Tag Archives: freedom

The Progressive Endgame

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What Progressives don’t understand—won’t accept—is that, as Eric Falkenstein wrote

People get most of their pleasure, and meaning, being useful to others, which includes inspiring the admiration or happiness of others by one’s actions. Every time I make my daughter squeal with delight makes me thankful to be alive, because I know she really loves me, and I work to provide her with things and habits that will make her prosper, and hope that at some point after I’m gone she will remember me with sincere gratitude.

This made especially in the actual community interactions of individuals.  Progressives are only willing to help their fellows by government diktat, not directly with their personal resources.  I’ve written elsewhere about who donates to charity, for instance, but it bears repeating: Conservatives donate 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; Liberals just 1.25% to 1.5%.  And further,

A healthy wage is a strong correlate with one’s usefulness to non-family members, especially if you work in field without a lot of regulation.

Adam Smith understood this.  John Locke and our Founders understood this.  The “invisible hand” and the existence of a social compact both are founded on the not-so-enlightened self-interest—the greed—of the individuals participating in the commerce and in the formation of the social compact.  Free commerce, and the republican government over which the compact members are sovereign, are what lead to the greatest material and moral prosperity of the individuals involved.  The first is self-evident.  The second derives from that material prosperity: being useful to others, indeed, satisfying our duty to others (which involves such mundane things as honoring our commitments, here to provide our mutual support to defend and preserve our—and our fellows’—individual and several inalienable Rights, to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and so on) is enormously facilitated by personal prosperity (which, just incidentally, also creates community prosperity): we have more wherewithal with which to satisfy our individual obligations (which are, don’t forget, individual, not collective).

Falkenstein concludes

[Eric Hoffer considered that] intellectuals found free societies a threat because such societies didn’t need mandarins directing them, and if not flattered would help incite the masses to some sort of revolution.  A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding, and so those unhappy with their own meaningless affairs will focus on minding other people’s business.  Hoffer noted one must not merely provide for those without meaning in their lives, but provide against them, because in a democracy and market economy their preferences will have power.  Those who see their lives as inferior and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom, and this can cause a Republic to fall to a democracy, and ultimately a tyranny.

Thus,

In other words, Hoffer describes the essence of the Liberal [I say Progressive—ed.] desire to micromanage society into perfect equality at the expense of liberty.  A coalition of intellectuals and the underclass, both of whom feel unappreciated.  We haven’t figured out a good outlet for these do-gooders, or a good way for those without a purpose to find life rewarding, so they continue to plague us with their plans and angst.

Free Speech and the UN

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There is a carefully sub rosa international attack on free speech in progress, and unless our government takes a more active role than it has been, that attack is going to have very serious negative repercussions right here at home.  Gordon Crovitz described this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications this December, which will be attended by all 193 of the UN member nations, including the US.  This meeting has been utterly devoid of publicity, and any knowledge we have about the agenda and goals have come to us only through leaks.  But here’s what we know, according to Crovitz.

A 200+ page “planning document” indicates the UN’s goals for the conference, and Eli Dourado, a George Mason University researcher, summarized the document’s contents thusly:

These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.

The proposals include the following:

  • give countries authority over “the information and communication infrastructure within their state”
  • require that online companies “operating in their territory” use the Internet “in a rational way”

Since these proposals come from the People’s Republic of China, this means government authorities and government definitions of “rational way.”

Other proposals would actually let the UN regulate Internet content:

  • “protect” against computer malware or spam
  • inspect private communications
  • measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic
  • give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses, replacing ICANN, the self-regulating body that presently ensures the stability of the Internet

These proposals come from Russia and Iran; although amazingly, Europe supports the billing drive (perhaps not so amazingly considering the penchant for government controls that EU member nations have).

So far, our government’s reaction to this assault on free speech—and on American free speech—has been…muted.  The best the Obama administration has been able to do is to mumble about

“unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope” of UN regulation

and

the text [of the planning document] suggests that the ITU has a role in content-related issues.  We do not believe it does.

This is a far cry from the bolder response we took took when the UN’s UNESCO became too ideological and not enough concerned with science and education: we cut off funding to the organization.

This administration needs to become a whole lot more forceful in opposing this attempt to grab the Internet and to use that control to stifle free speech.

Ballot Box Stuffing the Chicago Way

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From the city so democratic even the dead get to vote to the nation so democratic even illegals get to vote.  This is the goal of the Progressive administration, led by that Chicago community organizer.  Ballot box stuffing is so critical to this administration that it’s even suing states for trying to protect the sanctity of an American’s vote by eliminating the ineligible from the roles so that a citizen’s vote is not diminished or canceled by vote fraud.

