Category Archives: ethics

The Regulation of America

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We’re becoming a severely regulated country, and it’s coming on the heels of President Obama’s promise to

find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses [and] fix them

which he made in his 2011 State of the Union address and which he committed to writing in his Executive Order 13563 the week prior, which requires all executive branch agencies to “identify and consider regulatory approaches that reduce burdens.”

This also is symptomatic of what’s wrong with our present administration.

This exchange between Congressman Corey Gardner (R, CO)  and EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus at a House Environment and the Economy Subcommittee hearing demonstrates just how seriously Obama and his agencies take his promises:

Corey: Is it standard procedure for an economic analysis to ignore the impact on jobs?

Stanislaus: Well, we didn’t do a direct analysis, again we sought—

Corey: So you did not do a direct economic analysis?

Stanislaus: Well we did do an economic analysis on [various areas]

Corey: But not a cost on jobs?

Stanislaus: Not directly.

The entire five minutes of the video consists of variations of this exchange wherein Corey kept trying to pin down Stanislaus on whether the EPA satisfies its statutory requirement to do a jobs impact analysis as part of its rules economic analysis and Stanislaus’ constant evasion and finally admission that the EPA does not.  The rules, as rules, are more important than working Americans, more important than their effects on our country.

As the Heritage Foundation points out, since January 2009, 106 new “major” regulations have been enacted, costing us $46 billion, plus almost $11 billion more in implementation costs: Obama has become the biggest regulator in American history.  Dodd-Frank has generated the most regulations, and with the CFPB, these are the least accountable.  The EPA, though, is enacting the most expensive, with just four rules costing us $4 billion per year.  And this is before the closure of gasoline refineries in the Northeast—which will force New York, for instance, to import expensive foreign gasoline to make up the shortfall—and electric power generating plants throughout the already economic and employment challenged rust belt—which will drive up power costs for those hard-pressed businesses and citizens.

On the financial side beyond Dodd-Frank, the government is reaching directly inside our businesses to dictate to them what they can and cannot do with their own business assets.  Illustrative of this is the Federal Reserve Bank’s decision to not allow Citibank to return capital to its owners through increased dividends and stock buy-backs.  The Fed said Citi couldn’t handle it.  The Fed said that, not the bank’s owners.  The bank’s owners said otherwise but were casually overruled.

There’s a rather naked conflict of interest here for a government as prone to expand our national debt as this one is.  As Alex Pollock, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and past president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, points out:

…governments promote loans to governments. They have an obvious self-interest in promoting loans to themselves and to other governments they wish to help or influence.  Banks are extremely vulnerable to pressure from governments—the more regulated they are, the more vulnerable.  Employees of government bureaucracies have an incentive to encourage loans to their political employers—an inherent conflict of interest.

But never mind about petty conflicts of interest.  It’s this way because the Progressives don’t believe we’re able to take care of our own affairs.  Instead, we must be told what to do, have our courses of action limited—for our own good—by our Betters.  And for their political gain.

2nd Amendment and the Fifth Circuit

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog has a description of an egregious gun rights case.  It seems that, when Errol Houston was arrested in New Orleans in 2009 on drug and firearm charges, the police seized a properly registered gun that he had.  So far, so good—when the police arrest someone, they’re allowed to disarm him, too.  However, when the charges were dropped, the city refused to return his weapon to him.  He sued for the return, and amazingly, the district court found for the city.  Even more amazingly, the Fifth Circuit upheld the ruling, with this…logic…written by Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale:

Just as some regulation of speech–e.g., of obscenity and defamation–is “outside the reach” of the First Amendment, so, too, is some regulation of firearms outside the reach of the Second.  The right protected by the Second Amendment is not a property-like right to a specific firearm, but rather a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

Houston has not alleged defendants prevented his “retaining or acquiring other firearms.”  Therefore, he has not stated a violation of his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod dissented.  In addition to pointing out the degree of legality of the majority opinion, violating as it does the Supreme Court’s prior rulings in similar cases (vis., District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago), she also correctly explains the nature and meaning of the 2nd Amendment:

In the context of other enumerated constitutional rights, an equivalent per se exception for particular exercises of the right at stake (so long as other exercises of that right are permitted) would be intolerable.  Consider, for example, a court holding that the Free Speech Clause affords no protection against the government preventing the publication of a particular editorial in the New York Times because there are plenty of other newspapers that might publish the piece.  Or consider a court holding that the Fourth Amendment is inapplicable to the unreasonable seizure of a specific automobile so long as the government does not prevent the owner from borrowing, renting, or purchasing a replacement vehicle.  These examples should suffice to show the absurdity of courts recognizing categorical exceptions for each particular exercise of those rights.  In carving out such an exception from the Second Amendment, today’s majority impermissibly treats the Amendment as a “second-class right.”

Judge Elrod is right that the accessibility of alternatives is irrelevant—those alternatives are not the item itself, and the item itself remains the legitimate property of the owner.

Both the majority and Judge Elrod miss a larger point, though: the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is, indeed, a property right, but it is a different and more fundamental kind that that alluded by Judge Barksdale and accepted by Judge Elrod.  This property is one flowing from the endowment imbued in us by our Creator, a property of our being.  As such, Judge Elrod is right, but she doesn’t go far enough.  It is the regulation of our endowed rights that is the exception, not the possession of this or that particular item in a realization of one or more of those rights.

Pause for Commercial

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My book, A Conservative’s Manifesto: A Brief Discussion of some Principles, has been published, and it can be found, among other places, at Amazon.com (paperback, Kindle, or hardcover) and at Barnes & Noble (paperback, Nook, or hardcover). Links also can be found nearby in the column to the right and on the newly added Books page.

The book lays out, in so many words, a set of (modern) Conservative principles that are tied back to the 18th Century Liberal principles that guided our Founding Fathers in developing our American social compact.  I begin with a description of those 18th Century Liberal principles and continue with a description of our drift away from them over the last 80 years, beginning with FDR’s administration.  I also describe a modern Conservatism that is those 18th Century Liberal principles brought forward to today, and I apply those principles to a number of critical aspects of American life: faith, citizenship, the nation, our economy, and our government.  I close by contrasting modern Liberal/Progressive concepts with these modern Conservative concepts and offering a path back to those modern Conservative tenets that made our country so exceptional and so great.

I hope you find it both enjoyable and useful.

Are Ethics Situational?

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We have a Progressive comedian with a history of scurrilous slurs against conservative women, and we have a conservative radio talk show host making scurrilous slurs against a Progressive woman.  Only the conservative is the recipient of opprobrium.

There is some commentary on the commentary.

Penny Nance, of Concerned Women for America, suggests that President Obama should insist that the comedian’s $1 million donation to Priorities USA Action, which supports the Obama campaign, should be returned to the comedian.

On the other hand, Bill Burton, Priorities USA Action, while saying the comedian’s comments were “vulgar and inappropriate,” insists that it’s different than the comments from the talk show host.

The notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said during the course of his career, and what the [talk show host] said to sexually degrade a woman who engaged in a political debate of our time is crazy.  There’s no similarity about what Rush Limbaugh said, lying about the argument that Miss Fluke was making, a law student at Georgetown, and what a comedian has said in the past.

Hmm….

The Meaning of the Absence of Reasoned Argument

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Here is a sample of the kind of campaign that President Obama is running in his attempt to get reelected.

They’re obsessed

By Jim Messina, Campaign Manager on

In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers.

Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who bankrolled Tea Party extremism, and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.

So in the hours before Romney courts two men obsessed with making Barack Obama a one-term president, let’s see how many of us can chip in to the Two-Term Fund.

Here’s what Mitt Romney told his supporters just after his victory in the Florida GOP primary:

“We must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.”

Pitch in $3 or more over the next 24 hours to show that, while that message may fire up two oil-industry billionaires, it’s also one that plenty of us are tired of hearing.

The Koch Companies’ President of Government and Public Affairs, Philip Ellender, responded to this in a well-publicized manner.  I won’t go into that letter; however, a copy of it can be seen here.

What’s interesting, though, is Obama’s response, through Messina, to the Koch Industries letter.  I’ll cite relevant parts; the whole letter can be read at the link.

