Category Archives: ethics

The Supreme Court and the Constitution

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Here’s another implication of Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

According to Chief Justice Roberts, the penalty is merely a tax on not owning health insurance, no different from “buying gasoline or earning income,” and it thus complies with the Constitution. This a large loophole. The result is that Washington has unlimited power to impose new purchase mandates and the courts will find them constitutional if Congress calls them taxes, or even if it calls them something else and judges call them taxes.

Except that not buying a thing or a service is radically different from buying that thing or service.  This isn’t merely a matter of opposites: opposites are related to each other.  There is no relation between buying or not buying—the thing/service being bought is known; the thing/service not being bought cannot be known, and so the bought/not bought functions can have no relation to each other whatsoever.

Chief Justice Roberts writes that construing the Commerce Clause as the Obama Administration argued “would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority…. The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, and for over 200 years both our decisions and Congress’s actions have reflected this understanding.” [emphasis in the original]

But then

Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1920s and 1930s define penalties and taxes as mutually exclusive and critically different.

With this stroke, Roberts has cancelled the effect of his understanding on the limit of the Commerce Clause’s ability to compel commerce; he has simply transferred the ability to compel commerce to the Taxing Clause.  Which also had no prior compulsion power.

Whether the Federal government may compel our behavior via Commerce or via Taxing, our government now can compel our behavior.

This is judicial activism at its worst.

The Racism of the Left

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MSNBC host and racial activist Reverend Al Sharpton in an interview with The Hill, as cited by Fox News:

I’m not saying that this is because Holder is black, and I’m not calling [Republicans] racists. I’m saying what they’re doing has a racial effect, and that’s what we’re going to talk about.

What the Reverend chooses to ignore is that only a racist would find “racial effects” in an affair that has nothing at all to do with race.

But there’s more: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said last week that Republicans’ demand for a full accounting of the crimes of “Fast and Furious,” and Republicans’ objections to Attorney General Eric Holder’s stonewalling and potentially outright lying during the investigation, is mere obfuscation of their real goal—to  keep minorities from voting and to keep Holder from interfering.

They’re going after Eric Holder because he is supporting measures to overturn these voter-suppression initiatives in the states.

A vast, right wing, racist conspiracy.

Holder himself has been actively interfering with states’ efforts to ensure that their voter rolls are populated only with eligible voters, and not also with the dearly departed, or with Mickey Mouse, or with a white Holder.  Or with illegal aliens.  Because keeping ineligible voters from voting is somehow racist.

At least one Federal judge isn’t buying it, though, and that’s to the good.  US District Judge Robert Hinkle, of the Northern District of Florida, has rejected Holder’s suit against Florida, which suit was an attempt to block that state from protecting the sanctity of an American’s—a Floridian’s—vote by removing ineligible voters, of whatever race or stripe, from the voting rolls.

Ruling that while federal laws (vis., the National Voter Registration Act of 1993) are designed to block states from removing eligible voters close to an election, they are not designed to block states from removing voters who were never eligible in the first place, Judge Hinkle denied Holder’s motion to enjoin Florida from purging ineligible voters from their voter rolls.

Europe’s Labor Problems

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Aside from the debt and profligate spending problem, Europe’s labor laws are large contributors.  The Wall Street Journal recently described Italian labor law.  And Italy is not atypical for Europe.

  • Business pays 2/3 of each employee’s social security costs (I won’t go into how cheap we Americans are compared to the Europeans when it comes to social security).
  • Businesses with more than 10 employees (quoting the WSJ)

must submit an annual self-assessment to the national authorities outlining every possible health and safety hazard to which your employees might be subject.  These include stress that is work-related or caused by age, gender and racial differences.  You must also note all precautionary and individual measures to prevent risks, procedures to carry them out, the names of employees in charge of safety, as well as the physician whose presence is required for the assessment.

  • Businesses with more than 15 employees encounter very onerous limits on the ability to fire an employee, for any reason.
  • Businesses with more than 15 employees also must explicitly hire disabled—qualified or not—and must have at least 14 disabled employees when they go above 50 employees.  The businesses must maintain that 7% ratio at all larger sizes.
  • Businesses with more than 100 employees must submit to the government a biennial report on the gender dynamics within the company.  This report must include a tabulation of the men and women employed in each production unit, their functions and level within the company, details of compensation and benefits, and dates and reasons for recruitments, promotions and transfers, as well as the estimated revenue impact.

