Friday, February 12, 2010
Palin Exposes the Tea Partiers' True Colors
Why trading liberty for security is not consistent with a limited government philosophy.
The tea party movement started as a welcome protest against the alarming growth of federal spending and federal control. It had a strong anti-statist flavor, or seemed to. But judging from the applause for Sarah Palin at its convention, the movement's suspicion of government power is exceeded only by its worship of government power.
Her keynote address at last week's gathering in Nashville may have been the curtain raiser on a 2012 presidential campaign. "I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country," she told Fox News when asked about that option.
I'm glad it was she and not I who first used the word "absurd" in relation to a possible Palin bid for the White House. Because if her speech made anything clear, it's that the shallow, ill-informed, truth-twisting demagogue seen in the 2008 presidential campaign is all she is and all she wants to be.
When it comes to economic affairs, the tea partiers agree that—as Palin put it—"the government that governs least, governs best." When it comes to war and national security, however, her audience apparently thinks there is no such thing as too much government.
The conventioneers applauded when Palin denounced Obama for his approach to the war on terrorists. Why? Because he lets himself be too confined by the annoying limits imposed by the Constitution. "To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law," she declares.
Is her point that Obama is allergic to the use of military power or can't bear to fulfill his responsibility as head of the armed forces? That would come as a surprise to Iraqis, who have seen Obama stick to President Bush's timetable for withdrawal.
Hurtling Down the Road to Serfdom
Do we want a culture of takers or makers?
Hayek meant that governments can't plan economies without planning people's lives. After all, an economy is just individuals engaging in exchanges. The scientific-sounding language of President Obama's economic planning hides the fact that people must shelve their own plans in favor of government's single plan.
At the beginning of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that's at stake when the government controls our lives: "The most important change ... is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."
The NRA Muscles into McDonald v. Chicago
“Gun nuts” battle “Constitution nuts” at the Supreme Court
Brian DohertyMcDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court case that will settle whether or not the Second Amendment applies to states and localities, is gearing up to radically challenge Court precedent when it comes to defending rights against state infringement.
Alan Gura, lawyer for the Chicago plaintiffs whose right to effectively defend their lives in their own homes has been abridged by the city's ban on handgun possession, previously won 2008's D.C. v. Heller, the case establishing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess weapons against federal encroachment. Gura is responsible, then, for the rehabilitation and revival of one constitutional amendment already. In McDonald, rather than merely extending the Second’s reach, he is aiming to rehabilitate and revive the 14th Amendment as well.
However, the Supreme Court’s decision in late January to grant 10 of Gura’s 30 minutes of oral argument time to the National Rifle Association (NRA) seems likely to hurt chances that the Court will take the more dramatic route laid before them. The NRA isn't a plaintiff in McDonald (though they were parties in an earlier version heard by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which combined separate challenges to Chicago’s gun bans), and the organization's intent is to emphasize the more limited and traditional method of incorporating the Second Amendment against the states via the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Southern Europe's Fiscal Crisis
by Gary North
The euro is the focus of attention these days. This is because of a fiscal crisis in Greece, and looming crises in Portugal and Spain. Italy could follow.
What is the problem? Greece is running a huge deficit in the range of 12.7% of its Gross Domestic Product. The investment world regards a deficit of this magnitude as unsustainable. There are rumors of default.
Spain is running a deficit of 11.4% of its GDP. This is considered a threat to the nation's financial structure. There are rumors of default.
The United States government is expected to run a deficit of $1.6 trillion in an economy with about $14 trillion GDP. This means the deficit will be about 11.4% of GDP. Of course, this is seen by American economists as all right. After all, the United States is not Spain. Treasury Secretary Geithner assured the viewers on ABC News on Sunday, February 8, that there is no possibility that the rating on U.S. Treasury debt will ever fall below AAA. "That will never happen in this country." Unfortunately, he neglected to say whether it could happen in other countries, whose credit-rating agencies are not regulated by the United States government.
The euro is officially issued by the European Central Bank. This central bank acts on behalf of all 16 European nations that are part of the European Monetary Union. Non-members are Great Britain and Switzerland.
This system is now an aspect of the European Union, which has been in existence since December 1, 2009, when the Lisbon Treaty went into effect. Yet the legislatures of each of the member states of the EMU have independent fiscal policies. They do not control monetary policy, but they control taxes and spending.
Always before, monetary affairs have been conducted by central banks that represent central governments. The euro is an experiment in a central bank that officially operates on behalf of 16 nations.
FRIEDMAN ON THE EURO
In 2005, Milton Friedman commented on the problem facing the euro and Western Europe.
The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help. The euro has no precedent. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities. (New Perspectives, Spring 2005).
