Monthly Archives: June 2016

Another Government Overreach?

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Before the government can measure the size of the gig economy—or is it the sharing economy? The digital economy?—the sector needs to be defined.

No, it doesn’t.  It doesn’t even need to measure the size of the gig economy; government has shown it’s not going to do anything useful, or freedom-promoting, with that measurement.

And this misconception, by Commerce Department Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Justin Antonipillai:

In order to have good policy making, you have to have good data[.]

Again, no.  Government doesn’t need to make any policy in this area.  Not at all.  Government just needs to butt out, and let American entrepreneurs make their own way.

Only our Liberals are unable to function without being told every little thing every step of the way.  Even Liberals can learn how, though.

Barry Goldwater on Power

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Via The Wall Street Journal, a paragraph from Goldwater’s 1964 Republican Convention nomination acceptance speech:

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Could he have been talking about someone today?

Look Who’s Talking

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chastised Republican lawmakers on Sunday for a “paralyzed” Congress, saying they’ve fueled populist anger by refusing to “do their job.”

It’s Congressional Democrats and a Democratic Party President who are blocking the spending and tax cuts that would stimulate our economy and let people get back to work.

It’s a Democratic Party President whose Executive Branch creates rule after regulation that limits what people can do with their private property and that stifles innovation and economic growth, and it’s Congressional Democrats who block efforts to pull those rules and regulations back.

It’s Congressional Democrats who deliberately prevented the House from functioning at all because they couldn’t impose their minority will on the House, denying even the people’s House the ability to act democratically.

It’s Congressional Democrats who continually attack our 1st Amendment rights—every single one of them—and our 2nd Amendment rights, forcing Congress to spend valuable time protecting Americans’ individual liberties instead of positively pursuing the people’s business.

It would be good if the Democrats actually did start doing their jobs, instead of being cynically disruptive.

It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of foisting off on us her Russian overcharge reset, with Russia now occupying Crimea and other parts of Ukraine.  It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of napping through her 3pm call for help from our Benghazi consulate.  It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of ignoring security strictures and running her State email communications, including classified correspondence, from her private, unsecured, unprotected email server.

It would have been good had Clinton done something positive during her stay as Secretary of State.

Democrats Quibble

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In the Democrats’ preemptive release of their own version of the House Benghazi panel investigation into the fiasco in our Benghazi consulate that culminated in the terrorist murders of our Ambassador to Libya and three of his staff (a preemption that itself demonstrates the Democrats’ fear of the truth), they claim that ex-Secretary of State and current Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton

never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional protection.

Never personally denied.  The quibble, apart from the separate and early release, gives the lie.  Clinton was the Secretary of State.  Her security chief didn’t do anything—approving or denying—regarding consular security without the boss’ prior permission, either specifically to a given act or generally through the rules and procedures Clinton approved.

Further to the dishonesty:

The panel’s five Democrats said after a two-year investigation that the military could not have done anything differently on the night of the attacks to save the lives of four Americans killed in Libya.

Perhaps, perhaps not.  What these Democrats carefully elide is that Clinton’s State Department decision to not react to the ongoing terrorist attack was made in real-time as the attack began: Clinton had no way of knowing for how long the attack would continue or for how long our Ambassador and his protection detail and the personnel at the annex to which survivors of the initial stage of the attack retreated would hold out.  A decision to have military and other units move rather than to sit and watch might have reduced American fatalities.  Or maybe not.

The key point here is that Clinton’s denial, in advance of the attack, of added security, and her subsequent denial of real-time support while knowing she could not know whether that support would arrive in time, contributed to the success of the terrorist attack.

The panel’s five Democrats know this full well and choose quibbling and obfuscation rather than truth.

This is News?

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US Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday urged Britain and the European Union to manage their divorce responsibly for the sake of global markets and citizens….

Kerry said

The most important thing is that all of us, as leaders, work together to provide as much continuity, as much stability, as much certainty as possible[.]

Empty remarks by the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair.  After all, what else would he say—that the EU and Great Britain should go for each other’s throats, and the first slash wins?

On the other hand, after President Barack Obama threatened the Brits should they go against their Betters and vote to leave, maybe this is news.