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Jennifer Rubin compares some of President Bush’s 9/11 speeches to Obama’s recent speech. Rubin picked several Bush excerpts that are particularly moving.
It may have been his finest speech, revealing both his character and ours. … George W. Bush on September 14, 2001:
“In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion; in long lines of blood donors; in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible. And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.
In these acts, and in many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another, and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity. This is a unity of every faith, and every background. It is evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils and American flags, which are displayed in pride and waved in defiance. Our unity is a kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity against terror is now extending across the world. …”
George Will brings up a startling fact about the Depression.
…Hoover — against whom Democrats, those fountains of fresh ideas, have been campaigning for 78 years — is again being invoked as a terrible warning about the wages of sin. Sin is understood by liberals as government austerity, which is understood as existing levels of government spending…
Real per capita federal expenditures almost doubled between 1929, Hoover’s first year as president, and 1932, his last. David Kennedy, in “Freedom from Fear,” the volume in the Oxford history of the American people that deals with the Depression, writes of Hoover:
“He nearly doubled federal public works expenditures in three years. Thanks to his prodding, the net stimulating effect of federal, state and local fiscal policy was larger in 1931 than in any subsequent year of the decade.” …
Obamacare continues to bring out the worst totalitarian instincts in our ‘public servants’. Michael Barone comments on one government official who needs to be removed from her post.
…Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.
…And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”
…Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.
“Congress shall make no law,” reads the First Amendment, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
…The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government. …
Ed Morrissey also comments on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ trouble respecting the Constitution.
…Rarely have we heard a Cabinet official tell Americans to stay out of political debates at the risk of losing their businesses. It points out the danger in having government run industries and holding a position where politicians can actually destroy a business out of spite. It also demonstrates the thin skin of our current administration, where Hope and Change means keeping your mouth shut and pretending that everyone is happy while businesses slowly circle the drain. …
The WSJ Editors weigh in on the government bullying.
…Witness Kathleen Sebelius’s Thursday letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group—a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that “there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”
Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They’re more subtle than this in Caracas. …
Ed Morrissey has a less threatening, yet still amazingly stupid, quote from Sebelius.
…Yesterday, when addressing the strong opposition to ObamaCare throughout the nation, Sebelius chalked it up to ignorance and misinformation — and suggested a remedy that sounds as if it came out of Orwell, emphasis mine:
“Unfortunately, there still is a great deal of confusion about what is in [the reform law] and what isn’t,” Sebelius told ABC News Radio in an interview Monday.
With several vulnerable House Democrats touting their votes against the bill, and Republicans running on repeal, Sebelius said “misinformation given on a 24/7 basis” has led to the enduring opposition nearly six months after the lengthy debate ended in Congress.
“So, we have a lot of reeducation to do,” Sebelius said.
The administration is particularly concerned about the views of senior citizens – who “have been a target of a lot of the misinformation,” according to the health secretary.
“Re-education” has been a favorite effort by tyrannies over the past century or so, mainly (but not exclusively) communist. The most notorious programs came in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the latter of which produced the mass exodus of “boat people” to the US and other countries. “Re-education” has come to mean either brainwashing or intimidation of political dissidents. …
Mort Zuckerman discusses how the government has taken care of its own, at the expense, literally and figuratively, of taxpayers’ standard of living. He suggests a couple ways to start taking control back from the government class.
…Political tension is bound to grow when jobs disappear faster in the private than the public sector, just as compensation in the former is squeezed more. There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector, a difference for which the public sector compensated by providing more security and better benefits. No longer. These days, government employees are better off in almost every area: pay, benefits, time off and security, on top of working fewer hours. Public workers have become a privileged class – an elite who live better than their private-sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public’s masters.
Take federal employees. For nine years in a row, they have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private-sector workers. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9m federal civilian workers was more than $79,000, against an average of about $50,000 for the nation’s 108m private-sector workers, measured in full-time equivalents. Ninety per cent of government employees receive lifetime pension benefits versus 18 per cent of private employees. Public service employees continue to gain annual salary increases; they retire earlier with instant, guaranteed benefits paid for with the taxes of those very same private-sector workers. ,,,
…The only fair solution is to take the politicians out of the equation and have fully independent commissions in charge, fixing the scale of salaries and benefits for public-service workers and establishing an affordable second retirement tier for new employees. More reasonable retirement ages should be in order, such as 65 for general employees and 55 for public safety employees. This would take nothing away from the existing benefits of current employees.
A fundamental rethinking of the public workforce is necessary. Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.
Jonah Goldberg writes about the complexity, efficiency, and miraculous results of free markets.
…In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
…To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?
The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.
…the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner. …
Greg Mankiw’s Blog discusses an interesting scheme by some academicians. It is just one of the many ways rent control in NY city provides typical unintended consequences of intervention in free markets.
… In the end, the goal of the rent control laws is thwarted (the low rents are enjoyed by well-paid tenured faculty rather than the needy), the income tax laws are thwarted (a sizable part of compensation is untaxed), and all this is done by a nonprofit institution (the university) whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public interest.
The attitude in Greece is worse than you’ve heard. Stephen Spruiell blogs in the Corner about a terrible incident.
Michael Lewis has written one of his impossible-to-stop-reading pieces on the intersection of human eccentricity and high finance, and his target this time is the nation of Greece. There’s way too much good stuff in the piece to pull out one key quote or graf, but in the midst of all the black humor I found this excerpt just plain sobering:
“Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves. The Greek public-sector employees assemble themselves into units that resemble army platoons. In the middle of each unit are two or three rows of young men wielding truncheons disguised as flagpoles. Ski masks and gas masks dangle from their belts so that they can still fight after the inevitable tear gas. “The deputy prime minister has told us that they are looking to have at least one death,” a prominent former Greek minister had told me. “They want some blood.” Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.”
It is a sharp contrast to the kind of things that happen when members of our Tea Party get together in large numbers, as well as a vivid reminder that we do not want to find out the hard way what happens when we reach our credit limit.
John J. Miller posts on a little-known fact in the Corner.
A long article in the NYT Mag asks why young people take so long to grow up these days. In the middle of it, we discover the hiding-in-plain-sight wisdom of car-rental companies:
Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”
Hat tip: Joseph Asch of Dartblog.
And we have NRO Shorts. Here’s one:
The economy may not have double-dipped, but the housing market has — with a vengeance. After rallying earlier this year in response to a tax credit that subsidized home purchases to the tune of $8,000, it has plunged again with the expiration of the credit, and plunged much faster and farther than expected: July’s numbers for new and existing home sales were some of the worst ever recorded. The easy explanation for this is that the tax credit pulled forward summer demand into spring, and the homebuyers who would have bought this summer have already bought homes. This explanation is true as far as it goes, but it comes with an unpleasant addendum: The bubble sent housing prices into the stratosphere, and they still look artificially high. The administration’s misguided policies benefited the Democrats, at least in the short run, and also helped banks that needed a break from foreclosures. But they have delayed the market’s recovery.