flemming v. Nestor and Helvering v. Davis,  the U.S. Supreme Court ruled – correctly – that workers have no right to receive Social Security benefits.  Note also that most of the proposals to “fix,” or “reform,” Social Security offered by politicians take the form of either an increase in payroll taxes or a cut in benefits, by raising the retirement age, for example, or some combination of these.)  Income that derives from government largesse – in other words, income that derives from politicians using the coercive force of the law to transfer wealth from taxpayers to the “beneficiaries” of government programs – is based on nothing but the politicians’ promises.

Third, Social Security is, to put it bluntly, shitty – that is, the return on workers’ “investments” – the payroll taxes they pay into the scheme – is indeed shitty.  It offers a pathetically poor rate of return, compared to the other options individuals would have for investment if they controlled their own accounts.  If a younger worker today would invest a small portion of his Social Security payroll taxes (say $1000) into a private retirement account, the results would be staggering.  $1000 annually invested in the stock market, with its historical 10%-a-year average return compounded, would grow to more than $440,000 in 40 years.  In 50 years it would balloon to more than $1.15 million.  Those figures do not come from either a libertarian or conservative pundit; rather, they were cited by left-liberal Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, in a January 7, 2005 editorial in his paper denouncing ad campaign then being run by AARP (against President Bush’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security) as “an abuse of power by AARP leaders” who were engaged in scaremongering. 

            As Milton Friedman noted in his 1998 “Social Security Socialism” op-ed, a truly privatized system of individual retirement accounts would not only benefit participants in the system but the whole nation’s economy:  “If the corresponding sums had been accumulated by private individuals and not used to finance government spending, they would have been a real addition to the nation’s capital and not just a bookkeeping entry.  Those sums would have been invested in ways citizens or their advisers chose.  The end result would have been more productive investment, a larger stream of income and a freer, more responsible, more productive society.” 

            Instead, we have a socialist, insecure, and shitty program that is not only a drag on the nation’s economy but also is tantamount to grand larceny on an epic scale:  a system that uses force to deprive productive Americans of a significant portion of their income, and of the full future earning capacity of that income, in order to fund a retirement system with a pathetically dismal rate of return. 

Social Security is not only socialist, insecure, and shitty.  It is also unjust and unconstitutional.

            As a program that takes wealth earned by taxpayers and redistributes it to beneficiaries on the basis of their presumed “need,” Social Security also epitomizes the moral code of the 20^th-century welfare state – a moral code based on the Marxist slogan, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  In practice, implementation of that policy inevitably has lead to misery and destitution.  (Witness the history of communist societies, whether based on Christian, Marxist-Leninist, or Maoist dogmas, from the 17^th century to the present day.  Or consider the parable of the “Twentieth Century Motor Company” in Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged.)   

            The moral code of the welfare state is at odds with human nature – with individuals’ inherent desires to be free and to better their own lives – as well as with our society’s private morality, based on individual responsibility.  As David Kelley notes in his insightful book A Life of One’s Own, one of the tragic consequences of the welfare state is its basic assumption that the needs of recipients take precedence over the rights of producers – which means that “those with the ability to produce are obliged to serve, while those with needs are entitled to make demands” – resulting in “a public morality at odds with our private standards.”  (Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State (1998), p. 2.) 

Although the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal law creating Social Security, in its 5-4 decision in Stewart Machine Company v. Davis (1937), that decision was wrong, based upon an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution that ignored its essential context as a document creating a federal government of limited powers, enumerated in the Constitution.   The majority of the Court held, essentially, that Congress had an unlimited power to levy taxes and to spend tax revenues on whatever purpose it wished, notwithstanding the explicit enumeration of federal powers in the text of the Constitution.   A retirement system – whether a true insurance program or the kind of Ponzi scheme that Social Security really is – is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government. 

Social Security is doubly unconstitutional, when we consider that it not only exceeds the legitimate powers of the U.S. government as enumerated in the Constitution, but also deprives individuals of their rights (both their rights to property and to economic liberty), in violation of the Fifth Amendment due process clause of the Constitution.  The Social Security scheme, as noted above, is the epitome of a government program that takes property from A (one class of citizens) and gives it to B (another class of citizens).  In early American constitutional law, it was universally understood that such a law violates the essential rights that all individuals have in a free society.  Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, in the landmark early Court case, Calder v. Bull (1798), observed that a law contrary to the principles of natural justice – “an ACT of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first principles of the social compact” – cannot be valid; it “cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority.”  Among the examples of such blatantly unconstitutional laws that he gave were:  “a law that punished a citizen for an innocent action, or in other words, for an act, which, when done, was in violation of no existing law” [an “ex post facto” law]; “a law that destroys, or impairs, the lawful private contracts of citizens”; “a law that makes a man a judge in his own cause”; and – of course – “a law that takes property from A. and gives it to B.”  Chase added, “It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with SUCH powers; and therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it.” 

Real reform of Security Security – meaning privatization and eventual abolition of this horrid Congressionally-created Ponzi scheme – is inevitable, if the United States is to avoid total economic collapse.  Anyone who denies that Social Security faces fiscal crisis is in denial of reality, for the program is inevitably in conflict with demographic reality.  When the program was first enacted by Congress in 1935, the average life expectancy for 65-year-olds was only about 13 years.  The architects of Social Security assumed the program would remain solvent because they set the retirement age – the age at which benefits would begin to be paid – at 65, just a few years over the average life expectancy.  Over the past seventy years, although the retirement age has remained largely constant (Congress increased it to 67 in 1983), the average life expectancy has steadily increased.  In 1950, there were sixteen people working and paying Social Security taxes for every person receiving benefits.  By 1997, the ratio had declined to 3.3 people for every beneficiary; by the year 2020, the ratio will be less than two to one.  It’s plainly obvious that the system is a fiscal disaster; the only dispute is over exactly when the system will go bankrupt. 

As of May 2008 – that is, about a year ago, well before the explosive growth of the federal debt in recent months – an analysis by USA Today researchers estimated that the combined costs of federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs totaled an unprecedented $57.3 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t,” in other words, $57,300,000,000,000) – the equivalent of a $500,000 credit card debt for every American household.  When obligations of state and local governments are added, the total rises to $61.7 trillion, or $531,472 per household – more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.  The $61.7 trillion liability is, as an earlier article explained, “the amount that government needs now, stashed away and earning interest, to generate enough cash to pay future obligations.  The obligations are valued in today’s dollars and come due as early as in a few days, when Treasury bills mature, to as long as 75 years for Social Security and Medicare.”  (“Bill for taxpayers swells by trillions,” USA Today, May 19, 2008, and “Retiree benefits grow into `monster,’” May 25, 2006.)  The costs of Social Security and Medicare will skyrocket in the near future, as “baby boomers” – the 79 million people born between 1946 and 1964 – have already begun collecting Social Security, last year in 2008, and will begin collecting Medicare in 2011.

That’s pretty pricey (to horribly understate the problem) for a scheme that has no legitimate foundation in the Constitution – for a program created under an unconstitutional law, sanctioned by an erroneous Supreme Court decision, and sustained by a propaganda campaign run by demagogic politicians in league with special interest groups like the AARP.

It is a measure of how far the 20^th-century welfare state has corrupted American constitutional principles – how far it has undermined our commitment to individual freedom and responsibility, the responsibility each of us has over our own individual lives – that Social Security today is seen by many people as a “sacred cow,” rather than as the horribly unjust, immoral, and unconstitutional program it really is.  As Alex Epstein concluded in his recent op-ed, “Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable.  We should be debating, not how to save Social Security, but how to end it – how to phase it out so as to best protect both the rights of those who have paid into it, and those who are forced to pay for it today.  This will be a painful task.  But it will make possible a world in which Americans enjoy far greater freedom to secure their own futures.”

