Tag Archives: freedom

Oxen and Gorings

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Howard Kurtz is upset about some (Republican) politicians pushing back on press foolishness. He spent much of his column at the link writing about Republican candidates objecting to the press’ hyping of manufactured problems (Rubio’s traffic tickets, Christie’s bridge problems, and so on) and decrying the candidates for spending so much time acting like their oxen were getting stabbed. Then Kurtz made this remarkable remark:

[A]t some point candidates have to figure out how to use the press to sell their message, rather than just complaining.

Because if the candidates bypass the press, rather than “figure out how to use the press,” the press wouldn’t have much to do.

Alternatively, the press is used to being used by the Left, what’s wrong with those Republicans?

Never mind that the legitimate role for what used to be the press is to be independent, objective observers and reporters and not to be “used” for political purposes at all.

Whose ox is being gored, really?

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Free Speech

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Not directly, because this Oregon law predates Kennedy’s Obergefell ruling, but this is the inevitable outcome of his ruling on free speech.

Aaron and Melissa Klein, bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, lost in an Oregon court and have been ordered to pay $135,000 in “emotional damages” to the couple for whom they refused the baking. Administrative Law Judge Alan McCullough, who found for the victimhood couple, ordered the fine, but nothing further.

However, Brad Avakian, Oregon’s Labor Commissioner and Политический Руководитель, and for whom this Administrative Judge works, overruled the omission. On hearing that the Kleins had assured Oregonians in an interview with the Family Research Council that they intended to pursue the matter, he ordered them to speak no further. He gagged them.

So much for freedom of speech in Oregon. So much for freedom of religion in Oregon. Look for this sort of thing to accelerate in the wake of Kennedy’s ruling.

People’s Republic of China’s Stock Market Drop

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The PRC’s Shanghai Composite Index, which is an index of the stocks that trade on that country’s major stock exchange, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has fallen by some 28% in the last week. This is the second time since 2007 that this index has fallen this far (in 2007 it dropped by roughly 2/3 over the course of 13 months beginning in October 2007). In response, the PRC has decided to close the market to IPOs until the central planners in Beijing decide conditions are suitable for IPOs.

This central planning foolishness got me wondering. How big a deal is the Shanghai Stock Exchange for the PRC’s economy?

The total value of the PRC’s stock market was around $4.2 trillion in 2014, per Bloomberg Business. The PRC’s Purchasing Power Parity GDP for 2014 was around $19 trillion. Thus, the value traded in its markets was roughly 22% of GDP.

In contrast, the dollar volume on the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday (2 Jul) was some $63.5 million. Expanding that (very naively) to a trading year of 220 days during which stocks are traded out of a 365-day year (weekends and holidays, after all), the annual dollar volume for the NYSE runs to a skosh under $14 trillion. The US PPP GDP for 2014 was $17.7 trillion. The value of the NYSE’s stock trading was a bit under 80% of our GDP.

It’s certainly true that 22% of GDP or the raw value of $4.2 trillion are hefty numbers. But at only 22%, the central planners, in addition to chasing chimeras with their assumption they actually can control in any significant degree any economy, are chasing a relatively minor chimera with their IPO moves. But, then, like central planners everywhere, they think they Know Better than mere investors. Even when the Know Betters are monstrously wrong.

They Disagreed with Me!?

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“[Juncker] said we were ready to front-load EU funds at the disposal of Greece for the future and the Greek government didn’t take the offer, which convinced them that [the Greeks] weren’t interested in an agreement and it was ideological,” an MEP who was in the room told Politico after the meeting.

How dare they not immediately take our deal!? How dare they put patriotism against the wishes of their creditors!?

“He said, ‘We were so close, in fact, we were so close that it was just €60 million that we were arguing over.”

Then, Mr Juncker, why didn’t you cede the €60 million point, if it was such a trivial thing?

Even The Washington Post is looking at this with clearer eyes.

A Thought on Iron Curtains

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Shortly after World War II, Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain descended across Europe. The curtain was made concrete with the erection by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The purpose of that wall was more than simply to divide the USSR and its occupied territories from the rest of Europe; it was to keep the people inside that wall—inside the USSR or those occupied territories—from leaving for a better place, for a place where freedom and individual choice could be had.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, our Founders wrote, and We the People ratified, our Constitution and its attendant Bill of Rights, which include the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So was born a Federation and ultimately 50 laboratories of democracy, particularly as described by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co v Liebmann when he wrote in his dissent how a:

state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Now keep in mind the concern of John Jay who, while the Constitution was being drafted in those fateful summer days, considered that, in contrast to the failing Articles of Confederation, the States should be reduced to the same relationship to the proposed central government as counties then had relative to their States (although, in the event, he strongly advocated ratification of the Constitution itself):

merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government.

Next, consider these activities of our Federal government:

  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning abortion and when it might be appropriate or inappropriate, nationalizing the thing in Roe.
  • it terminated the discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the nature of marriage, nationalizing the thing in Obergefell.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the provision of health care and of health insurance, nationalizing the thing with the Affordable Care Act.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the market behavior of private enterprise, nationalizing the thing with Dodd-Frank.
  • it removed from all possibility of local discussion the relationship between private enterprise and private citizens with the creation of the wholly unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The list goes on.

The USSR’s physical iron curtain was designed to keep people from leaving in an era when they had a place to go to. There is another kind of iron curtain, though.

Our government is no longer requiring—as the Constitution above it does in Article IV, Section 1—that every state honor the decisions of every other state. Rather, it’s demanding that every state behave the same as every other state.

With the reduction of our 50 laboratories of democracy to mere districts to facilitate the purposes of the Federal government, this government is erecting a legalist iron curtain by deprecating the 10th Amendment, and so denying Americans a place to go to, denying us any place more compatible with our individual views, needs, moral imperatives.