Tag: socialism

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Lamenting Liberty Lost

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Lamenting Liberty Lost

Unless we have a radical change, we will continue our march toward the federal destruction of the presumption of liberty.

Andrew Napolitano | January 8, 2015

A British author, residing in the United States for the past 30 years, created a small firestorm earlier this week with his candid observations that modern-day Americans have been duped by the government into accepting a European-style march toward socialism because we fail to appreciate the rich legacy of personal liberty that is everyone’s birthright and is expressly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Os Guinness, the author of more than a dozen books defending traditional Judeo-Christian values and Jeffersonian personal liberty, argued that we should embrace individual liberty and personal dignity and reject the “no givens, no rules, no limits” government we now have. He went on to opine that the government today is not the constitutionally restrained protector of personal freedoms the Framers left us, but rather has become the wealth-distributing protector of collective interests the Founding Fathers never could have imagined.

Yet the problem is a deep one. The Framers believed in the presumption of liberty, which declares that we are free to make personal choices, and the government cannot interfere with our liberties unless we violate the rights of others. Stated differently, the federal government cannot interfere with our personal choices by writing any law it wants; it can only regulate behavior or spend money when the Constitution authorizes it to do so.

But for the past 100 years, the federal government has rejected the Madisonian concept that it is limited to the 16 discrete powers the Constitution delegates to it, and has claimed its powers are unlimited, subject only to the express prohibitions in the Constitution. Even those prohibitions can be gotten around since government lawyers have persuaded federal courts to rule that Congress can spend tax dollars or borrowed money on any projects it wishes, whether authorized by the Constitution or not. The courts even have authorized Congress to use federal tax dollars to bribe the states into enacting laws that Congress is powerless to enact, and Congress has done so.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/01/08/lamenting-liberty-lost

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Yes-We-Can president faces twilight of maybes

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Yes-We-Can president faces twilight of maybes

December 28, 2014, 6:58 PM    Last updated: Sunday, December 28, 2014, 6:58 PM
By JULIE PACE and NANCY BENAC
Associated Press

WASHINGTON   — It was supposed to be a joke. “Are you still president?” comedian Stephen Colbert asked Barack Obama earlier this month.

But the question seemed to speak to growing weariness with the president and skepticism that anything will change in Washington during his final two years in office. Democrats already are checking out Obama’s potential successors. Emboldened Republicans are trying to push aside his agenda in favor of their own.

At times this year, Obama seemed ready to move on as well. He rebelled against the White House security “bubble,” telling his Secret Service detail to give him more space. He chafed at being sidelined by his party during midterm elections and having to adjust his agenda to fit the political interests of vulnerable Democrats who lost anyway.

Yet the election that was a disaster for the president’s party may have had a rejuvenating effect on Obama. The morning after the midterms, Obama told senior aides, “If I see you moping, you will answer to me.”

People close to Obama say he is energized at not having to worry about helping — or hurting — Democrats in another congressional election on his watch. He has become more comfortable with his executive powers, moving unilaterally on immigration, Internet neutrality and climate change in the last two months. And he sees legacy-building opportunities on the international stage, from an elusive nuclear deal with Iran to normalizing relations with Cuba after a half-century freeze.

“He gained some clarity for the next two years that is liberating,” said Jay Carney, who served as Obama’s press secretary until this spring. “He doesn’t have as much responsibility for others.”

https://www.northjersey.com/news/yes-we-can-president-faces-twilight-of-maybes-1.1182564

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Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

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Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

Student unions’ ‘no platform’ policy is expanding to cover pretty much anyone whose views don’t fit prevailing groupthink

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/

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Six Reasons Why Vermont’s Single-Payer Health Plan Was Doomed From The Start

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Six Reasons Why Vermont’s Single-Payer Health Plan Was Doomed From The Start
Avik Roy , Forbes Staff

Last week, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin (D.) announced that he was pulling the plug on his four-year quest to impose single-payer, government-run health care on the residents of his state. “In my judgment,” said Shumlin at a press conference, “the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families, and the state’s economy.” The key reasons for Shumlin’s reversal are important to understand. They explain why the dream of single-payer health care in the U.S. is dead for the foreseeable future—but also why Obamacare will be difficult to repeal.