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday,  April 15, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Spring Briefs 2009

 

 It’s that time of year again – time for another series of “Spring Briefs” on MayerBlog.  As the spring weather heats up, so too do controversies in the world of politics and popular culture.  Here are my comments on some current developments:

 

 

n                 The Busybody-in-Chief 

            The new president, B.O., is commonly caricatured by cartoonists as having big ears.  Although his ears may be the most prominent feature of his head, physically, if he were to be portrayed metaphorically, in terms of his character, his most prominent feature would be his nose.  He just can’t stop sticking it into places it doesn’t belong.  The nation’s Demagogue-in-Chief is also the nation’s chief busybody, using the “bully pulpit” of his office – or perhaps I should say, his “bullshit pulpit” – to state his opinion on all sorts of matters that do not fall within the constitutional purview of the U.S. government.  Even before his inaugural, he criticized the BCS college football system, calling for national playoffs.  Since his inaugural, he has opined about a seemingly limitless variety of topics:  D.C. schools’ snow days (coming from Chicago, he thinks folks in D.C. are wimps when faced with winter weather); the Superbowl (he’s a Bears fan, but he picked the Steelers to win); Wall Street salaries (he – who signed into law the nearly-$1 trillion “stimulus” legislation – thinks corporate CEOs’ bonuses are “shameful”); and even the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (as part of ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, he picked North Carolina to win).  It’s only a matter of time before he declares the winner on American Idol. 

            What else can we expect from a president whose reactionary policies are hopelessly mired in the failed paternalistic approaches of the past?  From a politician who deceitfully promises “change” and yet who offers absolutely no new ideas, other than a radical expansion of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state? 

            President B.O., who took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” – even though he fumbled the oath, stumbling over its words at his splashy inaugural – ought to actually read the document.  If he did, he’d find that the legitimate powers of the U.S. government, including the powers of the president, are limited to just a few matters of concern to the national government, just a fraction of the business of America.  (In the famous words of that greatest 20^th-century president, Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business” – and it’s none of the damn business of the U.S. government.) 

  

n                 Daschle-ing through the Snow Job 

            In early February B.O.’s original nominee for the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle, withdrew himself from consideration (despite pundits’ assurances that his former colleagues in the Senate indeed would confirm him) because of continuing controversy over his failure to pay taxes.  As Charles Krauthammer noted in a Feb. 6 column, Daschle “had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.”  What Krauthammer was alluding to, of course, was the fact that news of Daschle’s tax problem surfaced after news of similar problems by other “tax-challenged” B.O. nominees, chiefly Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary.  (In retrospect, given Geithner’s failure as Treasury secretary, perhaps B.O. jettisoned the wrong nominee, a veteran crook over an incompetent tyro.) 

            The real scandal in Tom Daschle’s case, as Krauthammer adds (citing former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley), “isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal”:   

“Not paying taxes is one thing.  But what makes this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.  He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm.  But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist.  You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners or the Senate markup process.  You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence. . . . [Moreover, Daschle] made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm . . . .”

 

(“Well, that didn’t last long,” February 6.) 

            Krauthammer’s point is that Daschle’s tax problem – which really was an ethics problem – exposes the hypocrisy in B.O.’s campaign claim to dispense with Washington “politics as usual.”  Daschle’s influence-peddling “represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend,” Krauthammer notes.  That’s not surprising to those of us who saw through B.O.’s phony claims and promises to bring “change” to Washington for precisely what they were:  bullshit.

 

 n                 Fear-Monger-in-Chief 

            Yet another example of B.O.’s hypocritical bullshit has been his pledge (as stated repeatedly during his presidential campaign and then again in his inaugural address) to bring “hope” to Americans.  (“We have chosen hope over fear,” he pompously declaimed at his inaugural.)  Yet, in talking about the economy, he has used the most outrageous alarmist rhetoric:  he began on January 20 by describing the economy as “badly weakened,” then on January 23 said we’re experiencing “an unprecedented, perhaps, crisis,” which by January 30 had become a “continuing disaster for America’s working families.”  On the last day of January he said, :Rarely in history has our country faced economic problems as devastating as this crisis”; and a few days later, in early February, was saying the economy was “in desperate straits” and  that that “a failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” 

B.O. and his administration clearly were using this alarmist rhetoric to help build political support for his massive, nearly $1-trillion economic “stimulus” plan and for his ambitious plan to take advantage of the “crisis” to push through the greatest expansion of federal government power in U.S. history.  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, just after the election in November, brazenly spoke of the new administration’s “Rule one,” as he put it, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Europe a few weeks ago, urged her audience of leftist European activists to “never waste a good crisis,” suggesting that exploiting the current worldwide economic downturn could “have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security” – in other words, on advancing radical environmentalists’ anti-energy “green” agenda.  B.O. himself, in a radio address in early March, talked openly of exploiting the country’s hard times to “discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” 

Throughout history tyrants have used “crisis” rhetoric to expand their power:  Lenin and Stalin did it in the Russian communist revolution; Hitler did it to bring his National Socialist party to power in post-World War I Germany, while Mussolini similarly exploited national insecurity to bring his Fascist party to power in Italy.  The similar technique that B.O. utilized in his recent “State of the Union” address to Congress was astutely identified by Charles Krauthammer, in another one of his insightful columns, “Obama’s `Big Bang’ Agenda” (March 6).   Krauthammer writes of the “brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan”:  the president’s “rhetoric sleight of hand” in trying to claim that the current economic problems somehow were caused by the absence of his three ambitious legislative plans:  a program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as a goal.  “Amazing,” he writes:  “As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy.  As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest nonsequitur ever foisted upon the American people.”  The economic mess has nothing to do with the absence of universal health care, or the absence of “an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon tax, or the lack of college graduates; yet, “with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and in his budget that the essence of his presidency will be a transformation of health care, education and energy.”  Meanwhile, he has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the real problem, the banking crisis (or the housing and credit bubble whose bursting precipitated it). 

Notwithstanding the exaggerated rhetoric of B.O., his administration and their accomplices in the news media – who continually chant the mantra that we’re experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression – it can be argued that, in real terms, the present situation is actually no worse than the recession of 1982.  As my colleague Brad Smith noted in a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed (“Washington should halt its unhelpful financial `aid,’” Feb. 27), 

“The economy is bad, but unemployment (7.6 percent) remains substantially below its 1982 high of 10.8 percent, and economic forecasters predict it will peak well below 10 percent.  In fact, unemployment is still below the 1992 peak (7.8 percent) and the 1975 peak (9 percent). . . . Despite the president’s alarmist rhetoric, we are not even in the ballpark of the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent, exceeded 20 percent for 35 consecutive months, and did not fall below 14 percent until World War II and conscription of millions of people into the armed forces.”

 

The current short-term crisis is not unprecedented, but the president’s proposed response is:  not just billions but trillions in new government spending, coupled with talk of yet another major “stimulus” and of spending hundreds of billions more to nationalize health care.  As Smith concludes, “Each day the government seems to announce some new plan for interfering in our private affairs, including our finances and retirement planning.”  We have, under the current administration, “a frenetic, unsettling government that cannot stop doing something when the best thing it could do is to let what has been done already have a chance to work.”   

