Monthly Archives: July 2016

Do We Really Need Four More Years?

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Here’s what nearly eight years of Progressivism, accomplished by President Barack Obama (D) and his Progressive-Democrat acolytes in the Democratic Party, have done.  As The Wall Street Journal put it:

  • largest stimulus spending bill in decades
  • Obamacare
  • nationalized the student-loan industry
  • turned the banks into public utilities answerable first to government

All of these have created the slowest recession recovery since WWII.  The nominally low unemployment rate that has been achieved is measured against the backdrop of the lowest labor participation rate in 40 years—in two generations.  Banks as government-managed public utilities, no longer responsive exclusive to the banks’ owners and creditors—which includes us individual savings and checking account holders?  That’s just another means for government to collect revenue.

Progressivism has been bypassing our republican democracy form of representative government for the last several years, too.  Obama has ruled by Executive diktat Executive Order, Executive Action, Department/Agency rulemaking to achieve

  • climate change
  • organizing

Then there’s foreign affairs.

  • deals with adversaries—the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, for instance, and acceptance of Russian partitions of Georgia and Ukraine
  • distanced us from our allies—denigrating Israel over their efforts to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, for instance
  • with Progressivism’s cynical budget maneuvering there’s less ability to support military spending—to the tune of defense spending falling to 3% of GDP and less—down from 4.6% those eight years ago

All of this is Progressivism’s pell-mell retreat from our responsibilities on the global stage, and that world is far more unstable and dangerous to us and to those friends and allies than it was eight years ago.

Then there’s Progressivism’s attitude toward us plebeian Americans.  They’ve plied the politics of identity to divide us by ideology, age, race, class, gender, and any other cleverly defined separation they could create, and then they’ve played these artificial distinctions (we used to be all Americans, after all, who happened to be of one gender or the other, have one skin color or another, one ethnic heritage or another) against each other in Progressives’ cynical effort to maximize their personal power.

Do we really need—can our nation really afford—four more years of the same?

YGTBSM

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This is how out of touch the Democratic Party and this administration is.

Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.

That’s just breathtaking.

Of course, it’s also true that a man said that in America a man has the right to be stupid if he wants to be.

Progressive Democrats

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Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) is Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate.  Clinton said in her speech introducing him that he as a good Progressive candidate, and in a later speech, Kaine agreed with that characterization.

OK.  Let’s accept his Progressivism, even though the Leftists don’t entirely agree.

Kaine makes a big deal about his work as a missionary in Honduras.  Kudos to him for his contributions to Hondurans.

But we should ask him: what has he done for Americans, say in Appalachia, where his running mate has promised to destroy Applachians’ jobs and make them dependents of government, or in the Ozarks, where jobs are similarly scarce and opportunity similarly limited?

We should ask him, too, whether he supports his fellow Progressive Democrat’s—New York Governor Mario Cuomo—active obstruction of New Yorkers’ opportunities while simultaneously jacking up the cost of heating their homes in those northeastern winters with his ban fracking.

Does he care only about foreign poverty–a legitimate concern, to be sure–and not about poverty and opportunity in his own country?  We do, after all, have an AmeriCorps VISTA program that’s alive and well, and Teach for America that focuses on education for poverty-ridden children, and Teaching Fellows that also focuses on the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, and on and on.  What has he done to support domestic programs like these?

And there’s this bit about Clinton’s and Kaine’s Progressivism, which goes back to the early 20th Century. Here’s what Herb Croly, one of the founders of the Progressive Movement during that early 20th Century period (a movement that was carried forward by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and pushed enthusiastically today by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), had to say about us Americans and about democracy in his The Promise of American Life:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy.

And

…the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Do we really want folks with this level of contempt for Americans and for America in our Federal government?

Government’s Market Interference

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I wrote about this matter just a bit ago.  Now DoJ has gone ahead and filed its lawsuits seeking to block the mergers between Anthem Inc and Cigna Corp and between Aetna Inc and Humana Inc.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s rationale for this is this:

If these mergers were to take place, the competition among these insurers that has pushed them to provide lower premiums, higher quality care and better benefits would be eliminated[.]

And

They would leave much of the multi-trillion dollar health insurance industry in the hands of three mammoth insurance companies, and restricting companies, and restricting competition in key markets[.]

The one is mere speculation, and the other is prior restraint.  It’s certainly true that the mergers would create very large companies and leave fewer of them in the market.  But to say that this must reduce competition is just a guessing game, especially since Lynch declined to say—as her predecessors have declined to say, and as economists cannot say—what the minimum number of enterprises must be in any industry for there to be competition.  Indeed, absent collusion, which is illegal, two companies are driven to compete with each other by the economic forces extant in a free market.

Never mind, either, that as Lynch knows full well, that what’s illegal in America, what’s illegal under our antitrust laws—and all that’s necessary to be illegal—is abuse of monopoly power, not the existence of it.  As with the rest of our laws in a free country, these companies must actually commit the misbehavior before they can be sanctioned for it.

On the other hand, Government does allow protected monopolies—Ma Bell before its court-ordered breakup is one example.  A protected monopoly is a monopoly that is explicitly protected by Government: the monopoly is allowed to exist, and it is overtly protected from competition, in return for which the monopoly agrees to be heavily regulated by Government, including the prices it’ll be allowed to charge and the services it’ll be allowed to provide.  Indeed, protected monopolies are textbook examples of regulatory capture—only two-sided: the monopoly and the regulators have captured each other.

Lynch’s action, though, is an abuse of our antitrust laws; it’s nothing more than the Democrats’ campaign of lawfare.  Given the nature of Obamacare, though, maybe this protected monopoly/regulatory mutual capture is this administration’s final goal for health insurance companies.  That would be both a further effort to nationalize our private companies and an example of this administration’s view that it can control the capture.

This sort of behavior, too, emphasizes that the coming election will have consequences, not only for the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, it’ll have consequences for the nation’s Department of Justice and the other Executive Branch Cabinets and Agencies (and for our lower courts).

All of this, in the end, is motivated in part by individual Progressive-Democrats’ grasping for personal gain.

It is, though, even more strongly motivated by Progressive-Democrats’ collective contempt for their Lessers, us poor, dumb, plebeian Americans.

[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.