Category Archives: rights

Political Corruption, Big Government, and Generational Struggle

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Government, by its nature, is vulnerable to a broad reach of failure, and that becomes increasingly difficult to correct as government’s size grows and corruption, or even mere arrogance, increases.  Ultimately, government becomes large enough that it deems itself no longer responsible to the people who created it, and it engages in activities for its own benefit instead of ours.  Finally, these activities become centered simply on preserving and expanding its own power—which fosters corruption, which fosters further self-preservation and growth, which….

Here are some recent and current examples:

  • The Community Reinvestment Act and refusals to reform it, which created the conditions for the housing bubble and subsequent collapse.
  • Fast and Furious, DoJ’s gunwalking scam.
  • The method by which Obamacare was enacted, and its enactment against the loudly expressed wishes of the American people.
  • DoJ’s selective prosecution of crime, refusing for instance to prosecute voter intimidation crimes unless the alleged victim was from a government-favored group and the alleged perpetrator(s) from a government-disfavored group.
  • DoJ’s use of disparate impact analysis to manufacture racial discrimination where none exists and solely to satisfy a government’s politically motivated goal.
  • The process surrounding the stifling of the Keystone XL pipeline by the White House.
  • DoJ’s secret seizure of press telephone records (the AP, for instance) in New York, Washington, Hartford, and the main office for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.
  • The cover-up of the government’s preparation for and response to the terrorist attack on our Consulate in Benghazi.
  • The politicization of the IRS, and its use to persecute government-disfavored groups and men.
  • Labor Department’s selective enforcement of laws regarding the killing of members of protected bird species, including the refusal to prosecute wind energy farms that kill over 80,000 hunting birds per year.

And so on.  This kind of thing isn’t unique to big government, of course; any time men are placed in power over men—a necessity even of consensual governments—the potential for arrogance or corruption abounds.  However, small consensual governments, inherently limited in power—formally by a constitution, and practically by a vigilant and involved population—are easier to control, and the growth of corruption and arrogance much more hindered.

It’ll be a long, cross-generational struggle to restore our government and to repair the damage done these last 80 years.  It’s a struggle that must be engaged, however.

A Grant of Dominion

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…of one group of Americans over another, courtesy of President Barack Obama, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), and their Obamacare.

Dr Ezekial Emanual, ex-health-care adviser to Obama and presently senior fellow at the Center for American Progress strongly recommended this grant in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

In touting Obamacare’s health “insurance” exchanges, he recommended government add overt pressure on our young to buy health “insurance,” in addition to the existing Individual Mandate requirement, because their participation is a necessary subsidy for others’ purchase.

Emanual began his push for this strengthening of the grant of a claim on one person’s private property to another with this…error:

Government exchanges on a national scale have never been tried before.

This is clearly untrue.  Canada, which is moving away from its national health “care” travesty, and Great Britain, which still is maintaining its National Health Service disaster, have already done this creation of health “insurance” on a national scale.  We know the failure that is pending.

Emanual had this in support of his push for extending that grant of dominion:

Here is the specific problem: insurance companies worry that young people, especially young men, already think they are invincible, and they are bewildered about the health-care reform in general and exchanges in particular.  They may tune out, forego purchasing health insurance and opt to pay a penalty instead when their taxes come due.
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The consequence would be a disproportionate number of older and sicker people purchasing insurance, which will raise insurance premiums and, in turn, discourage more people from enrolling.  This reluctance to enroll would damage a key aspect of reform.

There are a number of things wrong with this.  In the first place, young people aren’t invincible and generally don’t think they are—this is just a cynically dragged red herring.  Young people, though, generally are healthy enough that both health “insurance,” especially the expensive, overwrought versions being pedaled by government, and health welfare, which is what the government’s product really is, are bad bets.

Insurance companies—when they’re allowed to sell true insurance policies—make their money by correctly assessing the likelihood of payout and adjusting the premiums they charge in advance of the expected payout accordingly.  The likelihood of payout for a young person (the odds of his getting sick) is quite low over any reasonable time frame.  The healthy young are wise to take that risk on themselves.

Secondly, young people aren’t as bewildered as Emanual makes them out to be.  They understand the risks they’re assuming, and they’re quite clear on the wisdom of the assumption.  They just don’t have the same assessment that Emanual—who apparently Knows Better—does.

Third, the penalty of the Individual Mandate itself is nothing more than a sinister enforcing mechanism of government’s grant of dominion over one man to another.

Fourth, the consequence of not following Emanual’s “recommendation” is simply the consequence of government’s demand for health welfare rather than allowing free market, competitively sold health insurance.  That consequence has nothing to do with the choices the young might freely make.