Leading left-wing economists worked on Vermont plan

Shumlin’s predecessor in Montpelier was a Republican, Jim Douglas. In 2009, Douglas announced that he would not be seeking a fifth two-year term; five Democrats joined the contest to replace him. Progressive activists demanded that each candidate promise to enact single-payer health care if nominated; all five complied. Shumlin got the nod, and assumed office in January 2011.

Shumlin got right to work. In Feburary 2011, a trio of health economists, including Harvard’s William Hsiao and MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, sent Vermont a 203-page report describing the feasibility, and the alleged virtues, of single-payer in the state. Gruber signed a $400,000 contract to work with Vermont on the project.

Hsiao has spent a good chunk of his career helping governments install single-payer systems; for example, he helped the Taiwanese government install “Medicare for all” in 1995. He’s also responsible for Medicare’s Byzantine price-control scheme known as the Resource-Based Relative Value System, or RBRVS.

Gruber you know; at a hearing to discuss the Vermont report, the Obamacare architect was confronted by a letter from a former state senator, who argued that “any Hsiao-Gruber type health care mega-system will inevitably lead to coercive mandates, ballooning costs, increased taxes, bureaucratic outrages, shabby facilities, disgruntled providers, long waiting lines, lower quality care, special interest nest-feathering, and destructive wage and price controls.” In response, Gruber wisecracked: “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/12/21/6-reasons-why-vermonts-single-payer-health-plan-was-doomed-from-the-start/

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The Reasons Behind Obama’s Failures

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The Reasons Behind Obama’s Failures

Ted Bromund / @Bromund / December 21, 2014

In early October, President Obama warned his supporters to “make no mistake: these policies [of mine] are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” After the November elections, he probably wishes he hadn’t said that. The scale of the liberal defeat is remarkable, as are its causes.

In 2008, Obama had long coattails: When he took office in 2009, the House of Representatives had 256 Democrats. In 2015, it probably will have 188.

But the underlying reasons for Obama’s failure run deeper than the normal swings of the political pendulum. Four of them are vital. The first is that a good part of Obama’s appeal in 2008 was that he was supposedly above politics. He was compared to Abraham Lincoln, a canny politician we now misremember as being above the partisan fray.

This was nonsense. If you want to get anywhere in politics, you have to be a politician. And the essence of politics has not changed since Aristotle’s time. That doesn’t mean that politicians are all liars. But it does mean that anyone who looks for salvation in a politician is going to be disappointed. Obama was hyped so high in 2008 that he had nowhere to go but down.

Another reason for Obama’s failure was that he sought, in his words, to begin “the work of remaking America.” The entire American political system was designed by the Founding Fathers to frustrate his plans. The Constitution, with its checks and balances and its separation of powers, was intended to limit the government and prevent transient majorities from having their way.

Within those limits, Obama has actually – and from a conservative perspective, regrettably – done a lot: Obamacare itself is proof of that. But inevitably, having set out to, as he claimed, fundamentally transform the United States, Obama has come up short. He has increasingly resorted to unilateral executive actions precisely because he resents the system’s constraints, but that just feeds the narrative that he’s more emperor than president.

The third reason for Obama’s failure is that most of his ideas were wrong. There were no shovel-ready jobs waiting for the stimulus spending. Fixing health care did not require ripping apart the insurance market. The answer to a weak economy was not expensive green energy.

Iran was not waiting for an outstretched hand of friendship. Russia wanted a reset for malicious reasons of its own, not because it wanted to be our friend. Al-Qaida was not on the run. The Arab Spring was not a new democratic dawn. The European Union was not a force for prosperity. Israel was not the reason the Middle East is so troubled.

Everyone makes mistakes. But it’s hard to bounce back from so many fundamental errors, especially when – and this was Obama’s fourth error – the administration has been terrible at the boring business of being competent.

The fiasco of Obamacare was bad enough. But then there was the Veterans Administration scandal, the Secret Service’s prostitute parties, the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups, Ebola and the Justice Department’s gun-running into Mexico, to name only a few of the screw-ups that have tainted the administration.

We should never attribute to malice what can plausibly be explained by incompetence. And conservatives aren’t shocked when governments make mistakes: It’s what we expect them to do. But incompetence wears more heavily on liberals, because they are the ones who always want government to do more. The evidence is overwhelming that government can’t do it well.

Obama came into office wanting, in his words, to make government cool again. But as respected U.S. political analyst Michael Barone points out, since Watergate and with the exception of the 9/11 aftermath, trust in government peaked under Ronald Reagan, precisely because Reagan sought to limit government. Under Obama, it has fallen to near-historic lows.

The conservative triumphs in 2010 and 2014 have not irrevocably set America’s destiny: there are no permanent victories in politics. But there was a fundamental contradiction between the apolitical fantasy that Obama embodied and the real-world desire of the American people to support liberal policies, especially when incompetently administered.

Once the fantasy wore off, reality set in. And for liberals, reality is often bad news.

Originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post.

https://dailysignal.com/2014/12/21/the-reasons-behind-obamas-failures/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

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Democrats divided on their path to 2016

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Democrats divided on their path to 2016

By Karen Tumulty and Sean Sullivan December 14 at 7:39 PM

In the six weeks since their repudiation in the midterms, Democrats have seen the opening of fissures within their once-disciplined ranks, marking the start of an internal struggle between now and the 2016 election over the ideological identity and tactical direction of the party.

The tension — shown in high relief during the messy final days of the congressional session — is in some ways a mirror image of the stresses within the Republican Party, which has been divided between its tea party and establishment factions in recent years.

In the case of both parties, the argument pits the more populist, purist elements of the base against the more pragmatic center.

For Democrats, “it is a conflict that was looking for an occasion,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was a policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “The election provided the occasion.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-divided-on-their-path-to-2016/2014/12/14/5ff3ba68-82fd-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html

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The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans

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The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans

It’s repetitive for some to hear, but important for everybody to know: You can’t explain Millennial economic behavior without explaining that real wages for young Americans have collapsed.

American families are grappling with stagnant wage growth, as the costs of health care, education, and housing continue to climb. But for many of America’s younger workers, “stagnant” wages shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, they might sound like a massive raise.

Since the Great Recession struck in 2007, the median wage for people between the ages of 25 and 34, adjusted for inflation, has fallen in every major industry except for health care.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/millennials-arent-saving-money-because-theyre-not-making-money/383338/?utm_source=FB1205_1

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November Jobs Report Gives Insight into Why Most Americans Think the Economy Is Lousy

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November Jobs Report Gives Insight into Why Most Americans Think the Economy Is Lousy

James Sherk / @JamesBSherk / December 05, 2014

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ November employment report showed solid economic growth, but also provides clues about why many Americans report unhappiness with the economy.

The headline figures contained mostly good news. The household survey reported the unemployment rate remaining flat (5.8 percent) at the lowest rate since July 2008.  Labor force participation also remained flat at 62.8 percent as did the employment to population ratio—remaining 59.2 percent, the highest since mid-2009 but well below pre-recession levels.

The average duration of unemployment has remained stubbornly high, rising to 33 weeks in November.

The payroll survey reported employers created 321,000 net new jobs in November—the most in any month since April 2011. The professional and business services (+86,000), retail trade (+50,000), healthcare (+29,000) and food services and drinking places (+27,000) showed the greatest gains.  The payroll survey also found the average work hours increasing a tenth of an hour to 34.6 a week—the highest level since early 2008. In more good news, revisions to the September and October surveys showed that employers created 44,000 more jobs those months than previously believed.

Nonetheless, polls suggest that most Americans consider the economy in poor shape. The exit polls from the midterm elections found that 70 percent of voters see America’s economic condition as either “not so good” or “poor.”

Over the past year, average wages have grown by 2.1 percent—only slightly above the rate of inflation.

The November jobs report gives some insight into why. The average duration of unemployment has remained stubbornly high, rising to 33 weeks in November. The median unemployed worker has been looking for work for almost three months—almost twice as long as before the recession hit. Unemployment has become more painful for workers; those who lose their jobs have much greater difficulty finding new ones.

Additionally, average hourly wage growth has slowed to a crawl during the recovery. In November, average wages rose just 9 cents an hour. Over the past year, average wages have grown by 2.1 percent—only slightly above the rate of inflation. Thus, the real buying power of American workers has hardly improved.