What B.O. is counting on is the same assumption that every socialist throughout history has made:  that capitalism is so resilient that, no matter what burdens government may place on the working of free economic markets, capitalists will still find a way, somehow, to make profits and thus bring the economy out of the current recession.  And that B.O. and the Democrat leaders in Congress can then claim credit for the recovery, by utilizing the post hoc, propter hoc logical fallacy – that simply because the recovery occurred after passage of their “stimulus” program, they can claim that it happened because of the stimulus (rather than, as is really the case, in spite of it).  The problem with this game plan is that B.O. and his administration may have gone too far with their alarmist rhetoric, turning their negative assessment of the economic crisis into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  

The real problem, though, isn’t with the alarmist rhetoric but with the misguided actions the president is taking.  It’s not mere coincidence that stock prices have continued to fall steadily since the election and since B.O. inauguration:  Wall Street is simply reacting rationally to the probable outcome of his policies – his actions, not his rhetoric – which logically, and inevitably, will not only fail to solve the financial crisis but will make our economic problems worse.  (It truly should be called “the B.O. Bear Market.”)  As Charles Krauthammer also noted in his March 6 column,  

“The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of

any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions – the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic – for enacting his `Big Bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.”

 

As Krauthammer concludes, B.O.’s agenda is “intellectually dishonest to the core”:  the “fraudulent claim” that health, education, and energy are both the cause of our financial collapse and its cure “is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”

 

 n                 Fawn-tasy Island 

            Although Charles Krauthammer has argued (in the above-mentioned Feb. 6 op-ed) that the new president’s “honeymoon” with Congress has ended – maintaining that the “legislative abomination,” the so-called “stimulus” bill, which was B.O.’s first signature program, has exposed the hypocrisy in the new administration’s “fairy tale” that it represented a different kind of politics – Krauthammer’s thesis doesn’t seem to apply to the national news media.  For them, the honeymoon’s not (yet) over:  members of the media are continuing their love affair with B.O., fawning over him – or (to use the apt word in the title of Bernard Goldberg’s new book) “slobbering” over him.  (See Goldberg’s A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.  Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris, in a Feb. 8 column, “Why Bernie Goldberg Has It Right,” notes that the book, “despite its long title,” is important to read, to understand how partisan the American media have become.)  

As one example of the national media’s B.O.-mania and bias in favor of the administration, consider NBC’s Today show the morning of Wednesday, February 25, the day after B.O.’s “State of the Union” address to Congress.  Matt Lauer’s teaser at the opening of the program repeated the Democrats’ mantra that the present economic situation is “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” presented a clip showing B.O.’s speech at its rhetorical height, and then asked, “But are the President’s proposals specific enough?  We’ll ask Vice President Joe Biden.”  Imagine the Today show anytime over the past eight years choosing former V.P. Dick Cheney as the principal commentator, giving his reactions to one of George W. Bush’s major speeches, and you’ll quickly realize the double standard of the news media and the favoritism they’re showing to the administration now that their guy’s in the White House. 

That same day, February 25, another segment on Today featured an interview with Mrs. B.O., Michelle, talking about life in the White House – a puff piece that epitomizes the way the network news (and especially NBC and MSNBC) have become virtual public-relations arms for the Democratic Party and the B.O. administration.  In so doing, the news media are abdicating their vitally important role to act as watchdogs over those wielding governmental power – a role that, at a minimum, requires them to act objectively, if not skeptically, rather than as fawning cheerleaders for the administration. 

The media has yet to realize that B.O., one of the least-qualified men ever elected president, is in way over his head (his admittedly large head), and that his presidency is based on nothing but bullshit (what I call “B.O.b.s.”).  In other words, the media have yet to make the obvious call that “The Emperor Is Naked!,” as I did in my Oct. 16  blog essay. 

  

n                 Hope for the GOP? 

            The national Republican Party – which arguably was the segment of the U.S. population that suffered most from the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and which then suffered from another near-fatal self-inflicted wound by nominating John McCainiac as its presidential candidate in 2008 – might finally be seeing the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel,” the key to its political comeback in the 2010 and 2012 elections.  That key may be found in, of all places, the GOP’s delegation in Congress, where every single Republican member of the House and all but three RINOs (Republicans in Name Only – Specter of Pennyslvania, Collins and Snowe of Maine) in the Senate voted “No” on B.O.’s first major signature legislation, the massive $787 billion “stimulus” bill (aptly called “porkulus” by conservative pundits).  The legislation has massive new government spending on health care, education, energy, and the environment – a “hodgepodge of government spending,” said Rep. Eric Cantor (R.-Va.).  Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute called the package a “Trojan horse” that houses “a combination of payoffs to different Democratic constituencies.” 

What the near-unanimous rejection of the $787 billion abomination means is that Republicans finally have found their long-lost limited-government principles and have begun to develop the political backbone they’ll need to stick to those principles.  Ironically, B.O. has united us – the opposition, that is – and has given us common cause in fighting against his misguided policies.

  

n                 Rush (Man of the) Hour 

Rush Limbaugh has been getting lots of free publicity lately, courtesy of the Democrats and their friends in the news media, who’ve been trying to demonize him in order to split Republicans and to stir up popular support for B.O.’s policies.  The FOBOs (friends of B.O., as I call them) have feigned outrage at Limbaugh’s supposed remarks about “wanting the president to fail,” but they took his words out of context.  As Rush explained in his inspiring talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in late February,  “What is so strange about being honest and saying, `I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?  Why would I want that to succeed?”  Bravo, Rush, bravo!  

The Democrats are right about one thing:  there is a struggle now going on in the Republican party.  But it’s not the personality conflict between Limbaugh or RNC chairman Michael Steele, over leadership; it’s a far more profound struggle between two camps that are competing, not just for control of the party, but for its very “soul” – for the principles that will guide the party into the 21^st century.  On one side are so-called “centrists” or “moderates” in the party who would concede the legitimacy of the welfare state and would make the GOP merely a watered-down, somewhat less socialistic version of the Democratic party.  On the other side are a coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, and free-market advocates who still value capitalism and the American free market system and who oppose on principle all efforts to move America further down the road to socialism.  What Rush Limbaugh has done, so eloquently in recent weeks, is to show Republicans which side offers victory – and hope for keeping alive the American dream.      

  

n                 It’s a Hit! – But Just a Bong Hit 

            One of the hot news stories (especially on newspapers’ sports pages, or in late-night comedians’ monologues) in early February focused on a photo of 23-year-old champion Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smoking from a marijuana pipe – aka a bong – at a private party in South Carolina.  Since the story broke, Phelps has been facing what arguably has been the greatest crisis of his career:  he was suspended from competing for three months by USA Swimming; he was dropped by one of his major sponsors, Kellogg Co.; he was threatened with criminal prosecution by a sheriff in South Carolina (who subsequently decided not to press charges); and, most recently, he’s endured a series of embarrassing interviews in which he’s been asked to apologize for his “mistake.” 

            It’s all much ado over nothing.  The only reason it’s a controversy is “reefer madness,” the continuing paranoia, or phobia, about marijuana – a naturally-existing drug that has many beneficial medicinal uses and which, when used recreationally, is no more harmful to users’ health than many legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco immediately come to mind), a drug that would be legal if the USA had sane drug laws, laws based on reason rather than irrational phobia.  USA Swimming, or any other sports authorities, arguably might have valid concerns if Phelps were using some sort of performance-enhancing drug – but that’s certainly not the case with marijuana, which has quite the opposite effect.  To put it bluntly, it’s none of USA Swimming’s damn business what Phelps does in his private life – whether he made one “mistake” by succumbing to peer pressure and taking a bong hit while partying with some other college-aged guys (as seems to be the case here) or whether he regularly smokes marijuana (as many other 23-year-olds do).   If it’s the latter, and he somehow manages to compete successfully – then all power to him, he really would be the greatest athlete of all! 