Emanual added further defense:

[W]e need to make clear as a society that buying insurance is part of individual responsibility.  If you don’t have insurance and you need to go to the emergency room or unexpectedly get diagnosed with cancer, you are free-riding on others.  …  The social norm of individual responsibility must be equated with purchasing health insurance.

Stipulating, arguendo (and only for that), that this is an accurate characterization, this justifies being forced to let others free-ride on me how, exactly?

Moreover, when I get sick and I’m uninsured, I don’t go to the ER and freeload—I pay for my infirm out of my own resources.  Just as my wife and I did when we were uninsured and paid for her biopsy and bilateral mastectomy out of our own resources.

Additionally—and this is a critical point that Progressives in general either can’t understand or simply ignore—helping those less well off is a matter of individual responsibility, not a government one.  Paying into government-provided welfare is legitimate, but only when government involvement is the last resort, not the default one.

Buying insurance or not, though—real insurance, not the present health welfare—has nothing at all to do with individual responsibility or with welfare.  That’s purely a personal economic and risk assessment choice.  Demanding that this man buy insurance so as to hold down that man’s cost for insurance is just, again, a grant of dominion to that other over the one: it’s government’s grant to another man of a claim superior to the one’s on his own property.

That’s tyranny, at best.

Emanual gave his game away here:

The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy.

How cynical.  They should spend money on a thing they don’t need because Obama says that’s cool.  And to preserve a political legacy for Emanual’s hero.

Nor another man nor government has dominion over us.  Especially, government has no dominion over us; government, contrary to Emanual’s apparent understanding, is our employee.

A Thought on Privacy

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an absolutely awesome expression of governmental hubris, says that New Yorkers should just “get used to” the city’s rapidly proliferating surveillance cameras.

You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they’ll be cameras everyplace…whether you like it or not[.]

Amazingly, Federal Judge Richard Posner agrees.

Obviously, surveillance cameras didn’t prevent the Boston Marathon attacks.  But they may well have prevented further attacks planned by the bombers, including whatever destruction they may have attempted to cause in New York City.  Moreover, the criticism ignores deterrence.  By increasing the likelihood that terrorists or other criminals will be apprehended, surveillance cameras increase the expected cost of punishment.  That will not deter all attacks, but it will deter many.

Surveillance cameras also can be expected to increase the cost—and difficulty—of maintaining individual freedoms in the face of a constantly snooping government.  But surveillance cameras are of a piece with the lockdown imposed on Boston during the recent manhunt.

Ben Franklin was right.  Posner and Bloomberg are wrong.  But the latter plainly are speaking from the perspective of government and not from the perspective of government’s employers.

Be Careful what you Wish For

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As the Wall Street Journal notes,

Video cameras played a critical role in helping authorities track suspects in this week’s Boston bombings.  Now calls for increased camera surveillance in the US are putting a spotlight on the technology and the debate about its use.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about that city’s surveillance system.  It can

alert police to abnormalities it detects on the street, such as an abandoned package that is left on a corner.

Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner, said on Fox News Sunday:

It gives you that historical record.

But such a ubiquitous government-run surveillance system also can alert government to abnormalities of which it disapproves—like individual citizens taking part in “right-wing extremist” peaceful rallies and meetings.  And there’s that government record on us private citizens thing, again.

In the present case, though, the matter of the Boston Marathon bombing, whose cameras were they?  The government’s cameras were involved in the data collection and subsequent hunt, certainly.  However, so were thousands of privately owned still and video cameras—all those smart phone cameras in the hands of Marathon fans and other ordinary citizens just out taking care of their own business in the area.

It was private citizens’ imagery and private citizens’ eye witness reports (one injured witness: “he looked right at me” and the boat owner’s sighting and 911 call) that generated the imagery, descriptions, and location data that so thoroughly supported the hunt, the tracking, and the capture.

Does government, today, really need such a widespread surveillance system?  No doubt the government’s surveillance cameras were highly useful, too, in this incident.  A tool for keeping track of the citizenry that’s in government hands, though, is subject to misuse, even if the tracking is for the best of reasons, as our government might assure us.  A tool for tracking one’s neighbors—or strangers—in private hands is subject to misuse, also, certainly.

Think, though, about which misuse is capable of the greater damage.

Think, also, about the extant government abuse of its surveillance capability.  Already, for instance, the present administration (and both national political parties) are scraping social media for personally identifying data for government (and party) purposes.  The IRS already is asserting its authority to read, without a court’s order, private email as part of its investigations (while denying it actually does so).  Do we need government actively tracking us private citizens?

Hmm….

2nd Amendment Rights and Steamrolling

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President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.  It came down to politics.”

“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”

What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed.  No, though.  He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it.  We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen.  The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.

In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry.  That ban was in the bill, true enough.  But the fears are no less real for that.

Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?

This is another failure of Obama’s doing.  As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc.  Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.