Tag Archives: ethics

This is Promising

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Fox News reported over the weekend some excellent news concerning the Mojave Desert Memorial Cross, also known as the WWI Mojave Desert War Memorial.

A veterans group can restore a memorial cross in the Mojave Desert under a court settlement that ends a decade-old legal battle….

The [National Park Service] will give up the acre of land [the hilltop area known as Sunrise Rock on which the cross had stood for decades before thieves stole it after losing a court battle to have it removed legally] in exchange for five acres of donated property elsewhere in the 1.6 million acre preserve….

Justice Anthony Kennedy, siding with the 5-4 majority, wrote that the cross evokes more than religion.  “It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten[.]”

As part of the settlement,

[o]nce the swap is complete, the park service will fence the site, leaving entrances for visitors, and post signs noting that it is private land. A plaque will be placed on the rock noting that it is a memorial for US war veterans.

No small amount of credit goes to Liberty Institute, who fought the legal fight for so long, and to Henry Sandoz, who worked so hard and so long maintaining the cross—keeping a promise he’d made those decades ago to his dying friend, Riley Bembry, who had erected the original cross in 1934—and producing the replacement that will go up when this all comes to fruition.

It’s not time to celebrate, yet; the land swap isn’t completed, the cross hasn’t been emplaced, and in the event, we still need to be alert for a repetition of the theft that prolonged this case.

Obama Got One Right

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President Obama is in hot water over a decision by his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to limit access to Plan B/Morning After pills to prescription only for girls 17 years old and younger.  Women 18 and older still can get the pill over the counter.

President Obama is right on this one.  Yes, he’s reputed to be “the most pro-abortion in the history of the United States.”  So what?  Those who use this to decry Obama’s hypocrisy are ignoring an important aspect of this issue.

While there is a legitimate question concerning the adequacy of the science and whether this pill is safe for “young teens,” there’s a larger matter involved.  Sex and pregnancy are serious matters, even for adults.  These girls, who are 17 and younger, are both legally and emotionally children.  It’s true enough that “18” is an arbitrarily drawn line for defining legal majority.  However, it’s also true that children lack the maturity to make reasoned judgments about the risks they run when they engage in various behaviors, including sex.

Whether or not this is the motivation for Obama’s decision, requiring the prescription for minor children is a pathway to getting/keeping parents involved, and parents need to be involved where their children are concerned.  Certainly, some children mature faster than others, some parents are bad parents, and many adults make bad decisions.  However, that last is irrelevant to this, and the maturation and examples of bad parenting are exceptions—they cannot justify a blanket rule granting all children access to this sort of medication without adult supervision—ideally, their parents’ supervision.

A Couple of Related Items

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission gave up the identity of a Pipeline Trading Systems LLC whistleblower when an SEC lawyer decided to show the PTS executive the lawyer was questioning a notebook compiled by the whistleblower that was “filled with jottings about trades, calls and meetings.” The executive in question recognized the whistleblower’s handwriting.

The WSJ article also cites an SEC spokesman:

Our review of the facts confirms that we followed this practice in this case.  While we utilize evidence from all witnesses, we do not reveal which witnesses may be cooperating with the government except as required by law or the governing rules of civil procedure.

Oops.  Apparently, given the spokesman’s claim that the lawyer “followed this practice” in the present case, it’s SEC civil procedure to give a whistleblower’s identity to the investigation target during the investigation.

In another WSJ report, we learn that The Obama/Holder Justice Department “inadvertently misled the Supreme Court in January 2009 by asserting that officials routinely ‘facilitate’ the return of erroneously deported immigrants.”  That assertion was provided the Supremes pursuant to Nken v Holder, and Chief Justice John Roberts cited it in a ruling that deportation while an appeal was still pending didn’t necessarily impose irreparable harm on immigrants.  This revelation is especially timely given that the Supreme Court also heard arguments this week about the legitimacy of Arizona’s immigration law,

Oops.  Sorry about that.

