Category Archives: rights

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.

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.

State of the Union

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Third verse, same as the first.  President Obama’s speech Tuesday night before the Congress, although couched in rousing terms of “teamwork” and “rebuilding America,” was in the end just more of the usual Progressive fare of class warfare, higher taxes and spending, and bigger government.

While promising to work toward job creation, Obama already has cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have been worth a prompt 20,000 construction and construction-related jobs and an additional 100,000 plus follow-on, more permanent jobs.  While promising vast reductions of intrusive regulations (he actually cited only a single elimination, that of 40-year-old regulation concerning treating spilled milk as an oil spill), his EPA has been running amok with intrusive regulations, from dictating the light bulbs we’re allowed to have in our bed- and bathrooms, to closing down badly needed electricity power plants (with their jobs and the jobs of the businesses that need that power) with excessive “pollutant” regulations that will do nothing to improve our environment or our health, to expanded regulations in the medical device industry that will stifle innovation in that vital area, and on and on.

He wants to reform our tax system, he said, but only to raise taxes on disfavored groups while “reforming” it through extending a payroll tax holiday that guts funding for Social Security;  “double[ing] the tax deduction” for businesses that manufacture in the US, adding to the Byzantine complexity of our corporate tax code; taxing revenue (all of it) from the sale of those severely regulated medical devices; and so on.  But he refuses to accept an overall reduction in income taxes in substitution for that general payroll tax reduction, he refuses to simplify the code and reduce the rates for all corporations—or for all individuals.  Instead, he wants to raise taxes on his “wealthy,” the top 5% of whom pay nearly 60% of the nation’s income taxes, while he refuses to talk about the taxes of the 50% of Americans who pay around 3%-4% of the nation’s income taxes while.  He wants to eliminate the tax breaks for

an [oil and gas] industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits….

Yes—he refuses to eliminate the same subsidies for his “green” energy efforts, like Solyndra, et al.

Obama said he wants an “an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”  This from the president that shoved senior creditors (at least as defined by existing bankruptcy law) to the back of the bus and gave preferential treatment to his union donors in the government-union takeover of GM and Chrysler.

And he promised openly to continue to govern by fiat whenever our democratic process won’t let him get his way:

With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions….

Next, there are factual errors in Obama’s speech.  He claimed that Obamacare “relies on a reformed private market, not a government program.”  But the fact is that fully half the more than 30 million currently uninsured are expected to receive coverage through government programs, while the other half are expected to be enrolled in government-approved “private” health insurance through state-based insurance markets.  Moreover, many of these will be get federal subsidies to do so.  Further, Medicaid will be expanded drastically.

And there’s this:  “On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen.”  I’ve addressed above some of the corrections to this claim.  Here’s more: the bailout actually began under President Bush the Younger.  Ford, though, the other member of the American auto industry as Progressives define it (eliding Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, etc. that also have major manufacturing plants in the US and so are key participants in the American auto industry) took none of the bailout money.  Furthermore, if we’re limiting the “American auto industry” in the Obama manner, Chrysler is no longer a part: it’s owned by Fiat, an Italian company.

Finally, although Obama gave short shrift to America’s foreign affairs, he did claim this.  “The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.”  However, the latest National Intelligence Estimate says that the Taliban will grow stronger, and it’ll use Obama’s unilateral offer of “negotiation” for delay.  The NIE adds that the Taliban in fact will end controlling the Afghan countryside—which gives it the cities

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.

First Racism, Now Bullying

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Apparently, disagreeing with a Progressive Politically Correct position is bullying, when it’s not racist.

A Wisconsin high school invited debate on the subject of gay couples and adoption, and then they censored the debate when some debaters actually came out in opposition.  The original debate was in the form of a “pro” essay and an “anti” essay in the high school’s student newspaper.  It seems, also, that the “anti” student grounded his/her argument in religious theory.

Having found some folks in their high school with the temerity to oppose the idea, the school and school district administration have fallen all over themselves to apologize for those unruly students who took the idea of open debate seriously.

Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District.  We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.

Todd Carlson, the Superintendent of the school district, went further:

We do apologize.  We have a responsibility as a school district to make sure we create a positive school climate and culture. This article probably didn’t go along with the policies and the guidelines and the practices that we have as a school district.

And the pièce de résistance.  Carlson added:

It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people – that’s right.

Of course the bullying and disrespect to another group of people—those opposing gay couple adoption—doesn’t enter into it.

This is bad enough, but the school not only has objected to just one side of the students’ debate, it has also refused to comply with requests of outside journalists to read the entire essay (and so I cannot offer anything from the offending essay, either, beyond the brief snippet cited at the link above).

As long ago as John Milton, the concept of freely expressing disagreement with established opinion was recognized as central to individual liberty.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Our own Declaration of Independence acknowledges that among our individual endowments of inalienable rights is the right to liberty, of which absent free exchanges of ideas—free speech—there can be none.

John Stuart Mill understood this.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

US District Judge Roger Titus, District Court for the District of Maryland, understands in a related case,

[W]hile Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the Government’s Indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: …uncomfortable…speech….

And now we have the Left’s version of free speech.  Hmm….

I’ve emailed Carlson the following questions; I’ll post again when I hear from him, or next Friday if I’ve not heard back by then.

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?