Monthly Archives: July 2020

Cancelation

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There’s cancelation and there’s cancelation.

The Left is busily canceling folks and institutions over historical transgressions—nearby or old, real or perceived, major or minor—including canceling heroes of the fight to end slavery because they were flawed. Why, then, are they so studiously not working to cancel the symbols of the Democratic Party, the leaders and other prominent members of that party, and the party itself? After all, it’s the Democratic Party that

  • actively fought for slavery anti-bellum and created the KKK post-bellum
  • moved to enact gun control laws explicitly to keep blacks unarmed and helpless against continued depredations
  • enacted Jim Crow laws
  • resegregated the Federal government under Woodrow Wilson
  • refused to integrate the military under FDR
  • nationalized minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from competing for jobs by being willing to work for less than white union members wanted to
  • created today’s “welfare” system that keeps blacks (and other poor) trapped in welfare cages
  • perpetuates racist segregation with their identity politics today
  • and on and on.

Oh, wait—that would mean the Left and the Party would have to cancel themselves.

Racism in the White House

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And Sexism. That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden is promising for us if he’s elected.

No, this isn’t about his sexist promise that he’ll have only a woman for Vice President, rather than the most qualified person, who might happen to be a woman, nor is it his strong leaning that the woman must be black, not—again—the most qualified person, who might happen to be black (and/or a woman).

This is about Biden’s promise of who he’ll nominate for Supreme Court Justice.

I have—we are putting together a list of a group of African-American women who are qualified and have the experience to be in the court.

Not people who are qualified and have the experienced to be on the Court and who happen to be black and women. No. Biden’s first criteria for his selections are skin color and gender—only third is actual qualification and experience.

This isn’t just pandering to blacks for their vote. This isn’t just insulting blacks by presuming they’re stupid enough to be bought off by such naked pandering.

Nor is this just a matter of pandering to women for their vote. Nor is it only insulting to women’s intelligence.

This is far worse than that: this is stinking sexism and rank racism.

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, viruses, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

A Judicial Error

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The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the

setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”

And then,

To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.

That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.

With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.

The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.

An Efficient Labor Market

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A writer, published in Wall Street Journal‘s Letters, responded to the idea that emphasis on education credentials over actual experience averred that the emphasis isn’t at all misplaced.

It’s more likely that there is a limited number of high-wage jobs available and that the market has efficiently set the wage based on the supply/demand curves.

This is a remarkably ill-informed claim, assuming as it does that we actually have an efficient market in labor.

Such a market cannot exist, though, in an environment where unions have monopoly power over labor in the industries in which they operate, nor can it exist in an economy with such widespread minimum wage mandates.

Since both of those exist, we are even farther from an efficient market for labor.