Category Archives: morality

Justice Thomas’ Dissent

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Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent from the Supreme Court’s just published ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, quoted below, is short, to the point, and worth studying.  His dissent also can be found at the end of the full ruling (together with the four Justices’ joint dissent), which itself can be read here.  Justice Thomas’ cites are omitted below.

JUSTICE THOMAS, dissenting.
I dissent for the reasons stated in our joint opinion, but I write separately to say a word about the Commerce Clause.  The joint dissent and THE CHIEF JUSTICE cor­rectly apply our precedents to conclude that the Individual Mandate is beyond the power granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.  Under those precedents, Congress may regulate “economic activity [that] substantially affects interstate commerce.”  I adhere to my view that “the very notion of a  ‘substantial effects’ test under the Commerce Clause is inconsistent with the original understanding of Congress’ powers and with this Court’s early Commerce Clause cases.”  As I have explained, the Court’s continued use of that test “has encouraged the Federal Government to persist in its view that the Commerce Clause has virtually no limits.”  The Government’s unprecedented claim in this suit that it may regulate not only economic activity but also inactivity that substantially affects inter­state commerce is a case in point.

It was this “substantial effects” test that permitted the ruling in Jones & Laughlin and which was dramatically expanded in Wickard.  Until these odious rulings are reversed, the dangerous lack of limits still extant in the Commerce Clause, the majority opinion in this case notwithstanding, remain a clear and present danger to our individual liberties.

Obamacare, the IRS, Privacy, and Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

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Here is a partial list, courtesy of Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business, of the additional privacy invasions in which Obamacare requires the IRS to engage, in order to ensure that you, “private” citizen, are complying with the Progressive Government’s determination of what is appropriate for you.  Understand, you’ve lost the right to determine what level or type of health insurance coverage is appropriate—the Progressive Government will determine that for you.  You’ve also lost the right to determine what level of coverage is affordable according to your own—or your small (or large) business’ estimate—expense pattern and what you’ve decided you’re willing to pay—the Progressive Government will determine that for you.

According to the Taxpayer Advocate Office, we erstwhile private citizens must tell the government’s man, under Obamacare,

  • our insurance plan information, including who is covered under the plan and the dates of coverage;
  • costs of [our] family’s health insurance plans;
  • whether [any of us] had an offer of employer-sponsored health insurance;
  • cost of employer-sponsored insurance;
  • whether [any of us] received a premium tax credit;
  • whether [any of us] has an exemption from the individual responsibility requirement.

Moreover, the IRS under Obamacare is requiredauthorized to talk with folks about us with whom they never before had routine contact—all to ensure that we’re “paying our fair share.”  This list includes

  • new state-run insurance exchanges;
  • employers;
  • insurance companies;
  • government insurance programs.

Your W-2 no longer is enough; now the IRS will be quizzing your employer in great detail.  The fact that you do, or don’t, have health insurance coverage no longer is a private matter; the Progressive Government will be quizzing your insurer.

On top of this, if we must pay a penaltytax because we don’t have the Progressive Government’s definition of “adequate” coverage, that tax is designed to be the maximum collectable, not the minimum.  The tax is either a fixed dollar amount, or a percentage of our income above the filing threshold, whichever is greater.  Even common criminals, on conviction, don’t automatically get the maximum sentence in every case.  But then, your money really isn’t yours, anyway—it’s the property of the Progressive Government; it’s just ensuring it gets every bit of its property.  And the criteria for determining the size of our tax?  They include more destruction of our privacy:

  • the IRS determines our “household income,” the sum of the incomes of everyone living under our roof
  • the IRS will demand to know the insurance coverage of each person living under our roof.

If anyone is lacking proper insurance, you get the tax.

It’s just as bad for the small businesses that we “private” citizens run, now for the benefit of government rather than for our own purposes.  Here’s an example of the penaltytax “your” small business must pay.

Businesses with more than 50 employees are required under Obamacare to provide “adequate” health insurance coverage for all of their employees.

The tax is $2,000 per employee, but the business must first knock out from the math the first 30 workers—part-timers don’t count.

Example: If you have 51 full-time employees and 15 part-time employees throughout the year, and one full-time employee is receiving a tax credit to help them buy health insurance [because you’re not providing “adequate,” “affordable” insurance for that employee], your business will have to pay:

51 (the number of full time employees) – 30 (the first 30 employees are excluded)

21 x $2,000 = $42,000

Notice that: one employee is getting short-changed (according to the Progressive Government), so we pay the penalty on a multiplicity of employees.

Think about the effect this will have on hiring.

Read Ms MacDonald’s entire article to see a fuller the list of abuses Obamacare heaps on what used to be “our” businesses.

Remember all of this in November.

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.

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.

An Old Dead Guy’s View of National Debt

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On this, the 80th day shy of the 215th year since George Washington’s Farewell Address, an anniversary made notable by our present astronomical and exploding national debt, I thought I’d post what that old dead guy had to say about national borrowing and national debt.

The short version is, “Don’t do it, and don’t have it.”  Following are his specific words.

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit.  One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible: avoiding occasions of expence by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it; avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expence, but by vigorous exertions in time of Peace to discharge the Debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear.  The execution of these maxims belongs to your Representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should cooperate.  To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue; that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant; that the intrinsic embarrassment inseperable from the selection of the proper objects (which is always a choice of difficulties) ought to be a decisive motive for a candid construction of the Conduct of the Government in making it, and for a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining Revenue which the public exigencies may at any time dictate.

Notice that bit about taxation, too.  Taxes are for paying down the national debt and for the common defence, not for frivolous spending.  But again, the overriding imperative this Founder laid out is that our nation’s debts should be kept small by keeping spending small, and those debts should be paid by the generation that incurred them—not visited on our children’s children.

We citizens bear an additional responsibility in this, too: not to make frivolous demands on government to do for us that which we should—and can—do for ourselves.

Á propos is this remark by David Ricardo in response to Great Britain’s decision to print fiat money in an effort to increase funding for their war against Napoleon (one of those “unavoidable wars” to which Washington would have been referring, and not too far removed in time from Washington’s address):

Why should the mere increase of money have any other effect than to lower its value?  How would it cause any increase in the production of commodities? ….

Money cannot call forth goods, —but goods can call forth money…[.]