His admission that there have been unions based on gold was significant. He did not pursue this, because he rejected the gold standard. He made his reputation as a monetary theorist for his opposition to a gold standard. He was a faithful disciple of the American theorist who was most adamantly opposed to the gold standard, Irving Fisher. Friedman's monetary theories were an extension of Fisher's.
What Has 'The Union' Ever Done for Colorado?
The main argument trotted out by defenders of giant, super-armed governments is that such states offer vital protection to the peoples they claim to protect. Thus, according to this argument, the gigantic war machine stationed in Washington D.C. (or, more accurately, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, Japan, etc.) stands as an indispensable bulwark against imminent foreign invasion that keeps the individual people living under its umbrella safe from attack from, inter alia, the German Kaiser, the Japanese, the Germans again, the Soviets, the "terrorists," Iraq, Iran, etc.
Now, it may be excusable for the egotistical governing class in Washington D.C. to indulge themselves with this twaddle, but for Coloradoans there is no excuse. Indeed, it only takes a few minuets of historical reminiscence to realize that this is not only false with regard to the state of Colorado, but the very reverse of the truth. Instead of protecting Coloradoans from vague foreign threats, the federal government of the United States has, from the birth of Colorado to the present, actually made Coloradoans the targets of foreign aggression. In other words, while the federal government has been piously claiming to protect Coloradoans since the mid-19th century, it has actually done nothing but put them in grave danger.
The history of the federal government’s wonton endangerment of Coloradoans’ lives begins with the War Between the States. (Actually, if we are to be thorough, the federal government’s disregard for Coloradoans’ lives begins with the Mexican American War, when the U.S. government assumed responsibility for the "protection" of the people then living in Colorado from Mexico. In subsequent years, the "protection" afforded to the indigenous Coloradoans turned out to be virtually synonymous with "ethnic cleansing" and "extermination." But I digress). When Lincoln decided to invade and lay waste the South in order to "preserve the Union," Colorado was not yet a state. But, the population was steadily growing, thanks to the discovery of gold, and especially silver, in the Rocky Mountains in 1859.
Five Decades of Failure Are Enough
With trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, policymakers need to scour the federal budget for departments to cut and eliminate. They should start with ones that are not just wasteful, but actively damaging to the economy. Top of the list would be the $60 billion Department of Housing and Urban Development.
HUD's negative impact on the economy is far larger than its multibillion-dollar budget.
HUD's policies played a key role in causing the housing boom and bust and then the recession in its wake. Weak lending standards on HUD-insured mortgage loans helped fuel risky non-prime lending. HUD also put pressure on banks and the failed housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make risky loans to underqualified borrowers. Thanks to those policies, Fannie and Freddie went bankrupt and already have received $112 billion in taxpayer bailouts.
Steady increases in home-buying subsidies in recent decades were motivated by political attempts to curry favor with special interests such as the Realtor and homebuilder lobbies. Politicians justify the subsidies on their claimed civic virtues. But, as we've seen in the wake of the housing bubble's bursting, there's nothing virtuous about putting people into homes they can't afford. READ MORE @ CATO
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Myth Alaska
Sarah Palin bounces a reality check.
Nick GillespieSarah From Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar, by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, PublicAffairs, 306 pages, $26.95
The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, by Matthew Continetti, Sentinel, 256 pages, $25.95
Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin, HarperCollins, 413 pages, $28.99
No recent political figure has ignited the fury of the commentariat like former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Shortly after inducing a pulse in the zombified John McCain campaign with a rousing speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, the little-known politician was dismissed by Salon’s Cintra Wilson as a “power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty” whose conservative ideology made the feminist writer “feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”
The editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Martin Peretz, sniffed that the candidate “was pretty like a cosmetics saleswoman at Macy’s” and that it was “good to see that the Palin family didn’t torture poor Bristol [unmarried, pregnant, and 17 at the time], at least in the open.” The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, a self-identified conservative who calls his Daily Dish “the most popular one-man political blog in the world,” persistently suggested that Trig Palin, the governor’s then-four-month-old baby with Down Syndrome, was likely not Sarah’s biological child; and demanded the full release of her obstetrical records, stopping just short of insisting he be allowed to examine the placenta. If Barack Obama is hounded by a small group of reality-challenged “birthers” who doubt the president was born in Hawaii, Palin has more than matched him with what might be called her “after-birthers.”
This is ugly stuff, the sort of warmed-over misogyny you expect from early ’70s Hollywood, not semi-serious writers and pundits. But Palin’s admirers have issues with modulation and mental balance too. Watching last year’s vice presidential debate, National Review’s Rich Lowry squealed that Palin’s smile “sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.” As happens so often with what passes for political discourse on the right and left, those of us who stand athwart the red-blue dichotomy find ourselves yelling, “Please make it stop!”
