Category Archives: morality

An Outcome of Big Government

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The proper lessons of the unfolding IRS scandal are twofold.  First, any effort to have the IRS police advocacy activities of social-welfare organizations is bound to be clumsy and prone to degenerate into either selective or broad witch hunts.  Second, the remedy is not to further limit political speech by nonprofit entities—which would certainly raise significant constitutional issues—but to encourage such speech by imposing fewer restrictions.

That combines with this:

There are two valid takeaways from the IRS scandal [and the other scandals: AP; Benghazi; Sebelius’ HHS “fund-raising” for Federal government’s health exchanges, just exposed this year].  First, it confirms that big government, whose power Obama is bent on expanding, cannot be trusted to behave properly.  Second, it calls for further investigation to determine how high up the chain the wrongdoing extends and whether the administration acted promptly to stop the targeting once it learned of that activity.

The need for an investigation and the firing of miscreants and subsequent jailing of those miscreants whose behavior was criminal certainly is warranted.  However, the IRS’ unconscionable behavior, and the Obama administration’s behavior vis-à-vis the other…scandals…, aren’t unique to the Obama administration.  These are the inevitable outcomes of Big Government, even when that government acts with the best of intentions.

Our Federal government needs to be drastically shrunk in size and scope, returning it to the small, limited, and so controllable, entity that it was designed to be.

A first step in this, in the present context, would be to do away with the distinction between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations—the legal distinction is wholly artificial and without meaning, anyway.  All entities engaged in otherwise tax exempt activities must be able to engage in some political activity.  That’s at the core of the speech clauses of the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There’s nothing in there about “except for when individual Americans or groups of them peaceably assembled are doing certain government-identified things.”

Subsequently, reform the tax code altogether to a single low, flat tax and thereby eliminate the need for tax exempt status for any organization.

The Morality of the Left, Redux

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Via Peter Baker of The New York Times, comes this…gem.  Baker quotes David Axelrod, long-time senior advisor to President Barack Advisor and heavy-hitting campaign supporter in 2012, as saying this:

[T]he reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.

So, the plain, unvarnished truth isn’t practical, is that it?

The Morality of the Left

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In response to the IRS’ appalling targeting of administration-disfavored groups applying for tax-exempt status, President Barack Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe tweeted

David Plouffe ‏@davidplouffe 12 May

What IRS did dumb and wrong. Impt to note GOP groups flourished last 2 elections, overwhelming Ds. And they will use this to raise more $.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, all that matters in Plouffe’s moral world is

partisan advantage rather than…apolitical tax enforcement….

It’s clear to me from all of the scandals exploding in DC that this view of “morality” is typical of the Progressives and is not at all unique to Plouffe.

The rightness or wrongness of a thing is wholly unimportant.  What matters is whether any profit can be made from it, and what’s wrong about it is the other side collecting the profit.  So they say.

Just a Bunch of Low-Rent Chicago Hoods

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Here’s a short list:

  • Fast and Furious and Attorney General Eric Holder’s steadfast refusal to cooperate with Congress’ investigation of this crime
  • Department of Energy’s use of taxpayer money to loan millions to cronies at Solyndra, Fisk, A123, et al
  • President Barack Obama’s initial attempts to downplay the IRS’ politically targeting government-disfavored groups and men by holding up their tax-exempt applications and/or singling them out for “investigation:” “If the reported actions are true,” he said on the heels of the IRS admitting it had done these things and issued their faux apology
  • Obama’s “firing” of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller by allowing him to resign: Miller was resigning anyway in a couple of weeks, and he’s being allowed to stay on for a couple of weeks
  • For all that, IRS continues to collect tax data by trolling taxpayers’ digital activities, scraping eBay auctions, Facebook posts, and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records.
  • Obama’s dissembling about events surrounding Benghazi and the terrorist murders of our Ambassador and three others, including lies to the press, through Carney’s mouth, about “a single” talking point edit
    • the “penultimate point” from original talking points:
      • The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the US facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks
    • State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland’s concern:
      • …the penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that either?
    • White House’s David Adams’ concurrence with Nuland:
      • I’m with Toria [Victoria]. The last bullet especially will read to members like we had been repeatedly warned
  • Obama’s politicizing the outcomes of the Benghazi and IRS failures, then claiming that it was the Republicans who were politicizing them by seeking the facts of these matters
  • DoJ’s secret seizure of AP phone records, which included those for phone lines in the House of Representatives press gallery—which means phone records of Congressmen talking with the press via telephone were included: DoJ was collecting communications records on Congressmen, too
  • HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius pushing, among other organizations, insurance companies (which she regulates) to contribute private monies to help make up the shortfall in government funding of the government’s insurance exchanges
  • Obama, et al., claiming that Republican budget cuts caused the Benghazi security failures, even though Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb testified under oath before Congress that budgetary considerations were not a factor in her decision not to beef up Benghazi security
  • More than 2,200 illegal immigrants, over 600 of which had criminal records,  released earlier this year by DHS’ ICE, using the sequester as the excuse, and the release kept hidden from Congress for months until threat of subpoena

And Obama is the leader.