How are they related?  By the dishonesty shared by these government organs.  Why dishonest?  Because the lawyers involved are highly trained, very intelligent people, and they were not acting on the spur of the moment.  It stretches credulity well past breaking to think these were simply careless mistakes.

For how much longer can afford this level of dishonesty in our government?

Entitlement Waste

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In the pouring taxpayer money down a rathole category, we have this and this.

In one of President Obama’s Chicago Way executive edicts, he pushed through a “demonstration program” of $8 billion to pay performance “bonuses” under the Medicare Advantage insurance program.  The bonuses were claimed to be incentives to improve performance; however, in fact they were targeted at average performers: out of a 5-star scale, Medicare Advantage plans that got 3.5 stars got bonuses.  In such a canonical “esteem is more important than performance” reward system, a reasonable person might ask after the incentive to do better when simply meeting standard is remarkable.  Moreover, the enormity of this program meant that the bonuses, in their aggregate, actually undid nearly two-thirds of the cuts in overall Medicare Advantage costs that Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act supposedly provided.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that this waste be done away with, and the bonus program be canceled.  This isn’t a lone recommendation.  The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent Congressional agency, also has a dim view of this administration “bonus” program.  MedPAC’s view is that the bonuses are just “a mechanism to increase payments,” and Commission Chairman, Glenn Hackbarth, wrote that the bonus plan

lessens the incentive to achieve the highest level of performance

It gets better.  A report released Monday by the Social Security Trust Fund’s trustees contained this bit of good news:

The Social Security retirement fund is projected to run out of money in 2035 while the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out in 2016.

Combined, the two funds will last all the way to 2033.  If they run dry, payroll taxes would only cover about 75 percent of current benefits.

These failure dates are closer in than claimed last year.  The program’s finances are worse, say the trustees, due to a couple of factors:

Workers are expected to work fewer hours than previously projected, even after the economy recovers.

High energy prices suppressed wages, a trend the trustees see as continuing.

Thus we see another effect of Obama’s destructive energy policy, as well of his failed economic policies generally.

But just try to rescue these entitlement programs from their failure.  On the one hand, we have the Ryan Plan, which the Progressives in Congress and the Executive Office timidly snipe at from the sidelines, and on the other hand, we have the Progressives’ plan.  Umm, what was their plan, again?  Oh—the do-nothing Senate and the do-nothing President don’t actually have one.  They just want to keep throwing money down this rathole, too.

The Law

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…doesn’t apply to me; I’m special.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department is getting something right, and they’re coming in for all kinds of opprobrium from the Left for their efforts.  It seems that the government’s lawyers are haling a band of publishers into court for colluding on the prices for which they would permit eBook versions of their publications to be sold by resellers.  With great crocodile tears, for instance, Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) bleats

I feel absolutely befuddled by the lawsuit.  For the Antitrust Division to step in as the big protector of Amazon doesn’t seem to make any sense from an antitrust point of view.  Rarely have I seen a suit that so ill serves the interests of the consumer.

Others insist that that, even if the publishers are illegally colluding, they’re acting in the best interests of the industry and, by extension, of readers.  They also insist that book publishing is special: books are the heart and soul of culture and civilization, and if publishers can’t make a decent profit, their ability to produce books is threatened (ignoring whose definition of “decent profit” should be operable here, or the legitimacy of the “heart and soul” bit in an age of virtualization).  As a result, these critics further insist that DoJ should allow the publishers to continue breaking the law.

Leaving aside the cynicism of the meme that holds that illegal behavior is acceptable so long as it serves favored interests, such objections stem from a distortion of what the anti-trust law actually is.  American antitrust law is concerned with protecting competition, not competitors.

Law professor Herbert Hovenkamp, of the University of Iowa, notes that

The goal of antitrust policy is to protect consumer prices….  It’s not to protect inefficient firms from having to exit the market.

Professor Hovenkamp points out further that

Price fixing [the particular beef of the DoJ’s action] is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations.  [DoJ doesn’t] have discretion to just walk away from what appears to be a strong set of facts that, if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.

Senator Schumer, et al., know better.  This is a demonstration of their morality.