Category Archives: rights

Is He Worth the Money?

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That’s the question the nattering Left is asking about Elon Musk’s new pay package on offer from Tesla—a package that could aggregate to a trillion dollars over 10 years. Of course, we’d expect such a question from the Left—and from too many Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who disparage free market capitalism.

Of course, in one sense—a sense at the core of free markets—is by definition, Musk is worth the money: all the parties to the package voluntarily and of their own accord agreed to it, each satisfied that they’re better off after agreeing than before.

What the natterers carefully ignore, though, is this:

…the Tesla CEO will get richer only if workers and shareholders do too. Oh, and only if consumers like what Tesla is selling.
Tesla’s board recently proposed a pay package for Mr Musk worth up to $1 trillion over 10 years, contingent on the company achieving ambitious milestones.

Musk has actually to perform in order actually to earn that pay. That’s another aspect at the core of free markets: folks must earn their compensation; they’re not entitled to money just because they think they’re special.

Muddled Editor “Thinking”

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This time, by the August Ones of The Wall Street Journal‘s board of editors. They’re upset because Attorney General Pam Bondi openly decried “hate speech,” and then said that when that speech clearly crosses a line, it becomes criminally actionable. Their lede:

Is a basic understanding of the First Amendment too much to expect from the nation’s Attorney General?

What Bondi said that drew their…attention:

There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

Targeting someone with hate speech isn’t general hate speech; it’s making threats, and it’s incitement to violence, and that is illegal.

Bondi went on the next day, as…paraphrased without context by the editors:

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But then she incoherently mixed in everything from “violent rhetoric,” to doxxing, to calling a SWAT team to the home of a Member of Congress.

Those all are forms of threats of violence or of actual violence. The only incoherence is in the imaginations of the editors.

And this from the editors:

The AG also didn’t recant her statement on Monday that the Justice Department might “prosecute” Office Depot or its ex-employee who refused to print a Kirk vigil poster.

Nor is there any reason to. What the editors omitted from this particular excerpt is that DoJ might prosecute on illegal discrimination grounds, not on speech grounds.

Apparently, basic reading/listening comprehension is too much to expect from opinion writers.

Patriotism is Intimidation

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The subheadline tells the tale that’s been unfolding for far too long in the United Kingdom, the cradle, but no longer a home, of individual liberty and consensual government,.

For some it [the national flag of the United Kingdom] is a symbol restoring patriotic traditions. Others see it as vehicle for intimidation.

The British flag, and its sibling, the red cross on a white field that is the Cross of St George flag, are symbols of British culture and history, and especially of British national identity.

Yet there is a growing movement (only lately starting to be answered) that openly disparages those national symbols, risibly calling them bigoted, exclusionary, and divisive.

They’re sort of right on one, but the other two—the bigotry and divisiveness—are centered on and emanate from only those folks, mostly “immigrants” and their apologists, who do not want to assimilate into British culture, to become British citizens, or merely to accept British culture in their status as non-citizen legal residents.

The flags are exclusionary, though, in the sense that they’re symbols of nationhood for patriotic British citizens and subjects, folks who are proud of their national history and culture, warts and all, while working to improve a grand but humanly imperfect nation.

Different flags in the UK have different connotations. The Union Jack, or, more formally, the Union Flag, is meant to represent England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It can be controversial among Scottish, Welsh, or Irish nationalists, but is often seen as a mild expression of patriotism in much of England. But the English flag—the Cross of St George—is sometimes associated with soccer hooligans and far-right protests, and has xenophobic connotations for some.

This is just foolish. There’s nothing controversial about the Union Flag—it symbolizes the union of the nation. Those who don’t want to be part of the union need to recognize that their view has lost repeated independence referenda and get over themselves. The only ones seeing the flag as in any way xenophobic are those immigrants who refuse to assimilate and the timid virtue-signalers who side with them to curry favor.

That some hooligans have chosen to wrap themselves in the English flag is in no way a reflection of what that flag represents—it only reflects the misbehaviors of the hooligans. Those who associate it with hooliganism need to leave off their Newspeak Dictionary-twisted definitions and return to British English dictionaries.

[A] local lawmaker called to remove the flags, whether British or English, saying they were being used by some “to rally those who suppress the rights of others and perpetrate acts of hate.” The local city council estimated it would cost £250,000 to take them down and has removed only a few.

This is disingenuous at best. Here, too, the lawmaker’s beef is with those who misuse—abuse—the flags, not with the flags themselves. It’s only the ones who rally those to hate who should be getting the lawmaker’s opprobrium. The position he’s taken, though, is akin to him actively supporting the unpatriotic over British patriots.

Don’t get too smug over the falling—and fallen—Brits, though. We have too many neighborhoods and news writers waxing hysterical about how divisive our own national flag is.

The same contempt for bigots and cowards in the UK applies to these so-called Americans, too. We have a chance, still, to decisively defeat those naysaying unpatriotic ones, and hopefully one good thing about our own Left’s murder of Charlie Kirk will wake us up and get us going.

Willful Ignorance

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Or preferring her Newspeak Dictionary definitions over those in actual American English dictionaries.

That’s Arizona Progressive-Democrat Representative Yassamin Ansari’s view. In response to the hue and cry over her terming illegal aliens members of her constituency, she had this:

So, I didn’t realize this was such a controversy until the right-wing media started attacking me for using the word, so I Googled the word constituent. The definition of constituent is somebody who is part of a community, doesn’t matter what their legal status is,

She Googled for the definition of “constituent.” She could have consulted an actual dictionary of the American English language, but she chose not to. ‘Course, if she had, she would have seen her narrative collapse around her. This is what Merriam-Webster, for instance, has to say about the American English meaning of the term:

constituent
1 : a member of a constituency
pledged to help her elderly constituents

Following that first and thus primary definition over to constituency, we get this first and primary definition:

constituency
1 a : a body of citizens entitled to elect a representative (as to a legislative or executive position)
the governor’s liberal constituency

Citizens. Not illegal aliens. Even the second part of that first definition lends no support for Ansari’s Newspeak definition:

b : the residents in an electoral district
The senator’s constituency includes a large minority population.

Since illegal aliens are not legally resident, they are outside even the residents of an electoral district.

Inconvenient facts are, to a Party member, inconvenient.

Rights from Men, Not from God

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That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker