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David Warren comments on the inexorable growth of government.
… Even if McCain wins, we can expect another “stagflation party,” of the kind we attended in the 1970s, though quite possibly on a 1930s scale. For in the time-hallowed tradition of party competition, the Republicans may now be offering even bigger giveaways than the Democrats in the hope of buying off swing voters.
And while there is no unanswerable logical reason why the Canadian government should follow the rest of the West down the next plughole of the Nanny State, we heard the sucking sound throughout our short northern campaign season. The era of Thatcher and Reagan is over, and the era of Herbert Hoover has resumed.
Of course I have only touched on money, and the freedom to retain your earnings and spend or invest as you think wise, in your own interest and that of your family, is only one aspect of freedom. It is a key aspect, however, for money talks, and a government that has appropriated most of it will have a lot to say about the rest of your habits.
Through the last generation the consistent trend has been towards “liberal fascism”: constantly escalating legal and quasi-legal pressure on people who do not agree with the direction society is taking. Look for more.
A telling note on media bias from John Fund.
David Harsanyi’s column reminds us of Mark Twain’s dictum; “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
How is it that most ordinary citizens can survive an entire lifetime without experiencing the thrill of a grand jury indictment or the shadow of an ethics investigation?
Well, congratulations! And if you’re curious, feel free to live vicariously through your elected official.
It’s true that by 2006, Republicans had infested D.C. with shifty and corrupt swindlers, and the party paid the price by handing Congress over to Democrats.
Remember Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promising a new age of principled government in 2006? “The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C.,” she claimed, “and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”
Naturally, it was pure bunk. …
Speaking of corruption, how about the “card check” bill Big Labor has told the Dems to pass? The Hill says George McGovern is helping the fight against it.
… McGovern said that he became involved in the campaign when Rick Berman, executive director of the Employee Freedom Action Committee, brought the issue to his attention. The two have known each other for a number of years.
“But I wasn’t doing it to please him,” McGovern said. “I’m doing it because I believe it’s an important right that should be protected.
In the ad, McGovern says, “It’s hard to believe that any politician would agree to a law denying millions of employees the right to a private vote. I have always been a champion of labor unions. But I fear that today’s union leaders are turning their backs on democratic workplace elections.”
The ad will first air nationally on Fox during Tuesday’s presidential debate, and then in the coming weeks in seven states with close Senate elections. …
John Stossel takes exception to the “reregulation mantra.”
… It’s intuitive to assume that regulation prevents problems, but it’s rarely true. First, how would regulators know what to do? Leaving aside the bias they might have and the brutal fact that regulation is physical force, how can a small group of people understand the workings of a market sufficiently to regulate sensibly? Markets, especially financial markets, are far more complicated than any mind can grasp. They consist of many millions of participants making countless decisions on the basis of unarticulated know-how and intuition. To attempt to regulate such activity requires knowledge no one can possess.
To seriously regulate those markets you’d have to impose the “precautionary principle,” a favorite idea of some environmentalists, especially in Europe. The principle prohibits any product or activity not proven 100 percent safe. It sounds so reasonable. But Ron Bailey of “Reason” points out what it really means: Don’t do anything for the first time.
Bad idea. The world needs innovators and inventors. We need people who try things for the first time.
Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek emphasized that government planners suffer from a “knowledge problem” because “the knowledge of the circumstances of which [they] must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
In other words, the planner or regulator can’t possibly know what the multitude in a market “knows.” So what regulators really do is straitjacket market participants, preventing innovators from creating prosperity for us all. …
Drawing from a WSJ Op-Ed, Ed Morrissey points out the government interference that created affirmative action mortgages.
… Now Obama and the same Democrats who pushed Fannie and Freddie to buy a trillion dollars in bad loans want to blame “deregulation” for the crisis. It wasn’t deregulation, and as Wallison points out, the industry didn’t get deregulated at all. Congress created this crisis by pushing Fannie and Freddie into not just buying subprime paper but into transforming it into securities that infected the entire financial system. …
Morrissey also posts on Jesse Jackson’s Zionist slip.
Barack Obama may say that Israel has no better friend than himself, but Jesse Jackson begs to differ. Amir Taheri wrote in yesterday’s New York Post that Jackson hailed a new era in American foreign policy, where the “Zionists” would no longer control American action:
He promised “fundamental changes” in US foreign policy – saying America must “heal wounds” it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the “arrogance of the Bush administration.”
The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.
Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House. …
Peter Wehner posts in Contentions.
At a time when many people are saying Barack Obama’s past associations with radical figures doesn’t matter — and even that it shouldn’t matter – it’s worth considering the opposite argument.
From the ancient Greeks to the founding fathers, many of our best political minds believed character in our leaders matters. It doesn’t matter more than anything else, and character is itself a complicated thing. People can have strong character in some respects and weak character in others. People can demonstrate battlefield valor, for example, yet show cruelty to those over whom they have power. They can speak unpleasant truths when there is a high cost to doing so and betray their spouses. Individuals can demonstrate admirable loyalty to their friends and still lie to the public, or work for peace and yet violate the laws of our land. …
Power Line tells Barack to spread his own wealth around.
… Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city,” warns Aristotle.
The founders of the United States were deep students of politics and history, and they shared Aristotle’s worry. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” James Madison and others therefore made it a “first object of government” to protect personal property from unjust confiscation. Numerous provisions were included in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to protect the property rights of citizens.
Given that one of the causes of the American Revolution was a tax, the founders understood very well that taxation could become a way for one group to prey on another. So while the Constitution empowered the federal government to levy taxes, it limited this power mostly to indirect taxes like tariffs, duties, and excise taxes. For much of American history the federal government subsisted solely on those fees. …