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Mark Steyn echoing a chapter from Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, says you give more power to government, and you’ll get more creeps like Mark Sanford.
… “Why are politicians so weird?” a reader asked me after the Sanford news conference. But the majority of people willing to live like this will be, almost by definition, deeply weird. So big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits. It’s just a question of how well they disguise it. Writing about Michael Jackson a few years ago, I suggested that today’s A-list celebs were the equivalent of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria or the loopier Ottoman sultans, the ones it wasn’t safe to leave alone with sharp implements. But, as Christopher Hitchens says, politics is show business for ugly people. …
David Warren says tyranny arrived softly.
… In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the “politically correct” ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny — of the Nanny State and all its trappings — has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation.
In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before. The “revolution” has been accomplished by such means as George Orwell predicted: by changing the meanings of words.
Most overtly it has been done with “rights language” — by the construction of new, artificial and quite abstract “group” rights that are anathematic to individual freedom. But beneath this, we have watched court and legislative interventions to redefine such basic ideas as manhood, fatherhood; womanhood, motherhood — a purposeful destruction of the family in the cause of extending the powers of the state. We have likewise watched the religious order of society being systematically undermined, so that atheism or “irreligion” has become the default position from which the state now issues its ukases. …
John Fund reports the Obey/Waters spat.
… House Appropriations Chairman David Obey and Rep. Maxine Waters of California are both Democrats but you couldn’t tell yesterday after the two shouted at each other on the House floor and Ms. Waters apparently pushed or shoved Mr. Obey. The two had to be separated by other Members. …
WSJ Editors on the ways NY, NJ, and CA went broke.
President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.
A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.
These states have been models of “progressive” policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government “investments,” heavy unionization and a large government role in health care.
Here’s a rundown on the results: …
In The Atlantic, Phillip Howard says DC needs a world-class spring cleaning.
Just a few months ago, members of Congress took turns wagging their fingers at CEOs of the automakers for not making tough choices–not shedding “legacy costs,” not making products consumers wanted, not cutting bloated bureaucracies. Detroit had become self-referential, unable to compete because it was unwilling to deal with its internal constituents.
Now Washington faces a series of domestic crises that will shape the health of our society for decades–unaffordable healthcare, balkanized financial regulation, and a mind-boggling deficit, to name three. But Washington will likely fail–indeed, may even make the problems worse–unless it deals with its own “legacy costs” and bloated bureaucracies, which currently make it impossible to achieve new focus and efficiencies.
Detroit is Google compared to Washington. Year after year, Congress makes laws but almost never repeals them. Washington is like a huge monument to legacy costs. Laws from the Depression will send tens of billions in unnecessary subsidies this year to farmers, organized labor and other groups thought to be in need–80 years ago. Bloat is also notorious–it’s nearly impossible to fire anyone under civil service laws, so layers of middle management have grown exponentially. Professor Paul Light found 32 levels in some agencies (compared to 5 levels in most well-run enterprises). …
David Harsanyi says politicians are world-class practitioners of lying with statistics.
Did you know that around 300 million Americans went without food, water and shelter at some point last year?
I am a survivor.
If you were blessed with the prodigiously creative and cunning mind of a politician, that kind of statistic — meaningless, but technically true — could be put to good use.
In the entertaining 1954 classic, “How to Lie with Statistics,” Darrell Huff writes that “misinforming people by the use of statistical material might be called statistical manipulation . . . or statisticulation.”
One of the most persistent examples of modern-day statisticulation is the sufficiently true claim that 46 million (it becomes 50 million when senators really get keyed up) Americans are without health insurance.
Set loose on the public’s compassion, this number is a powerful tool in the hands of eloquent orators like President Barack Obama when peddling government-run health care reform. And no matter how often the figure is debunked, no matter how many studies point to its inexact nature, it’s just too politically inviting not to embrace. …
Unintended consequences, thy name is “black liquor.” WSJ editors with the story.
If you’ve studied polar bears for more than 30 years and you don’t think they are threatened, what do you think will happen to you? UK’s Daily Telegraph has the story.
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group. …