            Neither did Phelps’ singular “mistake” give Kellogg Co. a justifiable reason to terminate its sponsorship deal, apparently under some sort of “morals clause” in the contract, on the assumption that his scandalous behavior made him somehow less fit to be a “role model” for the kids who eat Kellogg’s cereals.  But what about all those dope users who also eat Kellogg’s cereals when they get the munchies?  The company seems to be thumbing its nose in their faces.  To their credit, almost all of Phelps’ other sponsors have decided to stand by their man, including Swiss watchmaker Omega (which issued a statement affirming it was “strongly committed” to its relationship with Phelps and calling the controversy a “nonissue” that concerned only Phelps’ “private life”), swimwear manufacturer Speedo (which called Phelps “a valued member of the Speedo team”), and Hilton Hotels Corp. 

            For those of us who’d like to see an end to reefer-phobia and to have both the government and sports authorities adopt rational drug policies, the lesson is clear:  Boycott Kellogg’s – and wear Omega watches and Speedos when staying in Hilton hotels.

 

 n                 Presti-digital-delaytion 

            Perhaps nothing better epitomizes the failure of the federal “Nanny State” than the U.S. government’s botched mandate to convert television broadcasts from analog to digital signals.  For most of the past year, U.S. TV watchers have been inundated with warnings about the “big switch” to take place on February 17, 2009 – but now it won’t take place until June 12, because members of Congress worried that millions of Americans weren’t ready for the switch.  So, in early February – barely two weeks before the original deadline – Congress voted to delay by four months the transition to digital. 

Like so many other problems in American society today, the problem was caused by Congress in the first place.  Rather than allowing the broadcast industry to modernize on its own – which would mean allowing the free-market system to work as it should, matching consumers’ demand with producers’ supply – Congress mandated the much-touted “new era in TV viewing” by forcing most of the nation’s broadcasters (all but a few low-power stations) to cease broadcasting analog signals and instead broadcast TV signals only in digital.  Despite the program’s self-serving propaganda (emphasizing the superiority of digital picture quality), Congress was motivated by more than a paternalistic regard for consumers’ welfare:  it also aimed at regaining control of the segment of the broadcast spectrum occupied by analog signals and redistributing that segment to other uses, including mobile broadband and public safety – which the U.S. government already had auctioned off, netting more than $20 billion for the U.S. Treasury.  ($20 billion used to be a great deal of money, but it’s now a drop in the bucket, compared to the nearly $1 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money the Democrat-controlled Congress recently spent in the “porkulus” legislation.) 

When Congress originally had decreed February 17 as the deadline date for the big switch, it also appropriated $1.3 billion for a program offering $40 coupons for American consumers to buy digital converter boxes.  (By an amazing coincidence, the average cost of the boxes ranges from $40 to $70.  Had the government not offered free coupons – up to two per U.S. household – to help “subsidize” the cost of the converter boxes, no doubt they’d be cheaper, by about $40, the cost by which the “free” coupons inflated the market price of the boxes.)  Now, as part of the recently-enacted “porkulus” legislation, more money will be spent to further inflate the cost of converter boxes, just so no American will be denied the opportunity to see B.O. give another televised address to the nation – or appear on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show to promote his dishonest agenda.  

 

 n                 Octo-Womb 

            The bio-medical ethics cottage industry has been stirred up over the past several weeks with the national debate over Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single California woman who gave birth to octuplets the last week of January.  The saga of Ms. Suleman has been slowly unwinding in the news, and each new revelation helps complete the picture of possibly the most irresponsible mother in the world today.  She is the biological mother of 14 children, all created through in-vitro fertilization:  the octuplets, whose birth resulted from the simultaneous implanting of six fertilized embryos in her womb, have six older brothers and sisters, ranging in age from 2 to 7.  Ms. Suleman is unemployed, and she depends on government welfare payments to support both herself and her huge family. 

            Ms. Suleman, or “Octowomb” as I call her (an apt name alluding to her single most famous accomplishment), epitomizes all that is wrong with the modern “welfare state” and the way in which it fosters, and even rewards, personal irresponsibility.  By all accounts, she is unfit to be a mother:  she lacks the wherewithal to provide minimally adequate care for her children, either financially or psychologically; indeed, she appears to be “mentally challenged,” to put it euphemistically, or to be a “nut,” to put it more bluntly, as testified by her own mother (who said in an interview that Nadja has been “obsessed” with having children since she was a teenager), the public-relations persons who have quit working on her behalf, and by her own well-publicized 911 phone call (the day she mislaid one of her children and called frantically, saying she’s “going to kill myself”).   

            As a libertarian, I’m uncomfortable with the state second-guessing parents’ child-rearing decisions, but I also believe government has a legitimate role in protecting the rights of children who are suffering from parental abuse or neglect (when objectively defined and proved by credible evidence).  And while I generally take a broad view of reproductive liberty (the freedom to procreate, or not to procreate), I consider that liberty – like all other aspects of liberty, rightly considered – to be limited by actions that are harmful to others.  Personal freedom goes hand-in-hand with personal responsibility.  Just because Ms. Suleman desperately wants to be a mother – and, apparently, has some sort of sick psychological “need” to be a mother (whether of one, two, six, or fourteen children) – should not entitle her, in the law, to be free to be so, relieved of the awesome responsibility that bringing any child into this world ought to entail.  Again, by all accounts, “Octowomb” is an unfit mother who doesn’t deserve to have custody of any of her manufactured children.  California child-welfare agencies should place these innocent victims of Ms. Suleman’s insanity in appropriate foster homes, giving them the chance to live healthy lives in the homes of fit adoptive parents.  And the fertility doctor who helped her realize her sick fantasy – the doctor who violated the professional guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) that limit the number of embryos to be implanted – ought to lose his state license to practice medicine.  Maybe he should be forced to take care of two or three of the pups from the litter he helped to create.

  

n                 Damn Socialist Tinkering 

            Once again, earlier this month, Americans were forced to undergo the inconvenience of setting all their clocks one hour ahead, to Daylight Saving Time (DST), as mandated by an act of Congress.   I’ve previously written about this misguided law, yet another one epitomizing the folly of government tinkering with virtually all aspects of our daily lives.  I’m pleased to see Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and usually a left-wing supporter of government tinkering in the economic sphere, in a recent column calling for the abolition of DST.  Noting how a reader has written him to complain how DST has interfered with her chickens laying eggs – in other words, as Neuharth puts it, “what this foul extra hour of early morning darkness means to her fowl” – he observes that now “chickens join parents of school-age children, farmers, city-folks with early morning jobs,” and others in opposition to the law, created by lobbyists for “the late-night crowd,” who pushed Congress to extend DST.  “Getting rid of DST would give most people – and chickens – something to crow about” (“Even chickens hate daylight saving time,” March 6).

  

n                 Twitter-dum and Dumber 

            There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the nation:  Twitter.  One uses Twitter to send “tweets,” or electronic notes (limited to no more than 140 characters), to one’s online friends, family, and other subscribers.  What’s really remarkable about the Twitter phenom is that its fans aren’t just young people who might find text-messaging too intellectually challenging.  Politicians and journalists have gone Twitter mad, too.  As Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, recently noted, several members of Congress were seen, during the president’s “State of the Union” speech, “hunched over their handheld devices madly tweeting, like fifth graders passing notes in the back of the class.”  One Republican Congressman from Virginia reported, “I am sitting behind Sens. Graham and McCain.” CNN’s Roland Martin, stuck at an airport in Chicago while trying to get back to snowed-in New York City, tweets, “No flights allowed in.  I was on plane in Chicago, we pulled out, got word, now back at gate.”  And NBC’s Ann Curry, in the snow-bound city, reported: “All Stars are not the proper shoes for NYC today.  But seeing this dark city frosted in white is worth my cold toes.”  That’s, I suppose, what passes for eloquence in the world of “tweets.” 

