Category Archives: rights

A Large Misunderstanding

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A Wall Street Journal article about Breitbart writer and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos and his impact on college campus views of free speech opened with a widespread misunderstanding.

The tour by Milo Yiannopoulos is sparking reaction from more groups than any recent speaker has on college campuses, heightening tensions between free speech and public safety.

There is no tension between free speech and public safety, though: there is no public safety without free speech.  The relationship between free speech and public safety is not only—not even primarily—concerned with people whose feelings get hurt, or people legitimately insulted, and who then act out emotionally and dangerously.  The relationship is centered on Government’s ability to control what will be spoken or done and the threat that those abilities represent to public safety.

It’s only necessary to look at the vociferous protests from the Left and from the Right against what each side saw in its time as Government overreach to see the relationship.

Again: there is no public safety without free speech.  Full stop.

“How Barack Obama rescued the US economy”

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That’s the headline on a recent Financial Times piece (sorry, the FT has a paywall) by Martin Wolf.  It’s a silly headline, for a silly article.

How should we assess the economic success or failure of Barack Obama’s presidency?

This is a difficult question to answer.

No, the question is easy to answer.  Obama’s economic policies have been abject failures.  It’s also straightforward to lay the bulk of responsibility on Obama and his administration.  While it’s true that the Panic of 2008 began in the prior administration, it was Obama’s “stimulus” package that both blew up the nation’s debt and failed in its purpose of stimulating our economy with shovel ready jobs in a massive so-called Keynesian stimulus and its bailout of failing large banks.  It was his Federal Reserve’s policies (yes, yes, the central bank is supposed to be independent, but it was Obama’s Ben Bernanke, extended at Obama’s decision, and his Janet Yellen appointment) that degraded money discipline with their decisions to ease the money supply and hold interest rates artificially low.  It was his excessive—explosively so—regulation that limited business’ ability to function in the market, that limited small business’ ability to get started, that limited job growth and employment recovery.

It was the Obama administration’s Dodd-Frank, with its too big to fail policy that distorted those big business’ risk-taking decisions, decisions that used to be made in a free market but that under Dodd-Frank are made with the perception—courtesy of that “stimulus” bailout—that if the business messed up, Government would bail them out.

[S]hockingly, most congressional Republicans opposed all significant monetary, financial and fiscal actions taken to deal with the crisis.

This isn’t shocking at all; what’s shocking is the blind, knee-jerk rejection of free market principles by a Democratic Party (soon to become a Progressive-Democratic Party) suddenly in complete control of our government and cut loose from any restrictions on their power.  Absent the “stimulus,” the Panic might have been steeper, but it also would have been much shorter.  One only has to compare the Depression of 1920-21 with the Great Depression to see the efficacy of government non-response compared with Government intervention, and the Panic of 1907 with both to see another example of the efficacy of private response compared with Government intervention.  Of course, the Democrats knew—and know—this history, yet they acted as they did, anyway.

He tried to move the US closer to the universal health insurance taken for granted in other high-income countries. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has added an estimated 20m adults and 3m children to the insurance rolls.

He didn’t try, he did it by Party fiat and then by Executive diktats—lots and lots of diktats.  Further, while Obamacare has provided health welfare to those adults and children, it also has thrown millions more out of their health insurance plans and denied them access to their doctors in direct—and knowing—contravention of Obama’s explicit promises that these denials would not happen.  The claim of cost growth reduction is a cynical one, also, being limited as it is to the cost of selected groups of Americans.  In fact, the cost has exploded, with premiums rising in double-digit per centages, deductibles going to 10s of thousands of dollars—an annual expense—the departure of heretofore health insurance companies from the health welfare plan “market,” and the cost to taxpayers similarly growing rapidly to pay for the subsidies of those given essentially free access to this health welfare.

Wolf’s discussion of our “jobs” recovery is misleading, also. Labor force participation rate is at historic lows, held back by those policies’ suppression of job creation.  Even the male labor force participation rate, which has been in a declining trend since its early ’50s peak, is farther below that long-term trend than it ever has been in that time frame.

Finally, this graph summarizes the efficacy of the Obama administration “recovery” as compared to post-WWII economic dislocation recoveries.

Even at the end of 2016 rate of 4.7% unemployment of 4.7%, the Obama administration’s economic policies have held back the recovery by years.