This also shows why claims that this represents the strongest economic growth since the tech bubble are misleading. Yes, the economy has added jobs a good pace – welcome news after the deep recession and anemic recovery. But wages grew far faster and the unemployed found jobs far more quickly in the mid-2000s. This does not feel like a booming economy because it is not.

All told, November’s employment report brought welcome news about labor market improvements—but the economy still remains far from a satisfying recovery.

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Under Obama, U.S. personal freedom ranking slips below France

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Under Obama, U.S. personal freedom ranking slips below France

BY JASON RUSSELL | NOVEMBER 18, 2014 | 12:48 PM

Americans’ assessments of their personal freedom have significantly declined under President Obama, according to a new study from the Legatum Institute in London, and the United States now ranks below 20 other countries on this measure.

The research shows that citizens of countries including France, Uruguay, and Costa Rica now feel that they enjoy more personal freedom than Americans.

As the Washington Examiner reported this morning, representatives of the Legatum Institute are in the U.S. this week to promote the sixth edition of their Prosperity Index. The index aims to measure aspects of prosperity that typical gross domestic product measurements don’t include, such as entrepreneurship and opportunity, education, and social capital.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/under-obama-u.s.-personal-freedom-ranking-slips-below-france/article/2556322

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More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations

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More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and WILLIAM M. ARKINNOV. 15, 2014

WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers or accountants or drug dealers or yacht buyers, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/more-federal-agencies-are-using-undercover-operations.html

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Obamnomics ,Giving Up in America : 40% Women, 28% Men, 39% Youth Don’t Want A Job

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Obamnomics  ,Giving Up in America : 40% Women, 28% Men, 39% Youth Don’t Want A Job

(Washington Examiner) – Nearly four in 10 Americans, or 92 million, are not in the labor force and now there’s a reason why: They have simply given up and don’t want to work.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the largest group of people not in the labor force are those who don’t want a job, a remarkable statement on the nation’s work ethic. The federal job counter said that 85.9 million adults last month didn’t want a job, or 93 percent of all adults not in the labor force.

A Pew Research Center analysis out Friday dug a bit deeper to find out who those people are. Many are younger Americans who seem far less interested it landing a job than previous generations, possibly discouraged by the lack of good-paying jobs.

SPECIAL: Join the Tea Party REVOLUTION! The Obama Regime must be dismantled!

Pew said that 39 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t want to work, up from 29 percent in 2000.

Women especially don’t want a job, but men have similar feelings.

“Women are more likely than men to say they don’t want a job, although the gap has been narrowing — especially since the Great Recession. Last month, 28.5 percent of men said they didn’t want a job, up from 23.9 percent in October 2000 and 25.2 percent in October 2008. For women, the share saying they didn’t want a job hovered around 38 percent throughout the 2000s but began creeping up in 2010, reaching 40.2 percent last month,” said the Pew analysis.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/giving-up-40-women-28-men-39-youth-dont-want-a-job/article/2556177

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Business groups brace for deluge of regs

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Business groups brace for deluge of regs

By Tim Devaney – 11/11/14 06:11 PM EST

Business groups are bracing for an onslaught of regulations, with the Obama administration bent on completing a host of the president’s unfinished policy goals and the midterm elections now in the rearview mirror.

Agencies across federal government are expected to drop a host of major rules over the next few months, with regulations running the gamut from calorie label requirements on restaurant menus to new rules for hydraulic fracturing and air pollution.

There are at roughly two dozen major rules that are scheduled to drop between now and late January, according to a review of the administration’s official regulatory agenda and rules now awaiting approval at the White House.

Groups including the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute said they are most concerned by expected costs associated with a slate of rules now in the pipeline at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The EPA’s regulatory march is very concerning to the business community,” said Matt Letourneau, spokesman for the Chamber’s energy institute. “We’re fighting these regulations,” he added. “We’re trying to encourage EPA to listen to our concerns. We’re hoping EPA backs off or changes course.”

https://thehill.com/regulation/223769-biz-groups-brace-for-deluge-of-regulation

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7 things the middle class can’t afford anymore

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7 things the middle class can’t afford anymore
Erika Rawes, The Cheat Sheet 8 a.m. EDT October 25, 2014

During debates and speeches, politicians often bring up the financial burden that’s placed on the middle class. We talk about the middle class as though they are this singular entity, who used to thrive until they underwent persecution by the evil 1%. But, realistically speaking, the middle class and the 99% are not really synonymous. So, who are the middle class?