Progressives even go so far as to argue, with a straight face, that there is no voter fraud, it’s a phantom problem.  We didn’t hear that, though, about the Florida Presidential election outcome a while back.  We saw the power of it in a Minnesota US Senate race in 2008, and in a recent Washington Governor election, where the recounts were repeated until the right candidate won.  And in some jurisdictions, it’s simply a way of life.

And so, we have the Obama jurisdiction suing Florida for trying to remove Mickey Mouse from the voter rolls.  Certainly, in a massive effort like Florida’s we get the occasional outlier case like the war vet whose citizenship was questioned in that same Florida drive.  However, this just demonstrates the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s administration: the Department of Homeland Security refuses to let Florida officials bounce their list off the DHS databases—the most current we have—as another check of who is a citizen and who is not eligible to vote.

Permitting ballot box stuffing by allowing anyone to vote—even white guys claiming to be Eric Holder—is the broadened Chicago Way to preserve Progressive incumbency.

Government Censorship

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Readers know that I’m no fan of the NLMSM.  However, now we hear of a naked attempt to turn the press—that erstwhile bastion of freedom—into an arm of the Federal government, all at the behest of President Obama’s Labor Department.

Labor officials have put forward a plan to require reporters who analyze and write about economic data which Labor provides in its “lock up” room to use government—Labor—computers, software(!?), and Internet accesses so the government, they claim, can protect itself against potential security hacks.

I have some beachfront property in central New Mexico on offer for those who believe this claim.

This is nothing but the government’s attempt to dictate to the press what they will be permitted to see and what they will be permitted to say about what they will see.  Bloomberg News Executive Editor, Dan Moss, testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has the right of it:

This proposal threatens the First Amendment.  The government would literally open the reporters’ notebooks.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee isn’t conducting any hearings on the matter.)

Carl Fillichio, a Labor communications specialist, told committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R, CA) after Wednesday’s hearing that he, Fillichio, would provide “some flexibility” on a June 15 deadline for the plan’s implementation.  Notice that: a communications specialist, not a Labor official with actual authority, claims to be in a position to commit the Department.  Fillichio did then send an email to Bloomberg, The Washington Examiner, and others, saying in part

Per my commitment to Chairman Issa’s request, we are going to move the effective date on changes to the lock up[.]

Notice this, too: there’s no commitment by this underling—or by anyone in authority at Labor, or by anyone in Obama’s White House—to eliminate this plan; there’s only a “commitment” to move its effective date.

Fox News‘ headline in the linked article is naïve.  This isn’t a backing off.  This is just cynical delay and a weasel-wording of a pseudo-change made by a junior functionary.  This obfuscation is of a piece with the HHS contraceptive, sterilization, and abortifacients insurance coverage “compromise.”  The plan will go into effect essentially unchanged, unless there’s more outcry and more pressure put on our Congressmen to withdraw by legislation this plan’s attack on our freedom (which also will force Obama’s explicit veto).

Regulations and Foreign Law

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The Fed wants to put our own banking system under the aegis of international banking regulators.  Not directly, but by requiring all American banks—including even our smallest institutions—to meet the capital requirements of Basel III.  Basel III is an international standards “agreement” carrying international bureaucrats’ view of what constitutes a bank’s capital adequacy; those bureaucrats’ view of proper stress testing of a bank; and those bureaucrats’ view of the adequacy of a bank’s liquidity, apart from its capital adequacy.

There’s more: the Fed intends to impose on each bank a 1%-2.5% surcharge on its (increased) capital—because the Fed has a better understanding of how the bank’s capital should be used than does the bank.

Aside from whether US businesses should be under the control of foreign quasi-governmental agencies—a meme this administration is increasingly embracing—smaller financial institutions will have trouble meeting the additional requirements.  This is apparent from the results, in market share and profit margin, of this sort of intervention.  Lenders with $1 billion or less in assets have seen their market share fall to the neighborhood of 10% from the 31% they held in the early ’90s, and smaller banks had a return on assets of 1.22% for the first quarter of this year, compared with 1.52% for those with more than $1 billion in assets, just from the existence of the Fed’s domestic regulatory requirements.  So much for too big to fail.  The Fed is busily instituting too small to survive.  (And as an aside, notice those profit margins.  So much for fat cat bankers.  Those are the margins of chain grocery stores.)

There’s yet more.  The Fed doesn’t want banks to rate their riskiness in any effective way.  It intends to  force banks to stop relying on credit ratings when looking at their own assets’ riskiness.  Instead, the risk classifications of another foreign entity, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, are to be used.  The OECD Knows Better.

Hmm….