But Pitts’ criticism of this phenomenon truly is eloquent.  As he writes, “In the 90s, you often heard people complain of how memoir writers and afternoon talk shows had turned our public spaces into a communal confessional, intimate secrets once necessary for whispering now shouted into the other like an order at a fast-food joint.  Ten years later, we are not just sharing secrets; we are sharing lives.  And not the good parts, either, but the banal, the mundane, the everyday. . . . Now here is Twitter, which encourages you to narrate your life in real time as opposed to, well . . . living it.  I’m sorry, but include me out.  I will never Twitter you.  In the first place, you have better things to do.  In the second, I am not that interesting.  No one is.”

  

n                 Idol Speculations 

            Another new season – the 8^th, believe it or not – of American Idol has been airing on Fox TV, to continued high ratings.  As in past seasons, the news media has tried to stir up controversies, even where there really aren’t any.  First were the stories about the new, fourth judge, Kara DioGuardi, whose main purpose seems to be functioning (somehow) as a calming influence on Paula Abdul.  Then came stories about the new “twists,” or “tweaks,” in the rules this year:  resurrection of the old rule allowing the judges to pick “wild card” slots (only 9 of the top 13 finalists were picked by the viewing public), coupled with a new rule allowing the four judges to “save” one finalist from being eliminated prematurely (a rule that in practice, thus far, seems downright tacky, as it means that each finalist not “saved” by the judges gets to be rejected twice, first by the viewers and then by the judges).  Then came the Internet rumors that one of the finalists (guess which one) is – gasp! – gay.  Finally, just this week, came the even juicier Internet chatter (a rumor spread, perhaps deliberately, by an “A.I.” staffer) that the show’s producers have already picked the final four contestants – allegedly Danny Gokey, Alexis Grace, Adam Lambert, and Lil Rounds – and have somehow “fixed” the show so that one of these four will win.  (It’s a rumor already proven at least partially false when Alexis Grace was eliminated this week.) 

            The finalists this year are generally a talented group, but once again (like last year) the men seem more talented than the women.  Lil Rounds impresses me as the strongest of the female singers, but any one of three guys – either Danny Gokey, Adam Lambert, or Matt Giraud – could emerge as the best.  I like Adam Lambert, who is both a superb singer and a smooth (yet flamboyant) performer, thanks to his background in musical theater (wink, wink).  But, despite his devoted fan base (they have to be devoted in order to still vote for him after his outrageous performance of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire this week), I don’t see him as the winner.  I also like Danny Gokey, mainly because he wears glasses; he’ll go far in the competition – perhaps all the way to the final two – because his singing talent is coupled with a moving “back story” (his sorrowful loss of his wife, who died during heart surgery just a month before his audition).  But I’ll stick my neck out and predict, as my pick for the final winner, Matt Giraud.  Matt is a fellow Michigander (originally from Ypsilanti, he’s now a piano player and has “a gal” – a girlfriend, that is – in Kalamazoo).  Nicknamed “White Chocolate” when he was a kid performing soulfully in gospel choir, he seems like a cross between Michael Bublé and Billy Joel (especially when he’s playing at the piano).   Best of all, he’s a true dark horse contestant, one of the four “wild card” finalists, whom none of the pundits picked as a stand out at the beginning of the season – just the sort of guy who’ll really shake up expectations as the show continues to surprise viewers. 

  

  | Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday,  March 19, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer

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Rating the U.S. Presidents – 2009

 

 

Another annual tradition on MayerBlog is my mid-February “Presidents Day” essay discussing my rating of the U.S. presidents.  As I explained in my original post (“Rating the U.S. Presidents,” February 13, 2004), my rating system differs from others in deemphasizing “leadership” per se and instead emphasizing fidelity to the Constitution.  I do use the same six categories as other rating systems – “Great,” “Near-Great,” “Above-Average,” “Average,” “Below-Average,” and “Failures” – and then (with some exceptions) arrange the presidents chronologically within each category.  I revised the ratings slightly in 2005 and 2006, as follows:

• “Great” presidents:  Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln

• “Near-Great” presidents:  Madison, Monroe, Cleveland

• “Above-Average” presidents:  Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Coolidge, Reagan

• “Average” presidents:  Adams (both), Harrison (both), Garfield, Arthur, Fillmore, Hayes, Pierce, Taylor, Tyler, Taft, Harding, Kennedy, Ford

• “Below-Average” presidents:  Buchanan, A. Johnson, Grant, Eisenhower, McKinley, Hoover, Truman, Carter, Bush (both)

• “Failures”:  Roosevelt (both), Wilson, L. Johnson, Nixon, Clinton

(For an explanation of each category, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), and for easier access to my individual summaries of each president, see “Rating the U.S. Presidents (Reprise) (Feb. 7, 2007).) 

As I’ve previously noted, my “Rating the U.S. Presidents” essays are also perhaps the most controversial pieces I post on this site.  Everyone seems to have an opinion about the best – and the worst – presidents in American history, and many people (including some libertarian friends who generally see eye-to-eye with me on most political matters) are not shy about e-mailing me to express their disagreement with my ratings.  In my 2006 essay, I defended my rating of Lincoln as “great,” in answer to some modern libertarian critics of Lincoln (see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “Abraham Lincoln: Why He’s Great”), a topic on which I elaborated somewhat in my last entry, in honor of this year’s bicentennial of Lincoln’s birthday.  And last year, although I left my ratings still unchanged, I focused on the U.S. president whom I’ve put at the bottom of the list of “Failures,” the one I consider the worst U.S. president ever, Bill Clinton.  So many people of various political stripes (left-liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc.), both defenders and detractors of Clinton, disagreed with my rating that I felt it necessary to explain the reasons why I regard “Slick Willie” as the worst president – reasons I continue to give in justifying my conclusion that he’ll remain the worst president, ever.  See “The Worst U.S. President” (Feb. 15, 2008). 

This year, I’m making one important change to the ratings.  Although in past years I defended my rating of the former president, George W. Bush (or “Bush the Younger,” as I refer to the 43^rd President) as merely “below average” – again see “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “George W. Bush: A Great Disappointment, But Not a Failure” – I’ve decided, now that his two terms in office have passed, to downgrade his rating, to “failure,” for the reasons discussed below. 

            I also include a review of the recently-published book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, by Ivan Eland (Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, 2009).   

You’ll notice that I have not included the new president, B.O., who was just inaugurated as few weeks ago, for the obvious reason that it’s too soon to fairly assess his presidency.  (This is the one and only time I’ll show generosity toward B.O., whom I regard as the worst sort of bullshit artist, a slick politician who has the audacity to call his reactionary policies – essentially, nothing but a massive increase in the federal regulatory/welfare state – “change.”  As a popular witticism says, the only “change” the new president will bring will be the few cents left in the value of the dollar when his policies are implemented.)  Perhaps next year I will include him.  I will note, however, how I anticipate rating him.  As arguably the least-qualified man ever elected president, I expect he will rate no better than “below average.”  And if the dire consequences that I fear from his presidency do come to pass (see my previous essays on “the tyranny of bullshit,” in “2009: Prospects for Liberty,” Part I (January 15) and Part II (January 26)), then I think he will join his two predecessors in being rated yet another “failure.”