Drug Czar Should Go
Voters are disgusted by the reckless spending of politicians in Washington. The backlash is coming, so policymakers are now scrambling to do something, or at least be seen as doing something, about the enormous federal debt. Now is a good time for Congress to abolish government agencies that are outdated, dysfunctional or just unnecessary.
A prime candidate for abolition is the office of the so-called "drug czar."
The position of the drug czar was created by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1988. It was a time of drug war hysteria. Former first lady Nancy Reagan called casual drug users "accomplices to murder." President George H.W. Bush vowed to make the war one of his top priorities. During his inaugural address, he said, "Take my word for it. This scourge will stop." The conservative firebrand William Bennett became the first czar and made headlines with brash talk of beheading drug dealers. The nation's capital was declared to be a "high intensity drug-trafficking" zone. There were raids and arrests - including the notorious trial of then-Mayor Marion Barry.
In theory, the drug czar's office was supposed to develop a long-term strategy to win the drug war and bring about a "drug-free society." Each year, the czar would call for more governmental efforts to "reduce demand" and to "disrupt the supply" of narcotics. Instead of millions, the government started to spend billions. READ MORE AT CATO
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
GARY JOHNSON'S OUR AMERICA (CONDENSED VERSION)
The Obama Budget and the Horse You Rode In On
From the AP I read the astonishing item that “In a face-to-face encounter, President Barack Obama chastised Republican lawmakers Friday for opposing him on health care, economic stimulus and other major issues.” Hahahaha! This is too rich! Hahaha!
Composing myself for just a moment and taking a quick look to see if my zipper is up, I stand up and say, “Let me be the first to tell that arrogant commie bastard that Republican lawmakers are not the only ones opposing his arrogant, insane fiscal monstrosities, and I will be the first to say that I have nothing but Utter Mogambo Contempt (UMC) for anyone who is NOT opposed to such lunacies that are, already, budgeted to spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year when the Whole Freaking Economy (WFE) is only $14 trillion, and out of that, the Congressional monsters plan to deficit-spend $1.6 trillion in the year, which is So Much Money (SMM) that if your brain has not exploded at the sheer inflationary horror of increasing the money supply by $1.6 trillion in one year, then say “goodbye” to the last of your brain cells when I tell you that this whopping, gargantuan, insane $1.6 trillion of deficit spending is only the beginning!
I know, from long experience, that many of you ask, like this recent one from mom, “Do you know that you are the worst? Your writing stinks, your economics stink, I hate you and everything you do, and one can only wonder how it could get worse!” which leads me to the conclusion that many of you will write and ask, “How could it get worse than $1.6 trillion of deficit-spending, which means at least $1.6 trillion in new money created by the Federal Reserve, so that the federal government can spend $3.8 trillion, which is so much money that it is 27% of the whole freaking economy?”
Read More at Lew Rockwell
Scientific Misconduct: The Manipulation of Evidence for Political Advocacy in Health Care and Climate Policy
Science is increasingly being manipulated by those who try to use it to justify political choices based on their ethical preferences and who are willing to suppress evidence of conflict between those preferences and the underlying reality. This problem is clearly seen in two policy domains, health care and climate policy.
In the area of climate policy, recent revelations of e-mails from the government-sponsored Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveal a pattern of data suppression, manipulation of results, and efforts to intimidate journal editors to suppress contradictory studies that indicate that scientific misconduct has been used intentionally to manipulate a social consensus to support the researchers' advocacy of addressing a problem that may or may not exist.
In health care policy, critics have long worried about the inordinate influence of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers on research to show the safety and viability of new products. Recent information, however, shows that government agencies may cause more problems in this area — a worrisome development considering that health care legislation recently passed by the United States Senate would allow federal agencies to punish organizations whose researchers publish results that conflict with what the agency feels is appropriate.
That bill allows the withholding of funding to an institution where a researcher publishes findings not "within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence," a vague authorization that creates a tremendous tool that can be used to ensure self-censorship and conformity with bureaucratic preferences. As AcademyHealth notes, "Such language to restrict scientific freedom is unprecedented and likely unconstitutional."
How Many More Are Innocent?
America's 250th DNA exoneration raises questions about how often we send the wrong person to prison.
Radley BalkoFreddie Peacock of Rochester, New York, was convicted of rape in 1976. Last week he became the 250th person to be exonerated by DNA testing since 1989. According to a new report by the Innocence Project, those 250 prisoners served 3,160 years between them; 17 spent time on death row. Remarkably, 67 percent of them were convicted after 2000—a decade after the onset of modern DNA testing. The glaring question here is, How many more are there?
