Freedom of choice is an essential ingredient of prosperity. Money is valuable because of the many ways you can spend it. The growth of government degrades the economy by reducing this valuable freedom. A recent development in the endless health-care saga illustrates another way Big Government weakens the economy: the high cost of evading its worst excesses.
The Associated Press describes a new provision in the health-care bill that will require businesses to count both full and part-time workers when calculating penalties to provide government-mandated health insurance. The original Senate bill only counted full-time workers when assessing penalties, but as the AP puts it, “Democrats feared that businesses would avoid penalties by hiring more part-time workers. But business groups oppose the change as overly burdensome.”
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Posted by Doctor Zero on March 10, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 2 Comments »
New York Times house “conservative” David Brooks recently dismissed the Tea Party movement by comparing it to the New Left radicals of the Sixties. After remarking on the fondness of both movements for mass protests and street theater, he identifies their “core commonality” as a belief in “mass innocence”:
Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on March 8, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 17 Comments »
The Washington Post reports on the big political story from last week:
Regularly intemperate — most recently in his hyperbolic attacks on the Federal Reserve — Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) is on his way to retirement, largely because his Republican colleagues have concluded that the 78-year-old former major league pitcher is a political liability. Mr. Bunning is not going quietly: His latest move was to put a five-day “hold” on a $10 billion bill to retain non-essential government workers and install satellite TV in rural areas. Democrats, who control the Senate, had insisted the measure should be treated as an “emergency” bill exempt from pay-as-you-go rules. Mr. Bunning said “no.” This was spectacularly bad politics — Mr. Bunning is not the spokesman his Republican colleagues prefer, to put it mildly — and so he ultimately relented.
What made Bunning’s lonely stand “spectacularly bad politics?” After all, the government is painfully broke, and in debt up to its eyeballs. Americans are nervous about the dark mass of unsustainable debt lurking in their future, waiting to devour their children. The public sector has been expanding like mad, hiring armies of lavishly compensated government workers, even as the private sector suffers double-digit unemployment. Why would it be politically unwise for Bunning to take a stand against ten billion dollars in further deficit spending, to retain non-essential government employees?
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Posted by Doctor Zero on March 6, 2010 ♦ Filed in Congress ♦ 8 Comments »
Twenty-five years ago, a little after sunrise on a Monday morning, the front door of my house was kicked in by a man who had blown his mind with crack cocaine. He marched my family upstairs at gunpoint. When I reached the top of the stairs and turned around, he put the gun in my forehead and pulled the trigger.
I’ve always heard it was good to begin a composition with an arresting opening paragraph. That’s the catchiest one I can offer from an otherwise modest biography. I hope the rest of this essay lives up to the opening. I’ll do my best.
I don’t mind admitting this incident gave me a lifelong aversion to guns. I don’t have any objection to other law-abiding citizens bearing arms – in fact, I’m strongly in favor of it. It’s just not a right I have chosen to exercise, although I’m working on getting over it. I’m fascinated by the beauty and science of firearms. I rarely pass a gun magazine on the stands without flipping it open, and I love attending gun shows. My first close encounter with a gun was rather… intense, so I’m understandably nervous around them. I recently discovered I’m a remarkably good shot with a target rifle, after some friends invited me to shoot with them. I’ve decided twenty-five years is long enough to be uncomfortable around the reality of something I’ve always supported in theory.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on March 3, 2010 ♦ Filed in Guns ♦ 54 Comments »
ObamaCare has become a nightmare America just can’t seem to escape. Every time it seems to have been vanquished for good, and relieved voters begin discussing rational market-based approaches to health-care reform… ObamaCare surges up from its damp grave, moonlight flashing from the trillion-dollar machete gripped in its fist.
Last week, we even had one of those cheesy “stingers” during the end credits to this horror film. The Republicans nuked ObamaCare into steaming fragments during Obama’s disastrous health-care summit, but the President staggered to the nearest camera and announced his intention to stuff the hot, glowing wreckage down our throats, in a political ritual that will require the sacrifice of many senators and representatives from his increasingly unpopular party.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on March 1, 2010 ♦ Filed in Healthcare ♦ 17 Comments »
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . .
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
Health care isn’t a privilege, it’s a right.
Various
Bienvenue.