 

  

George W. “Bailout” Bush:  Yup, He’s a Failure

 

             Just three years after I defended my earlier rating of “Bush the Younger” as merely “below average” (insisting, as I did then, that calling him a “failure” gave him too much credit), why am I now downgrading him to the “failure” class (ranking him as even more of a failure than Nixon but not quite as bad as Clinton)?   I could say that, now that all eight years of his two terms are over, it’s possible to evaluate the full record of his presidency.  But that answer raises another question:  What, if anything, did Bush do wrong during his last three years in office, that would justify classifying him as a “failure”?  There’s a simple, one-word answer to that question – one that some commentators have now fastened onto Bush as a kind of nickname:  Bailout.  As I observe in my summary of Bush’s presidency below, 

What ultimately made his presidency not merely “below average” but a true failure was his administration’s massive, $700 billion “bailout” of Wall Street, following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 – a crisis precipitated by Bush’s own Treasury secretary’s dire Apocalyptic rhetoric.  In doing so, he not only practically destroyed limited-government conservatism in the modern Republican party but also set in motion a series of events that threatens to undermine American capitalism by converting our semi-socialist “mixed economy” into full-blown socialism, under Bush’s successor, the current occupant of the White House.  Finally, to “Bailout” Bush’s lasting infamy, he left a record of dangerous expansion of executive power and undermining the rule of law – a record that actually built upon the disastrous legacy of his predecessor, Clinton.

 

            Bush’s disastrous economic policy has been aptly described as “disaster socialism,” by the editors of Reason magazine, in the lead article in the January 2009 issue (“Exit, Stage Left: Bush’s disaster socialism”).  Like the apologists for FDR who claim that his New Deal programs “saved capitalism,” at the price of undermining the constitutional system of limited government upon which capitalism depends, George W. Bush himself – in a December interview on CNN – by his own admission “abandoned free-market principles” in order (he alleged) to “save the free-market system.”  That admission speaks volumes about Bush’s failings – his shameful lack of understanding about capitalism (perhaps not surprising, given Bush’s M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School), as well as the American system of limited government.  He didn’t merely abandon free-market principles; he failed to have them in the first place, because he had no idea what these principles are.   

            Bush’s comment also highlights the trait that marked both the strongest and weakest features of his presidency:  Bush’s supreme sense of self-confidence, bordering on cockiness.  To his credit, he was not at all swayed by public opinion – in this sense, he was almost the opposite of his predecessor, Clinton, whose constant craving to be popular meant that the policies of his administration were practically determined by opinion polls.  Bush never let poor popularity ratings dissuade him from policies he thought were right – which is fine, when he was right (in cutting taxes, for example), but was most unfortunate, when he was wrong (as he was in deciding to “bail out” Wall Street) and stubbornly continued to pursue failed policies.

  

 

Reviewing Recarving Rushmore:

Why I Disagree with Many of Ivan Eland’s Ratings

  

Like my ratings (fully set out, in revised form, below), the system of ratings used by Ivan Eland in his recently-published book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, 2009), challenges the conventional view of the U.S. presidents.  He too rejects the conventional view that equates presidential activism with greatness and instead emphasizes fidelity to constitutional limits on presidential power.  He emphasizes three values – peace, prosperity, and liberty – and rates the presidents according to how well they did in promoting those values.  The emphasis on prosperity (that is, on free markets) and liberty yield generally predictable results, but Eland’s ratings yield some surprising results overall because of his emphasis on the third factor, peace – a peculiarity of Eland’s analysis, explained by the facts that his think tank, the Independent Institute, is generally aligned with the pacifist, non-interventionist wing of the modern libertarian movement and that Eland himself is director of the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty. 

Eland ranks the presidents into five categories: “excellent,” “good,” “average,” “poor,” and “bad.”  Given his emphasis on peace, he rates highest those presidents who not only limited the powers of the federal government and the executive branch, staying within the limits the Framers intended (as viewed by Eland), but also those who kept the United States out of war and who pursued a foreign policy of isolationism.  Thus, his four highest-rated presidents – the only four he rates as “excellent” – were all 19^th-century presidents:  Tyler, Cleveland, Van Buren, and Hayes, in that order.  (Yes, that means that Eland’s No.1-ranked president was the relatively obscure John Tyler, the Whig who resided in the White House for one term, 1841-45.  Tyler also was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency, after the Whig elected president in 1840, the war hero William Henry Harrison, died only 31 days after his inaugural.)  These four men – Tyler, Cleveland, Van Buren, and Hayes – are the ones Eland would prefer to see honored at Mount Rushmore (hence the book’s title, Recarving Rushmore), precisely because they were so “bland.”  As Eland summarizes their achievements,  

“[T]hey largely respected the Constitution’s intention of limiting government and restraining executive power, especially in regard to making war.  They realized that America is great not because of its government’s activism at home and abroad, but because of the hard work and great ideas of private American citizens living in freedom.  In other words, they realized that peace, prosperity, and liberty are best achieved by the framer’s notion of restricting government power.”

 

And, he adds, most of them – three of the top four (with Cleveland being the exception) – served only one term. 

What about the four presidents actually honored by the monument at Mount Rushmore?  Only one – George Washington – rates as “good,” according to Eland’s analysis.  Washington “grabbed more presidential power and made the federal government more active than most of the framers of the Constitution had envisioned,” and he set some bad precedents, including “unconstitutionally crushing the Whiskey Rebellion in 1793.”  Eland nevertheless ranks Washington “a respectable seventh” place because “he had republican intentions, shunning being a king or dictator, and set a most valuable precedent by leaving office after two terms.”  As for the other three on Mount Rushmore, Eland rates Teddy Roosevelt as “poor” (at No. 21 in his rankings), and both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as “bad” (at Nos. 26 and 29, respectively).   

Some other surprises found in Eland’s ratings:  Jimmy Carter ranks as “good,” among the top ten (at No. 8), whom Eland sees as “the best modern president.”  Rounding out Eland’s top ten, the other presidents in the “good” category, are Arthur, Harding, Eisenhower, and Coolidge.  He sees Bill Clinton as “average” (at No. 11), joining John Quincy Adams, Taylor, and Fillmore in that category.  Of the early presidents, John Adams ranks highest, rating as “poor” (and ranked at No. 22); both Madison and Monroe join their fellow Virginians, Washington and Jefferson, as falling into Eland’s lowest category, of “bad” presidents.  Dead last in his rankings – the worst U.S. president according to his analysis – is Woodrow Wilson.  Except for Carter, Clinton, Coolidge, and Eisenhower, all the 20^th-century presidents (along with George W. Bush) rank as either “poor” or “bad.”  “W” comes in at No. 36, with only four presidents – Polk, McKinley, Truman, and Wilson – ranked lower. 

            Eland’s analysis is at its best when discussing domestic policy – especially when he critiques those 20^th-century presidents who abused presidential powers and expanded the scope of federal powers, to create the modern regulatory/welfare state.  He ranks Woodrow Wilson as last – the worst of the “bad” presidents – because Wilson was “the most interventionist president in U.S. history,” not just in foreign policy (bringing the U.S. into World War I) but also in domestic policy, with his “New Freedom” legislative agenda of government intervention in the economy that “laid the groundwork” for FDR’s New Deal.  Eland goes relatively easy on Teddy Roosevelt, whom he calls “charismatic” but “overrated,” “a less consequential president than his dull predecessor, William McKinley”; nevertheless, he criticizes T.R. not only for his “excessively belligerent” foreign policy but also for championing “progressive” policies – such as his “trust-busting” campaign – that unconstitutionally expanded government and harmed the country.   

