Tag Archives: culture

The Proper Role of Crime

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From Atlas Shrugged:

“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr Ferris.  “We want them broken.  You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against—then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures.  We’re after power and we mean it.  You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it.  There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.  Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?  What’s there in that for anyone?  But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt.  Now, that’s the system, Mr Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

Hmm….

h/t Instapundit

The Blinders of the Liberal

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Juan Williams has a piece in The Wall Street Journal that illustrates this quite nicely.  He writes of the “Clouds over [President Barack] Obama’s Second Term,” and surely there are such clouds.  But he couches his discussion in this way.

…there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.

…Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.

Even leaving aside the fact that the rise in the use of the filibuster includes several Congressional sessions of Democratic Party minority, this is an interesting argument.  Williams is claiming that Republican opposition to Obama’s bills couldn’t possibly be because those bills are terrible ideas.  No, being universally fine, the only purpose for opposing them must be personal—to harm Obama.

But this is entirely consistent with Williams’ next point.

…one factor for anyone judging Mr Obama is race.

Really, Mr Williams?  Have we met?  Certainly it’s no secret to my half-dozen readers that I disagree, with considerable enthusiasm, with nearly all that Obama has done or said.  But on what basis do you ascribe my opposition to race?  I reject your racist slur.

Along these lines, Williams offers this:

Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House.  By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.”

This is another manufactured beef, or it’s a concession that Liberals generally are racist.  Certainly no Conservative whom I know looked at Obama as anything other than a bad president.  Not a bad black president.  And not, even when he did show anger, an “angry black man.”

Where are you getting this stuff, Mr Williams?

More on Becoming a Dependent

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog reports that a

federal appeals court [the First Circuit] on Thursday [last] ruled that insurance companies can be required to pay long-term disability benefits to a recovering drug addict if the person would face a significant risk of relapse by returning to work.

The Law Blog expands:

The case…involved an anesthesiologist from Massachusetts…who became heavily addicted to Fentanyl, a prescription opioid used in her practice.

[The anesthesiologist] spent about three months at a treatment center, according to her attorney.  After she was discharged, her employee benefit plan that was administered by Union Security Insurance Company cut off her long-term disability benefit payments, totaling $4,000 a month.  Her therapist and other doctors feared that she had a high risk of relapse and cautioned her not to return to work where it would be easy to access the drug, the opinion said.

The anesthesiologist justified her suit by claiming that she shouldn’t have to fall off the wagon for her claim to be accepted.  She shouldn’t have actually to be disabled in order to collect disability benefits.  Never mind that there was no certainty of relapse asserted, by her or the Court, only a likelihood.  Never mind that her condition was entirely self-inflicted.  Never mind that she could have found work—even in the medical field—other than as an anesthesiologist.

Indeed, as the Appellate Court said quite clearly, she had not relapsed, and so she wasn’t back in her disability condition.  She was, though, out those $4,000 per month, payable for an actual disability.

The Court then noted in its opinion (cynically, say I)

The plaintiff’s risk of relapse was not merely theoretical.  In perhaps the most striking actualization of this risk, the plaintiff was arrested in May of 2005—some six months after her departure from [the treatment center]—for driving under the influence of alcohol[.]

Notice that.  She was driving under the influence of alcohol, not Fentanyl.  Some risk of relapse onto the drug.

The Court also noted in justification of its ruling (again cynically, say I) that the insurance company could have inured itself from this sort of…suit…by  “writing into the plan an exclusion for risk of relapse.”

The insurer, though, hadn’t included such an explicit exclusion because at the time they sold the policy they had no reason to believe a Federal Appeals court would rule so capriciously.  After all, the Fourth Circuit already had ruled differently on an identical case:

[The] Fourth Circuit…said the denial of benefits to an anesthetist addicted to the same narcotic was “reasonable.”

Now we know better.  If there’s a possibility of a disability occurring in the future, that disability exists presently.

Another brick in the wall of manufactured dependency.

Progressive Policies and the Poor

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Thomas Sowell, writing in the National Review, had some thoughts on the impact of modern Liberalism on the welfare of blacks in the US.  I think they apply to all minorities, to whites, to our poor generally.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

And

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage.  Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment….

And

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time, but most grow up with only one parent today.

And

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities.  But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

Sowell summarizes the matter starkly:

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good—and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The party of Jim Crow may be attempting to correct its past.  It is, in fact, failing miserably.  Modern Liberals give so little thought to the 50 years of empirical evidence defining the consequences of their actions that I have to conclude that they’re well aware of those consequences.  One of those consequences, flowing from the poverty enforced maintained by their actions, is the continued dependency of our poor on the largesse of the Modern Liberals in government.

That’s not just petty ego stroke, that’s political power.

Texas on Gun Control

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Copied shamelessly from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s Facebook post.

You’ll fit right in here in Texas!

Here in Texas, you will have the liberty and the opportunity to achieve your dreams. On top of that, we have no income tax, yet still manage to have a multi-billion dollar budget surplus.

We have right to work laws and a reasonable regulatory environment. Texas has created more than 275,000 jobs in the last year alone! And we’ll fight like hell to protect your rights.

You’ll also get to keep more of what you earn and use some of that extra money to buy more ammo.

I hope to see you soon in Texas. In the meantime, sign up to show your support for our second amendment rights.

Sincerely,Attorney General of Texas

Take careful note of the details.