Category Archives: ethics

Outcome Inequality

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The Daily Caller is writing about “The Inequality Trap,” in the context of income inequality.  Indeed, TheDC points out the hypocrisy generally inherent in the plaints:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, heads of state and billionaires from around the globe lamented the fact that some people are not as well off as they are, and called for government to do something about it. Then they went skiing.

And our favorite uncle Warren Buffet decries the premise that he pays less (income) tax than his secretary and wants government to raise his taxes—all the while declining to make donations to the Treasury and while doing everything legally within his and his accountants’ skill to reduce his own total tax bite.

Income or tax inequality, though, is just a small part of a larger item—inequality of outcomes generally.  The fact is, we can have equality of opportunity, as the principles statement of our social contract, or Declaration of Independence, promises us; or we can have equality of outcomes, as the Progressives today want us to have.  We can’t have both.

Not every individual has the same degree of talent, or capability, or work ethic of every other individual.  John Adams understood this:

Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them.

Forcing equal outcomes, then, is nothing more than denial of a more successful man’s right to the fullness of his Liberty and Life by denying him the right to the fruits of his success, his right to achieve his fullest potential, and it holds him back for no other reason than that others have not kept up.  This also subsidizes the less successful so they have the same outcomes as the more successful independently of their own labors.  This government subsidy, then, usurps that individual’s right to make his own decisions and makes the government responsible for each individual’s welfare, eliminating that individual’s own responsibilities and obligations.

But restraining the more successful, or subsidizing the less successful, are the same thing: the more successful are denied full value for their work, their talent, and their skills.  In the first instance, the more successful are held back directly, with the full measure of their success denied them.  In the second, the more successful are denied the same extra return to their performance that is awarded the less successful through subsidy.  Here, for instance, is every child receiving a prize, independent of the outcome from his effort or skill or talent, and so both the self-esteem of the child who did not do well and that of the child who won the competition are damaged by not being able to reap a reward consistent with actual effort or reap the consequences of failure and the opportunity to learn from that—with its own concomitant return to self-esteem.  Each child functionally receives only a participation award.  Here, too, is the high school orchestra, having won a state-wide competition in one year denied by rule the opportunity to compete at all in the following year.  This punishment for success denies the successful orchestra the opportunity for further success, and it denies the newly “winning” orchestra the opportunity to show that it is truly the best by outperforming last year’s winner.  Here, too, is the man who worked hard, both at the particular endeavor and at acquiring the skills necessary for success in the endeavor, and who was able to bring his talent to bear, being forced to give up some portion of the results of his more successful effort to another who did not do as well.  This concept of equal outcomes punishes the successful for their success, and it denies the unsuccessful the opportunity to do better and to become successful in their own right.

Instead, under our social compact, each American has an equal opportunity to achieve his version of the American dream, to achieve the full potential of his own capabilities.  This necessarily produces unequal outcomes when measured merely by fiscal wealth or material possession.  However, this equal opportunity is a grand implementation of American rights and liberties, as it provides the greatest equality for the protections of each one’s existence, rights, freedoms, and social well-being.  This also produces the greatest moral strength.

Thomas Jefferson understood this, too:

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not, exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Project 100,000

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In a throwback to the ’60s, and to a similar program, it seems that the present administration really is serious about helping those who are incapable of helping themselves.  Where that prior program centered on helping those who lacked the capacity for measuring up to the rigors of a military life, though, the present incarnation is centered on helping those who lack the capacity to measure up to the rigors of paying their taxes.

The present administration’s program began with the hiring of Timothy Geithner to be the man in charge of the national treasury, bringing him over from the IMF, where he had shown his inability to pay his self-employment taxes, despite having been repeatedly advised in writing by the IMF of the obligation.

Now we learn that 36 of Obama’s current staffers have been brought on board through the same program of outreach to the incapable.  These 36 owe nearly $1 million in back taxes for the 2010 tax year.  It’s not like they’re hurting for the money, either: Obama’s 1%, his staff of 457 aides, were paid a total of $37 million last year.

There’s more: the same IRS report that revealed the deficiencies of Obama’s staff also said that “thousands of federal employees owe,” in the aggregate, more than $3.4 billion in back taxes.  It seems none of these people are capable of understanding their tax obligations.

It’s clear, now, why Obama is so hard over on those who are better off—who are capable—being required to pay more.  Someone has to pay for Obama’s 100,000.

While this administration’s program of handouts for unfortunates is admirable, can we really trust the judgment that puts such people into such positions of power and trust?

(As an aside, Obama’s EPA performs even more poorly, both in total and on a per unfortunate basis: 413 of the EPA’s incapables owe nearly $19.5 million in back taxes.  Paying taxes is harmful to the environment?  Now there’s a rule….)

First Racism, Now Bullying (Cont’d)

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I first posted on this subject last week.  It’s a matter that concerns a school administrator’s definition of a student’s essay, written for a sanctioned debate, as bullying  for the sole reason, apparently, that the essay expressed opposition to adoption by gay couples.  In that post, I wrote that I had emailed District Superintendent Todd Carlson, the administrator who found the dissenting opinion an act of bullying, the following questions:

1) The hoo-raw is about a student newspaper op-ed debate in the form of an essay supporting gay couple adoption and an essay opposing gay couple adoption.  Is this a fair characterization of the newspaper’s debate?
2) I request access to copies of the student essays written in favor of and in opposition to gay couples and adoption.
3) You are reported as saying “It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people” in reference to the “anti” essay.  Is this an accurate quote?  If so, please advise how the “anti” position could have made without such bullying.  What terms and arguments would have been acceptable?

Dr Carlson has chosen not to respond.

Mathew Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, wrote to Dr Carlson also decrying the Superintendent’s bullying.  Staver described Carlson’s own bullying.