            Perhaps the best chapter in the book is the one on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Eland justly criticizes for his “Mussolini-style corporatism” that expanded the welfare state and abused executive power.  Eland excoriates FDR for bringing the U.S. into World War II – arguing that FDR “lied the United States into a massive war that he intentionally helped to provoke and allied himself with a dictator, Joseph Stalin, who killed more people than Adolph Hitler” – but his most solid criticisms of FDR concern his domestic program.  Eland concludes, “FDR’s New Deal had no coherent philosophy, wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, and cemented the expectation of permanent big government in the minds of the American public.  He actually deepened and prolonged the Great Depression by pursuing such activist government policies rather than letting natural market forces correct the economic slowdown.”  All this is a valuable history lesson, especially for today’s policy-makers (President B.O. and the Democrat-controlled Congress) who seem hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the 1930s.   

            Eland is also good in criticizing late-20^th-century presidents who further expanded the federal regulatory/welfare state:  especially Lyndon B. Johnson, whose “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” not only irresponsibly wasted trillions of dollars but also “created a permanent underclass, dependent on the government for its livelihood”; and Richard M. Nixon, whose bad domestic policies – including wage and price controls, inflationary monetary policy, Keynesian spending programs, the federal “war on drugs,” and the creation of new regulatory agencies like the EPA, OSHA, and CPSC – not only ruined the economy but also expanded government as much, or more, than his predecessor’s.  

            Eland’s analysis suffers from serious flaws, however, when he discusses 19^th-century presidents.  He is most unfair in discussing Thomas Jefferson, whom he rates as a “bad” president because of the precedents he set with the Louisiana Purchase, his Indian policy, and the Embargo, calling Jefferson “a hypocrite on limited government.”  Here Eland repeats the false charge of hypocrisy that has been made by Jefferson’s critics, from his time to the present day: that the Louisiana Purchase contradicted Jefferson’s “strict constructionist” principles (that is, his strict reading of the power-granting clauses of the U.S. Constitution).  As I have shown in my book The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (1994), Jefferson’s actions regarding the Louisiana Purchase confirm, rather than contradict, his constitutional scruples.  (It was Jefferson himself who urged a constitutional amendment to sanction the Purchase, to “set an example” against broad construction of federal powers, even though under Jefferson’s own theory of constitutional interpretation the power to acquire new territory clearly fell under the federal government’s treaty-making power.)  Eland’s real objection to the Purchase seems to be his absurd argument that Jefferson “violated” Indians’ rights by purchasing lands they (rather than France) “owned” and then pushing them westward as Americans settled the territories – an attempt to scapegoat Jefferson by indicting him for the U.S. government’s Indian policy over the entire 19^th century (including the actions taken by Andrew Jackson and other successors).  The Embargo on foreign trade in Jefferson’s second term did drastically curtail Americans’ economic freedom, but the draconian enforcement powers Jefferson exercised as president were authorized by Congress pursuant to its constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce.  The Embargo was a failed experiment in economic coercion to help avert war – it failed because war eventually came, the War of 1812 during the administration of Jefferson’s successor, Madison – but it was not inconsistent with Jefferson’s constitutional principles, which included the exercise of federal power in “its whole constitutional vigor.”       

            Eland is similarly unfair in his criticisms of Jefferson’s two successors – his fellow Virginia Republicans, James Madison and James Monroe – whom he also rates as “bad” presidents chiefly because of their foreign policy.  He blames Madison for the War of 1812, which he calls “an unnecessary and avoidable war,” although it was authorized by a Congressional declaration.  And he excoriates Monroe for his foreign policy (his famed “Monroe Doctrine,” which advocated European non-interference with the Americas) as well as for his support of U.S. westward expansion (including his continuation of Jefferson’s policy of what Eland calls “ethnically cleansing” Indian lands).  Just as he holds Jefferson responsible for 19^th-century Indian policy, he holds Monroe’s Doctrine responsible for U.S. interventionist foreign policy in the 20^th century. 

            Eland’s criticisms of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe illustrate the fundamental flaw in his analysis:  his misunderstanding of the proper scope of presidential powers in the realm of foreign policy.  Eland is a pacifist who allows his preference for peace to bias his view of presidential war powers; he confuses pacifism with constitutionalism, ignoring the fact that war is a legitimate exercise of federal government powers (at least when properly initiated by Congressional action).  He also would deny to U.S. presidents their full constitutional authority over diplomacy with foreign governments, which is a legitimate part of the “executive power” granted to the president under Article II of the Constitution.  As a result, he’s unjustifiably harsh in his critique of presidents who lead the country into war, even when they followed the proper constitutional procedure of asking Congress for a declaration of war.  He does this not only with regard to “Mr. Madison’s War” (as his Federalist political enemies called the War of 1812) but also with regard to the Mexican-American War, for which he excoriates James K. Polk and his “aggressive land-grabbing policies.”  Given his pacifism, it’s not surprising that Eland views “Manifest Destiny” with nothing but contempt and thus negatively grades any U.S. president who contributed to American westward expansion. 

As I discussed in my previous entry (“A Bicentennial Defense of Abraham Lincoln,” Feb. 5), Eland also shares with some other libertarian scholars an unfortunate agenda to demonize Abraham Lincoln – failing to understand the extraordinary nature of the secession crisis (a crisis that threatened not only the American Union but also the future of the republican form of government) and exaggerating the effects of Lincoln’s assertion of executive powers in putting down the Southern Rebellion.  Eland concludes his chapter on Lincoln with this extraordinary assertion:  “Instead of choosing war, Lincoln should have let the South go in peace, as the abolitionists advocated, or prior to the conflict, offered southerners compensated emancipation of slaves.  Under the first option, industrialization and rising moral objections likely would have peaceably eliminated slavery in the South – as they did in most other places in the world – helped out by a slave haven in the free North.”  That huge bit of speculative “alternative history” is totally unsupported by historical facts:  As the Confederate Constitution shows, Southern slave-owning secessionists didn’t simply want to be let alone; they demanded their “right” to expand their ownership of slaves into the western territories and even into free states they visited.  If the Civil War had not been fought, war between the United States and the Confederate States probably would have been inevitable – and Eland probably would have criticized Lincoln (or his successors) just as severely for getting the U.S. involved in that hypothetical war, too. 

Overall, Eland’s book is a provocative reassessment of the American presidency.  Like other ratings of the U.S. presidents (including my own, I admit), unfortunately it suffers from the author’s bias – in Eland’s case, his bias toward pacifism, which is (as I’ve noted above) so strong that he confuses constitutionalism with presidential weakness on matters of foreign policy and national security.  As Justice Robert Jackson once famously wrote, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact”:  it does not oblige U.S. presidents to refrain from exercising their legitimate powers (including presidential diplomatic and war powers) to safeguard the nation.

 

  

Rating the U.S. Presidents IV (3^rd Revised Version)

  

And so, with no further ado, here are my revised ratings of the U.S. Presidents. 

  

  

The “Great” Presidents

 

• George Washington:  He carefully exercised his powers as president, aware that he was setting precedents, the most important of which was the precedent of stepping down after two terms.

 

• Thomas Jefferson:  As I have argued in my book The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson and in various articles (see especially my essay on Jefferson in The Presidency: Then and Now, edited by Phillip Henderson), more than any other president since Washington, Jefferson took seriously constitutional limits, particularly the separation of powers.  Thus, as president, he respected Congress’s war power (in waging the Barbary War, the first U.S. foreign war).  He replaced the State-of-the-Union address to Congress with a written annual message (a tradition that lasted until Wilson’s presidency in the early 20^th century); he also refused to issue presidential proclamations declaring days of prayer or thanksgiving, because he viewed the First Amendment religion clause as (in his famous words) “a wall of separation between church and state” (a constitutional scruple which, unfortunately, few of his successors have shared).  And he even came close to jeopardizing his greatest success as president – the addition of the Louisiana Purchase territory to the U.S. – because he proposed a constitutional amendment (although an amendment was not necessary, even under Jefferson’s strict theory) “to set an example” against broad interpretation of federal powers under the Constitution.  (I know of no other president who so valued constitutional fidelity.) 