In its discussion of historical middle class societies, The Economist reports, “Their members are neither rich nor poor but somewhere in-between. . . . ‘Middle-class’ describes an income category but also a set of attitudes . . . An essential characteristic is the possession of a reasonable amount of discretionary income. Middle-class people do not live from hand to mouth, job to job, season to season, as the poor do.”

Some argue that the most sensible income amount to attach to the middle class would be the median household income, of around $54,000. Perhaps, anyone who earns between the 25th percentile and 75th percentile is a member of the middle class.

Diana Farrell, once Deputy Director of America’s National Economic Council, told The Economist she thinks a middle class income begins at the point where a person (or family) has one-third of their income left over for discretionary purposes after they’ve provided themselves with food and shelter. In other words, someone who earns $3,000 per month would have $1,000 left after they’ve paid their mortgage or rent, utilities, and grocery bills.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/10/25/cheat-sheet-middle-class-cant-afford/17730223/

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N.J.’s long-term unemployed rate worse than 48 states

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Congressmen Scott Garrett  points out  ,” Really disappointing news. It’s time to do away with the stale, failed ideas of the past. We must unleash our economy and help get our people back to work. The House has passed more than 40 jobs bills that are#StuckInTheSenate; it’s time for the Senate to take action.” 

N.J.’s long-term unemployed rate worse than 48 states
By Erin O’Neill | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on October 15, 2014 at 6:50 AM, updated October 15, 2014 at 7:41 AM

Nearly half of jobless residents in New Jersey have been out of work for more than six months, according to a new report, a level that ranks the state among the worst in the country.

The brief released today by New Jersey Policy Perspective notes the “long-term unemployment crisis is a national problem” but found every other state except Florida fared better than New Jersey. Also, while the share of long-term unemployed in New Jersey has fallen from its peak in 2010, the brief found that drop has not been as sharp as it has nationally.

“We’re in a much deeper pickle than most of the rest of the country,” said Gordon MacInnes, president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal-leaning think tank. “The reason for that is pretty plain: we haven’t produced enough jobs for people who are unemployed over a long period of time to fill.”

The report, which relies on analysis of federal labor data by the Economic Policy Institute, shows that 46.3 percent of the state’s jobless residents were unemployed for more than six months as of March 2014, compared to the state’s peak of 51.4 percent in December 2010. Those values represent 12-month moving averages.

On the national level, the share of long-term unemployed peaked at nearly 44 percent of all jobless residents in November 2011 and has since dropped to roughly 37 percent.

Only Florida had a larger share of long-term unemployed among the states in March at 46.5 percent.

https://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/10/njs_share_of_long-term_unemployed_ranks_among_worst_in_us_data_shows.html#incart_m-rpt-1

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The riddle of black America’s rising woes under Obama

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The riddle of black America’s rising woes under Obama
By Edward Luce

Those who have fared worst under this president are the ones who love him the most

A paradox haunts America’s first black president. African-American wealth has fallen further under Barack Obama than under any president since the Depression. Yet they are the only group that still gives him high ratings. So meagre is Mr Obama’s national approval rating that embattled Democrats have made him unwelcome in states that twice swept him to power. Those who have fared worst under Mr Obama are the ones who love him the most. You would be hard-pressed to find a better example of perception-driven politics. As the Reverend Kevin Johnson asked in 2013: “Why are we so loyal to a president who isn’t loyal to us?”

The problem has taken on new salience with the resignation of Eric Holder. America’s first black attorney-general has tried to correct the gulag-sized disparities in prison sentencing between blacks and whites. His exit leaves just two African-Americans in Mr Obama’s cabinet. Given the mood among Republicans, it is hard to imagine the US Senate confirming a successor to Mr Holder who shares his priorities.

https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5455efbe-4fa4-11e4-a0a4-00144feab7de.html#axzz3G40e0WkE