He’s using his position to bully this student. This is absolutely the epitome of intolerance….
When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing [the essay], and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic[.]”

Then came the threat.  Carlson told Wegner

[W]e have the power to suspend you if we want to.

Although Dr Carlson declined to make the boy’s essay available to me; Staver obtained a copy of both essays in the debate, apparently from a copy of the student newspaper in which the essays originally appeared.  He made the essays available at the above link, and both essays can be read here, as well.

Read the essays, and decide for yourselves whether the boy is “bullying” anyone.

In the meantime, it’s curious that Carlson refuses to explain his own actions, or to explain the manner in which an opposing opinion could be couched in a non-bullying manner.

Rule of Law, or Rule by Law?

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Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes about the Obama administration’s disregard for law through its decision to flout it on the subject of Obama’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, and Kevin Mooney writes about this administration’s disregard for law through its carefully selective enforcement vis-à-vis Federal voter registration law.

The Keystone law, an amendment (a rider in O’Grady’s terms) to the temporary payroll tax holiday bill passed last December, required Obama promptly to give thumbs up or down to the pipeline, and if he nixed it, he had to say why.  In his determination, Obama was explicitly enjoined by that law (which he signed, mind you) to consider the economy, energy security, foreign policy, employment, trade, and the environment.

In the event, Obama ruled the pipeline not to be in the national interest because of the State’s view that further environmental studies are required.  This directly contravenes the amendment, though, which specifically required that new environmental impact studies not be part of the consideration—there already having been three environmental studies completed in the last three years, each concluding minimal, if not trivial, impact.  O’Grady explains:

The three bullet points that cover this point in the rider couldn’t be much clearer: First, “the final environmental impact statement issued by the Secretary of State on August 26, 2011, satisfies all requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969…and section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.” Second, “any [O’Grady’s emphasis] modification” to the route “shall not require supplementation of the final environmental impact statement….” Third, “no further Federal environmental review shall be required.”

And so

…if the law is to be followed, since the president failed to make a national interest determination as specified in the rider, it means that “the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline…shall be in effect by operation of law.”

The only question, as O’Grady suggests, is whether Obama can be made to obey the letter and the spirit of that law—whether Obama believes in the rule of law, or in his rule by law.

In Louisiana, officials are attempting to follow Federal law, specifically the National Voter Registration Act of 1973, also known as the Motor Voter Law.  It seems that the election officials of Louisiana’s state government are following Federal law too zealously (a condition with which Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and others are quite familiar).

Obama’s lawsuits focus on the Motor Voter Law’s Section 7, which requires officials at state health and social service agencies, among others, to offer voter registration forms to all eligible adults, even if the same person visits the agency multiple times: that person is to get the forms at each visit.  The Feds have offered no evidence that this is failing to occur beyond the occasional honest error rate; what drew their eye, though, is the state’s adherence to Section 8 of the law.

Section 8 requires the state to purge its voter rolls of deceased and otherwise ineligible voters specifically to reduce the opportunity for voter fraud—which Progressives deny is happening at all.  It seems, though, that several Louisiana parishes have implausible voter registration rates: there are more registered voters in each of these parishes than there are people actually living in them.

The goal here is revealed by the “settlements” Obama’s administration has imposed on other states after similar suits were filed.  New Mexico, Indiana, Rhode Island, and others are now prevented from purging their voter rolls of any ineligible names until after the November elections.  Thus, the dead and other ineligibles, Democrats all, will be permitted to vote in the coming election.

Here, too, this administration’s choice between rule of law and rule by law is manifest.

Rights Upheld

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Last fall, I posted about a right-to-privacy case that involved police planting a GPS tracker in a suspect’s car without court sanction.  To briefly recap,  police wished to track the comings and goings of a suspected drug trafficker, so they obtained a search warrant for planting a GPS tracker on the suspect’s car.  In execution, though, the police had let the warrant expire before they acted on it, and then they planted the tracker outside the warrant’s jurisdiction.

The government argued that attaching the tracker to a car’s underside was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and further that no one who drove on public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.  Of course it was exactly this sort of cynical arrogance that contributed to our Founders’ writing into our Bill of Rights a requirement for the government to show cause to and get permission from a court before that government could invade and search an individual or his property.  Indeed, many of the government’s men understood this today; albeit they were breathtakingly careless in the execution: police had, in fact, obtained a warrant to attach the tracker, but within the District of Columbia.  However, they then installed the device after the warrant had expired and while the car was parked in Maryland.

Today, reports The Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling.  In a unanimous opinion, the Court said that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle—the Founders’ view, and American rights, were vindicated and upheld.

Still, the Court split in its opinion.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in the five-Justice majority opinion, held that the 18th century concept of “persons, houses, papers, and effects” included such private properties as 21st century automobiles in the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches (and seizures).  Thus, the 4th Amendment is technology-agnostic: our rights appertain to us, not to our property.  But we knew that from our Declaration of Independence.

Justice Samuel Alito went even further, in a dissenting concurring opinion (signed  onto by the likes of Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer).  Alito held that the warrantless (unwarranted?) GPS tracker implant not only violated the victim’s right of privacy, it violated his  “reasonable expectation of privacy,”  because, as the Court had held as long ago as 1967, “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”

Alito was quite clear in his reasoning, as summarized by the WSJ at the above link:

…a property-based approach was too narrow to guard against the proliferating threats to personal privacy modern technology posed.

In broadening Scalia’s argument, we see that technology agnosticism, again, with regard to our rights and freedoms.

In the end, the original obtaining of a warrant, coupled with the administration’s argument  that the warrantless search was only a trivial violation, demonstrates this administration’s utter cynicism when it comes to the rights and freedoms of Americans—and the continued need for the 4th Amendment to be applied rigorously and zealously.