The question of rights is one that goes to the foundational core of this country. The United States was born of free men asserting their rights against a distant imperial power, which itself had changed the way in which the world viewed the rights of humankind. However, it seems that in the last several decades, a new wrinkle has been introduced to, or discovered in, this core idea. Increasingly, rights are discovered that go beyond those enumerated by Jefferson, those of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” — in other words, the right to be left alone. These newly discovered, or invented, rights entitle all men to a degree of material comfort, most recently in the case of health care. So what is it that makes health care less of a right than Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . if anything?
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Posted by Loneloc on February 27, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 21 Comments »
The body of actor Andrew Koenig was found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park yesterday. His father, Walter Koenig, said that his son “took his own life, and was in a lot of pain.” Like most of my generation, I grew up with Walter Koenig as Chekhov on Star Trek, and he played a superb villain much later, on Babylon 5. Until his press conference yesterday, I didn’t realize he was a man of such incredible strength and dignity. He asked for his family to be left in peace to mourn their loss. I hope he won’t mind if I take this sad occasion to address others who might be following the road that ended in Stanley Park for Andrew. No matter how far you have gone down that road, there is always a path that leads away. I could offer no greater tribute to Andrew and his family than trying to help you take it, or at least see it.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on February 26, 2010 ♦ Filed in End of Life Issues ♦ 36 Comments »
Today marks an important milestone, as reported by Fox News:
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has become the first Obama Administration official to publicly describe last year’s deadly shootings at Ft. Hood, Tex., as a terrorist act, according to a search of news clips and transcripts.
“Violent Islamic terrorism … was part and parcel of the Ft. Hood killings,” Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning. “There is violent Islamic terrorism, be it Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen or anywhere else, [and] that is indeed a major focus of this department and its efforts.”
The Ft. Hood shootings occurred on November 5, 2009. Elapsed time until the member of the Administration who supervises your protection from terrorism identified it as such: 111 days. Well, maybe that’s a little unfair, because the Fox report says an “official who did not want to be named publicly” was willing to call it “an act of terrorism” last month. Napolitano is merely the first official willing to call it terrorism without using a stocking mask and the Cone of Silence.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on February 25, 2010 ♦ Filed in National Defense, Terrorist Attacks ♦ 6 Comments »
Bryan Fischer, host of the American Family Association’s “Focal Point” radio talk show, is very upset about Hot Air’s nose dive into the thundercloud of gay politics, and angry that it could happen with our new “Christian ownership” at Salem Communications slumped lifelessly in the pilot’s seat:
Wow. Just as soon as the “Hot Air” blog was purchased by the Christian conglomerate Salem Communications from conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, it has suddenly become an advocate for all things gay. What in the world is up with that?
For background, GOPROUD is an organization dedicated to advancing special rights for homosexual behavior, and advocates the overthrow of the Defense of Marriage Act and the overthrow of the law banning homosexual service in the military.
Not only was GOPROUD welcomed at CPAC, an event which is supposed to be the annual showcase for conservative values, the organization was allowed to sponsor the event, giving visibility and recognition to its effort to legitimize sexual deviancy.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on February 23, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 19 Comments »
Bienvenue.
Submitted for your approval, two historical anecdotes of interest:
1830: As related in John Meacham’s magnificent book, American Lion, a controversy early in the administration of Andrew Jackson centered around the construction of the Maysville Road, a thoroughfare intended to eventually form a leg of a highway that would link the western portion of the United States from north to south. The issue was that as initially proposed, the Maysville Road was contained entirely within the state of Kentucky, and was a pet project of Henry Clay, the powerful senator from Kentucky later known to history as the Great Compromiser. There were several issues at play here. Jackson and Clay were bitter political enemies, and Jackson was frugal with the public treasury and took a dim view of what would later be known as pork-barrel politics — in fact, Jackson remains the only president to have ever paid off the entirety of the national debt. However, the overriding consideration from Jackson’s perspective was that since the road was contained entirely within a particular state, the Constitution did not allow the federal government to fund the project; Jackson understood the “Interstate Commerce Clause” in a quite literal fashion. Despite the pleas of some of his closest political allies and oldest friends, who also stood to gain from the project, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road bill.
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Posted by Loneloc on February 23, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 10 Comments »