Failure of Hate Laws

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The failure stems from an inability to define hate, but mostly it fails from the irrelevance of hate as anything other than a motivator for committing a crime.  Motive, though, belongs solely in the jury box during the punishment phase given a conviction of a crime; it should not be foreordained by a Government’s attempt to define the hate or by Government’s more evident attempts to discriminate among groups of Americans and single some out for favorable treatment at the expense of other groups of Americans.

That’s demonstrated by Illinois and Ohio law, which comes up from case of the four blacks who attacked a white disabled man and live streamed it on Facebook, as discussed by Eugene Volokh in his Washington Post article.  For instance,

The focus, then, isn’t on “hate.” For instance, if a thief selects a physically disabled victim simply because he thinks it’s less likely that the victim will fight back, that too is covered as a hate crime under Illinois law.

And

Similarly, the Amish beard-cutting case was prosecuted as a hate crime on the theory that the targets were chosen by fellow Amish perpetrators because of the targets’ dissenting religious beliefs within the Amish community.  …  Choosing someone for attack based on his religion would be a hate crime whether the motivation is hatred, theological disagreement, or whatever else.

You see the irrelevance of hate in such crimes, yet Government, in these instances Illinois’ and Ohio’s, arbitrarily tacks it on, just because.

As Volokh put it,

But the Illinois statute and the federal statute [another of his example laws], like most other hate-crime statutes that I’ve seen, focus on discriminatory selection, not the underlying emotion behind the selection.

Indeed.  I pick you for my crime victim because I think I’m more likely to get away with it than if I’d selected someone else or because I’ve decided (legitimately or not) that you’d done me wrong, and I was determined to get you back, and I do the crime.  But if you happen to belong to a government-favored group of Americans, my crime—completely unchanged in its nature or motivation—becomes much more serious solely because of Government’s own discrimination: it has chosen to favor your group over other American groups and so to discriminate against those other American groups.

Which also is an argument for doing away with Governments favoring, for any purpose, this or that group of Americans over other groups of Americans, which Government has decided should be disadvantaged by that favoring.  That’s hate crime by Government.

Snowflake as Murderer

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Dylann Roof has been convicted of the murders of nine good men and women, people he butchered in his rampage through a Baptist church.

Now he’s crying over the…unfairness…of the penalty phase of his trial.  At the risk of repeating things known to those of you following along at home, Roof is defending himself during this phase, and he’s chosen to offer neither witnesses nor mitigating evidence during this phase.

In the punishment phase of a felony trial, the prosecution has to go first, which gives the defense the better position of having its presentation fresher in the minds of the jury.  In Roof’s trial penalty phase, the prosecution has presented a number of witnesses, who’ve offered “heart-ripping testimony,” to use The New York Times‘ phrase, concerning the devastation Roof’s rampage caused.  As the prosecution finished its examination of each of the 20 witnesses (so far, as of the date of the NYT‘s piece), Roof was offered opportunity to cross-examine; he declined—”no questions”—each time.

Roof ultimately argued the unfairness of this phase:

It is not fair to allow that much testimony to be heard by the jury when I am not presenting any evidence—from my family or anyone else—in mitigation.  If I don’t present any mitigation evidence, the victim-impact evidence will take over the whole sentencing trial and guarantee that I get the death penalty.

That’s just a bit of too bad.  The prosecution isn’t bound by the decisions, tactical or otherwise, of the defense.

Full stop.

Gerrymandering, Politics, and Race

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The (eight Justice) Supreme Court is going to take up the question of gerrymandering and Congressional districts in Virginia and North Carolina.  In fact, the case the Court is hearing is narrower than that:

drawing legislative districts based on race.

Never mind that the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates race-based districting: the VRA

generally prohibits reducing minority-voting power through redistricting[]

which, of course, explicitly requires race-based districting in order to “protect” that “power.”

Indeed, the whole divide[] between white and minority voters nonsense with which Jess Bravin opened his piece at the link is just a tacit summary of the Left’s racism.  We’re all Americans.  Full stop.  Any “divide” is nothing but an artificiality, fueled by the Left’s fundamental identity policies that end up masking real abuses.

Were the Left, and now the courts, serious about how bad gerrymandering is, they’d agree to its elimination altogether.  Congressional districts should be squares enclosing substantially equal sized populations, differing from those straight-line boundaries only at the borders between states, and drawn without regard to the Left’s identity politics concerning which special groups of Americans are resident in which districts.