The WSJ cites the OECD as noting that

All of these protections and assurances, along with the bureaucracies that oversee them, subtract 47.6% from the average Italian wage….  Two-thirds of that bite comes before payroll, meaning many Italian workers are unaware of their gross cost to employers.

I mean, really.  YGTBSM.

Progressives and Freedom

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From The Wall Street Journal:  Progressives are now actively lying about the National Federation of Independent Business because that organization is the formal lead plaintiff in the Obamacare lawsuit, which ruling the Supreme Court is scheduled to announce today.

Here’s what’s going on.

The chairmen of the House Progressive Caucus, Democrats Raul Grijalva [D, AZ] and Keith Ellison [D, MN], [wrote] a letter accusing the NFIB of acting against “the best interest of small business owners” and “the popular opinion of the American small business community.”

Because, of course, all those 300,000 small business NFIB members adore Obamacare.  These guys say so.

Then the WSJ notes:

…among the four million small businesses eligible for new tax credits if they provide health insurance for their workers, a mere 170,300 have signed up.

Hmm….

And they ask:

…if the NFIB is as unrepresentative as liberals claim, then why have its ranks grown by 5% since it became a plaintiff in the ObamaCare suit?

And they add:

Some 65% [of NFIB members, in an NFIB poll of its membership] believe ObamaCare will do the opposite [i.e., will increase health care costs] and 77% believe it will result in a higher tax burden, which are among the reasons the group joined the suit. One in five small businesses believes it’ll be forced to alter the benefits it offers employees.

Yeah.  That’s broad-based support for Obamacare, all right.  It’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Hope and Change

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The last 3½ years have seen a lot of this slogan.  While the hope—for the better—waned long ago, President Obama has, in fact, achieved quite a lot in the way of change.  Here are some of those changes:

He got Obamacare rammed through, albeit in the dark of night in a wholly, cynically, partisan manner, and he did it without a single Progressive (or Republican, come to that) congressman actually reading the bill prior to voting on it—some proud in their ignorance.  This bill achieves quite a lot: it lets children extend their childhoods and parental dependencies to their 26th year, by staying on mumsy’s and popsy’s health insurance policies.  It adds to the Federal deficit with its trillion-dollar costs.  It lets you, taxpayers, pay for coverage for an additional 20+ million health insurees.  It nationalizes the health care and health insurance industries.

He got Dodd-Frank rammed through in the same manner and with the same level of Congressional ignorance.  And pride of ignorance.  This bill also achieves quite a lot.  It creates a fourth branch of government in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.  These two agencies are wholly unaccountable to the Congress—and so to us—are not under control of the President, and at least the CFPB’s budget comes, on demand, from the Federal Reserve System.  Yet these two will, single-handedly and without oversight, determine whether financial institutions will be allowed to do business (vis., extend loans or credit of any sort—even at your corner mom and pop grocery store) and the conditions under which they will be allowed to do so.

He’s achieved a trillion-dollar cut in our defense capacity at a time of rising PRC aggressiveness, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and an expansive, grasping Russia.  This includes a shrinking Navy, a gutted Army, and an Air Force with little capacity for anything other than looking pretty in fly-bys.

In an apparent nod to an earlier Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, he’s leaking every cyber-warfare and counter-terrorism secret we used to have to the news outlets.  Apparently, if we have no secrets, other gentlemen have no need to resist the temptation to read ours.  Or he subscribes to the theory that if we tell our enemies everything we have, we don’t need to spend our resources trying to figure out what they know about us (another savings!).  Or both.

He’s instructed his DoD to desist using unpleasant interrogation techniques.  And, since he believes our enemies have no knowledge of anything that’s of intelligence value at all, he’s instituted a program of killing them rather than capturing them and having to figure out how to hold them and question them.  And he brags about personally selecting, by name, the ones that are to be assassinated—a Roman circus thumbs down from the Emperor.

No, Obama has wrought enormous change.  Just all of it has been destructive of our great nation.

We need to fix this.