I am writing in response to your letter, in which you portrayed the oil and gas executives you represent as average citizens trying to make their voices heard.

Of course, no such representation was made. They did mention the “tens of thousands of members and contributors from across the country and from all walks of life” with respect to Americans for Prosperity.  Of course Obama knows that there are not “tens of thousands” of oil and gas executives all across the country; this is deliberate, Alinsky-esque distortion.

But it is a cynical stretch to describe the political activities of your employers as furthering democracy when they are courting huge checks from special interest donors to pay for negative ads, with no public disclosure of the identity of those donors.

Hmm.  Obama claims to know of “huge checks from special interest donors,” but there is “no public disclosure of the identity of these donors.”  Which side of Obama’s mouth should we believe, here?  Or is Obama confessing to domestic spying on private American citizens?

You argue that Americans for Prosperity is a grassroots organization of everyday citizens. But its emphasis on rolling back environmental protections and blocking a clean energy economy appears to be nothing more than an effort to promote the corporate interests of your employers and others who lavishly, and secretly, fund its operations.

This is another deliberate distortion.  AFP doesn’t espouse rolling back environmental protections or blocking clean energy.  AFP, along with all thinking Americans, do espouse eliminating excessive EPA regulations that hinder business—of any type—with no discernible gain for the environment.  Nor do we Americans seek to block clean energy.  We do object to Obama wasting our money on the Solyndras of the nation, and we do object to Obama wasting our money on “green” enterprises whose product cannot survive in an honestly competitive free market without those props.

You note in your letter that Americans for Prosperity has tens of thousands of members and contributors from all walks of life across the country, suggesting that this is the source of AFP’s funding. There is one way to verify your point: disclose those donors for the public to make that judgment.

How very Axelrod of Obama.  He doesn’t have to supply any evidence.  He just has to accuse, and given the accusation, of course the accused is perforce guilty unless he can prove his innocence.

But, even though I’ve spent some time on this, it’s all just cynical distraction, which is Obama’s intent with his Messina letter.  What’s most important here is that at no time does Obama address the issues raised in the Koch Industries letter response to his original ad hominem attack.

If the President’s campaign has some principled disagreement with the arguments we are making publicly about the staggering debt the President and previous administrations have imposed on the country, the regulations that are stifling business growth and innovation, the increasing intrusion of government into nearly every aspect of American life, we would be eager to hear them.

and

It is understandable that the President and his campaign may be “tired of hearing” that many Americans would rather not see the president re-elected. However, the inference is that you would prefer that citizens who disagree with the President and his policies refrain from voicing their own viewpoint. Clearly, that’s not the way a free society should operate.

and

I…hope the President will reflect on how the approach the campaign is using is at odds with our national values and the constitutional right to free speech.

Oh, yeah—Obama did pretend to address the nation’s debt explosion:

That is why the President introduced a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion and put us on a path to solvency.

Obama’s “plan” is two budget proposals so ludicrous that even the Democratic party voted it out of town unanimously, and the second proposal, just last month, doubles down on that bad joke.

But he carefully elided the Progressive regulatory environment and the increasing intrusion of the Progressive government into the lives of ordinary Americans and our businesses.

And on free speech,

When you attempt to drown out their voices through unlimited, secret contributions to pursue a special-interest agenda that conflicts with what’s best for our nation, you must expect some scrutiny of your actions.

Once again, cynically unsubstantiated accusations of secret donations (since you know of them, Mr Obama, provide the data), while continuing the free speech of ad hominem attacks.

Two reasons come to mind for such a campaign.  One is the naked intimidation of those with dissenting speech in which Obama is so plainly engaged.  He simply will not brook any disagreement with his own hallowed positions, and he attacks, personally and with demonization, all those who do disagree.  Is this the sort of President of which we want another four years?

The other reason is that Obama simply is incapable of forming an argument that defends his own position, and so he runs away from the issues at hand and dives for the cover of the ad hominem as a means of changing the subject.  He knows his policies have failed utterly, but he lacks the moral rigor to acknowledge that and change course: he is capable only of avoiding the issues and engaging in personal attacks.  Is his the sort of President of which we can afford to risk another four years?