 

• Abraham Lincoln:  He not only saved the Union – the peculiar status of the United States as a nation comprised of states – but also republican government, by enforcing the rule that the minority must acquiesce in the legitimate decisions made by the majority, a rule necessary for republican government to survive.  Although he did so at horrible costs – the bloodiest war in American history, accompanied by expanded governmental powers and curtailed civil liberties – Lincoln did not violate the Constitution lightly.  (Indeed, given the extraordinary crisis faced by the nation during his presidency, what was remarkable was the degree to which he generally adhered to the limits imposed by the Constitution on his office and national powers generally.)

 

 

The “Near-Great” Presidents

 

• James Madison and James Monroe (tie):   Jefferson’s successors – and fellow Virginia Republicans – they each earned kudos for using the veto power to kill unconstitutional legislation, particularly “internal improvements” bills (bills to build roads or canals, the paradigm “porkbarrel” projects of the time).  Madison’s additional claim to greatness as president was his leadership during the War of 1812, arguably the American war that did least damage to the Constitution; but detracting from his greatness was his decision to sign into law the bill chartering the Second Bank of the United States – a position contradicting his opposition to the First Bank in the 1790s – because (he rationalized) the American people had tacitly consented to the broadening of Congressional powers.  Monroe shared with Jefferson a stricter interpretation of federal powers, requiring explicit amendment (not mere tacit consent) to go beyond those enumerated in the Constitution – the correct interpretation.

 

• Grover Cleveland:  The last Jeffersonian president (and the last good Democrat to hold the office), he aggressively used the veto power against private bills and other unconstitutional legislation.  In vetoing a bill in 1887 that would have appropriated $10,000 to aid drought-stricken farmers in Texas, he uttered the memorable words, “though the people support the Government; the Government should not support the people.”  He cut taxes as well as spending, he supported the gold standard, and he opposed protective tariffs.

 

 

“Above Average” Presidents

 

• Andrew Jackson:  Although he pushed the envelope in his exercise of presidential powers (earning the nickname “King Andrew” to his Whig opponents), he deserves great credit for vetoing the bill rechartering the Bank of the United States on constitutional grounds, thereby not permitting Chief Justice John Marshall’s over-broad interpretation of federal powers (in McCulloch v. Maryland) to constrain the president’s exercise of his duties under the Constitution.

 

• Martin Van Buren:  Notwithstanding the fact he was the first professional politician to serve as president, he was remarkably consistent in his adherence to limited-government Jeffersonian principles.

 

• James Polk:  He realized the United States’ “Manifest Destiny” by waging war against Mexico, after Congress officially declared it; and believing a two-term presidency promoted corruption, he served only one, as he had pledged he would.

 

• Calvin Coolidge:  The greatest president of the 20^th century because he did the least damage to the Constitution. “Silent Cal” earns bonus points for being a man of few words (although they include another one of the most profound truths uttered by an American president: “The business of America is business”), and for his lack of political ambition in declining to seek an additional term.

 

• Ronald Reagan:  Although his rhetoric was splendid (“Government is not the solution; government is the problem,” he declared in his first Inaugural Address on January 20, 1981) and promised a conservative revolution, Reagan’s administration disappointed those of us who hoped for real reforms actually cutting the size of the federal government.  Rather, he succeeded only in reducing the rate of growth in domestic spending.  But he did get Congress to significantly cut income tax rates, resulting in greater freedom for productive Americans (the freedom to keep the wealth we earn) and the economic boom of the 1990s.  And (his greatest legacy) by rebuilding U.S. military strength and by standing up to the Soviet Union, he won the Cold War – bringing about the collapse of Soviet communism and ending the greatest threat to national security (and world peace) of the 20^th century.

 

 

“Average” Presidents

 

• John Adams and John Quincy Adams:  The first father-son team to serve (in single terms, 25 years apart) in the White House, each had a mixed record as president.  The elder Adams, on the negative side, signed into law the blatantly unconstitutional Sedition Act of 1798; but on the positive side, he eventually stood up to the Hamiltonian Federalists and avoided war with France, leaving eight years of peace and prosperity to his successor, Jefferson.  The younger Adams began his presidency under a cloud which never fully dissipated: the 1824 election was decided by the House of Representatives, under circumstances that led to the charge of a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay, which helped contribute to Andrew Jackson’s success in 1828.  On the positive side, his administration coincided with one of the greatest “feel-good” moments in American history:  the 50^th anniversary of American independence (and, significantly, the day both his father and Jefferson died).

 

• William Harrison and James Garfield:  One died of pneumonia a few weeks after his inaugural, the other murdered by an assassin, both had very brief terms – and thus did very little damage to the Constitution.

 

• Chester Arthur, Millard Fillmore, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford Hayes, Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, and John Tyler (tie, in alphabetical order):  These unremarkable, unmemorable mediocrities typify the “average” American president.

 

• William Taft:  The heftiest president, his chief contribution to the presidency (presiding over a comparatively conservative interlude between the two “Progressive” presidencies of TR and Wilson) was overshadowed by his post-presidency service as Chief Justice of the United States.

 

• Warren Harding:  As my friend Brad Smith pointed out in a August 2, 1993 article in the Columbus Dispatch, Harding does not deserve the bum rap he’s been given by historians who associate him only with corruption and scandals (Teapot Dome pales in comparison to Watergate or “Clintongate”).  His administration returned the U.S. to “normalcy” – among other things, greater economic freedom and prosperity, civil rights protections, and lower taxes – after the draconian wartime presidency of Wilson.

 

• John Kennedy:  On the plus side, he got Congress to cut income tax rates (thereby reducing somewhat the injustice of steeply progressive taxation) and he led the U.S. through the Cuban missile crisis without starting World War III.  But on the negative side, he committed thousands of American military advisers to South Vietnam – and thus got us sucked into that conflict.  Were it not for the premature end of his presidency due to his assassination, he would be remembered as an unremarkable one-term president, the last president before the “Goldwater Revolution.”  (OK, OK – can’t I indulge in some wishful thinking?)

 

• Gerald Ford:  Although he restored honor to the presidential office in the wake of Nixon’s resignation, as well as acted wisely in refusing to bail New York City out of bankruptcy (“Ford to N.Y.: Drop Dead,” as the New York Post headline sourly announced), his administration continued the disastrous fiscal policies of his predecessor – resulting in a significant inflation problem, which Ford thought he could solve by having Americans wear buttons reading “W.I.N.” (“Whip Inflation Now”).  On the positive side, his administration coincided with another landmark “feel-good” event:  the American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.  (And disco!)

 

 

“Below Average” Presidents

 

• James Buchanan:  His acquiescence to the secession of Southern states left his successor, Lincoln, with the greatest crisis ever faced by an American President – a crisis that Buchanan helped precipitate by his inappropriate reference, in his inaugural address, to the Supreme Court’s upcoming Dred Scott decision.  His presidency was marked by his utter failure to take responsibility for his actions, or inactions – and his too-ready tendency to pass the buck to others.

 

• Andrew Johnson:  Politically inept and dominated by his biases (including racial prejudice and class-envy), he openly defied Congressional Reconstruction policies through unprecedented use of the “bully pulpit” and aggressive use of the presidential veto power – prompting Congress to impeach him and almost remove him from office.

 

• Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower (tie):  Great generals in wartime, mediocre presidents in peacetime.  Grant presided over an administration in which corruption was rampant; Eisenhower’s main claim to fame was the Interstate Highway System, which continues to be one of the biggest pieces of “pork” in American history.