While the failed trick itself is interesting, what’s relevant here is the interesting event at around 1:00 in the video.
See the folks acting collectively and on their own initiative, without need of government…help…to intervene in the incident to disable the snowmobile to prevent it resuming its runaway journey and then to help the injured spectator.
Do we allow that anymore? Where was the government?
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
Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (the court of jurisdiction, for those who are interested in such things, because this is the appellate court for matters pertaining to the NLRB orders) ruled unanimously that President Barack Obama’s “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board of Richard Griffin, Sharon Block, and Terence Flynn (the latter of whom resigned from the NLRB shortly after) were “constitutionally invalid” because the Senate was not in recess at the time of the appointments.
Writing for the court, Judge David Sentelle had this to say, according to Bloomberg at the above link:
Considering the text, history and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception[.]
The court expanded on that point in equally clear terms:
…the inescapable conclusion that the Framers intended something specific by the term “the Recess,” and that it was something different than a generic break in proceedings [an adjournment].
…
The natural interpretation of the [Recess Appointments] Clause is that the Constitution is noting a difference between “the Recess” and the “Session.” Either the Senate is in session, or it is in the recess. If it has broken for three days within an ongoing session, it is not in “the Recess.”
The court noted further that the Senate was in session at the time of these…appointments.
…the President made his three appointments to the Board on January 4, 2012, after Congress began a new session on January 3 and while that new session continued.
This also has implications for Richard Cordray and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he was “appointed” to chair, since he was put up in that same now known to be illegal batch of “appointments” as those NLRB folks. The thousands of pages of regulations that board has already written now are of only questionable validity; although the question here isn’t so cut and dried: the CFPB had a quorum, and the matter here is the necessity of a formally seated chairman. It also lends color to his nomination, for the current Senate’s consideration, to that same post.
Apparently, though, there are limits to Obama’s fiat governance.
But we knew that would be the case with a budget funded by on-demand calls to the Treasury and a deliberate lack of Congressional oversight. Here are three examples, from Skadden Arps, the “second best global law firm,” according to Spirit of Enterprise. In each case, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau imposed enforcement orders that charged both restitution payments and civil penalties for the miscreancies that wanted restitution. Those miscreancies generally centered on “deceptive marketing and sales practices” and “deceptive debt collection practices.”
Capital One: Required to pay $140 million in restitution and a $25 million civil penalty. The penalty was nearly 18% of the restitution.
Discover Bank: Required to pay $200 million in restitution and a $14 million civil penalty. The penalty was 7% of the restitution.
American Express: Required to pay $85 million in restitution and a $27.5 million civil penalty. The penalty was 32% of the restitution.
Assuming the restitution amounts are reasonable assessments of the severity of the banks’ misbehaviors, those civil penalties seem to bear no relation at all to the…crimes. They seem, in fact, to be capricious and out of control—just a grabbing of what an unaccountable bureaucrat felt like taking.
Skadden’s complete report (it’s long and wide-ranging) can be seen here.
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.