Calculating the percentage of innocents now in prison is a tricky and controversial process. The numerator itself is difficult enough to figure out. The certainty of DNA testing means we can be positive the 250 cases listed in the Innocence Project report didn't commit the crimes for which they were convicted, and that number also continues to rise. But there are hundreds of other cases in which convictions have been overturned due to a lack of evidence, recantation of eyewitness testimony, or police or prosecutorial misconduct, but for which there was no DNA evidence to establish definitive guilt or innocence. Those were wrongful convictions in that there wasn't sufficient evidence to establish reasonable doubt, but we can't be sure all the accused were factually innocent.
Most prosecutors fight requests for post-conviction DNA testing. That means the discovery of wrongful convictions is limited by the time and resources available to the Innocence Project and similar legal aid organizations to fight for a test in court. It's notable that in one of the few jurisdictions where the district attorney is actively seeking out wrongful convictions—Dallas County, Texas—the county by itself has seen more exonerations than all but a handful of individual states. If prosecutors in other jurisdictions were to follow Dallas D.A. Craig Watkins' lead, that 250 figure would be significantly higher.
READ MORE REASON
Nullification: It’s Official
While speaking to a large crowd of over a thousand people on the campus of Arizona State University last December, Congressman Ron Paul mentioned one thing that might come about as the result of the federal government habitually ignoring the Constitution: Nullification.
About five minutes into the video segment which you'll find below, he said, "There's not much attention paid to the Constitution in Washington. There's not much attention paid to it by our executive branch of government. And we don't get much protection from our courts. So one thing that might finally happen from this if the people finally feel so frustrated that they can't get the results out of Washington – they're going to start thinking about options. They might start thinking about nullification and a few things like that."
As someone who attended that rally and was doing my best to represent my state's chapter of The Tenth Amendment Center, I know I cheered very loudly and was very pleased when the rest of the crowd applauded enthusiastically.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the concept of state nullification, it was the idea expressed by then sitting vice president, Thomas Jefferson, when he authored what came to be called the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. The resolutions made the case that the federal government is a creature of the states and that states have the authority to judge the constitutionality of the federal government's laws and decrees. He also argued that states should refuse to enforce laws which they deemed unconstitutional.
James Madison wrote a similar resolution for Virginia that same year, in which he asserted that whenever the federal government exceeds its constitutional limits and begins to oppress the citizens of a state, that state's legislature is duty bound to interpose its power to prevent the federal government from victimizing its people. Very similar to Jefferson's concept of nullification, Madison's doctrine of interposition differed in some small but important ways. READ MORE
Monday, February 8, 2010
Dr. Davis' February 2010 Letter to the Editor
Recently a reporter called to inquire about my reaction to developments in the congressional campaign and he made a comment about “conservative libertarians.” While there may be such individuals, in general the term indicates a misunderstanding of both conservatives and libertarians.
My understanding of “conservative” indicates a desire to preserve and maintain the status quo. The status quo in government and the constitution that libertarians identify with was accepted as the norm from about 200 years ago to at least 120 years ago. Before that, from about 1765 to about 1800, it was clearly revolutionary.
From the “Progressive Era” beginning around 1890 to the present we have generally seen the expansion of the power of the federal government and its influence on the economy at many levels, as well as increasingly aggressive action in foreign affairs, all at increasing rates. This is not a status quo that libertarians accept, and, in fact, opposition to these things was in great measure responsible for the establishment of the Libertarian Party.
As a result, we have come full circle, to where the ideas of federal government limited and constrained by the Constitution, with a peaceful, neutral, noninterventionist foreign policy have again become what might be considered revolutionary.
It is with this in mind that I (and others) am running for Congress, with an aim to rolling back the expansion of the federal government in favor of more individual responsibility and self-government, less government in the economy, and noninterventionist foreign policy.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Davis, D.D.S.
Libertarian for Congress, First District
Mark Faber: Social Obligations Will Lead Western States to Default
The United States’ top credit rating is at risk, with its triple 'A' status warned it may be downgraded if the economy grows at a slower pace than expected, says ratings agency Moody's.
The US is predicted to have a $1.5 trillion deficit in 2010, which could be a real problem for the country’s seemingly insatiable appetite for borrowing. Outspoken investor and writer Marc Faber doesn’t give America much time before it goes bust.
“Maximum within 10 years time more than 35% of tax revenues will have to be used to pay the interest on the government debt and then you are in trouble – because then there will be not enough money out of the budget to pay for other stuff. I’m convinced the US government will go bankrupt, but not tomorrow. And before they go bankrupt, they’ll print money, and then you get high inflation rates, you have a depression and eventually they’ll go to war.”
Read More
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Sam Adams on a Sunday Afternoon
"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule."