Tag Archives: government

Julia, Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another take on the life of Ward Julia, via Power Line.

The captions are, unfortunately, hard to read.  Here they are:

Under President Obama: Julia is enrolled in a Great Leap program where she will learn critical community organizing and obedience skills from qualified union staff screened for felony convictions, readying her for success in the kindergarten phase of her customized 65-year life plan.

Under Mitt Romney little Julia will be marched to a Mormon polygamy camp in Utah where Paul Ryan will torture her with boring Republican math mumbo-jumbo.

Hmm….

The Federalist and Thinking

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote earlier about the willful imposition of ignorance by our pseudo-elites on their unfortunate students concerning the essays gathered up into The Federalist.  In this campaign season and President Obama’s repeated demands to raise taxes, I thought I’d just quote from the opening of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 31.

To the People of the State of New York:

IN DISQUISITIONS of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind. Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice. Of this nature are the maxims in geometry, that “the whole is greater than its part; things equal to the same are equal to one another; two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and all right angles are equal to each other.” Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is itself incapable of limitation. And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common-sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible.

The objects of geometrical inquiry are so entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart, that mankind, without difficulty, adopt not only the more simple theorems of the science, but even those abstruse paradoxes which, however they may appear susceptible of demonstration, are at variance with the natural conceptions which the mind, without the aid of philosophy, would be led to entertain upon the subject. The INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing, extending even to the minutest atom, is a point agreed among geometricians, though not less incomprehensible to common-sense than any of those mysteries in religion, against which the batteries of infidelity have been so industriously leveled.

But in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable. To a certain degree, it is right and useful that this should be the case. Caution and investigation are a necessary armor against error and imposition. But this untractableness may be carried too far, and may degenerate into obstinacy, perverseness, or disingenuity. Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general, the same degree of certainty with those of the mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than, to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations, we should be disposed to allow them. The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject. Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties.

It’s no wonder the Progressives run from these essays.  If they knew of them, Progressives might actually have to think about their policies’ effects.

What Do Progressives Have Against the Federalist?

Posted on by
1

Why study it?  Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has some thoughts on the matter.

…despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds.

And

The Federalist deals with the reasons for preserving the union, the inefficacy of the existing federal government under the Articles of Confederation, and the conformity of the new constitution to the principles of liberty and consent.  It covers war and peace, foreign affairs, commerce, taxation, federalism and the separation of powers.  It provides a detailed examination of the chief features of the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

Shockingly,

It advances its case by restatement and refutation of the leading criticisms of the new constitution.

Actual logic.  What’s up with that?

Amazingly, our pseudo-elite schools blow off this collection of essays almost entirely.  At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley, for instance, political science majors can get their BS/BAs without so much as a reference to The Federalist, and their law school graduates (except for Princeton, which has no law school) can get their law degrees with the same level of ignorance of how our legal system, and the laws within (and without) it, are intended to operate.

Never mind that the collection of essays comprises a most sound analysis of the problems our Constitution was intended to solve (have these institutions, or their graduates, even heard of the Articles of Confederation?) and the manner in which the government of which our Constitution is the blueprint was intended to operate.

Again, I ask: why do Progressives avoid The Federalist as assiduously as they do?  I can think of two reasons.  One is Berkowitz’: the essays are about a Constitution that they think no one can understand because it’s old, and it’s not binding on anything, anyway.  It’s wholly irrelevant.

But there’s another reason, too.  If they knew and understood these arguments, they’d have a harder time trying to criminalize those who disagree with them.

Update: corrected the last link, which had been broken.

Expensive Energy

Posted on by
2

Do “green” energy subsidies work?  Pretty much by definition, they do not.  Without the subsidies, “green” energy is unsustainably expensive.  Even—especially—when the subsidy is a government mandate to use/buy the “green” energy, the only thing green about it is the money necessary to buy it.  The cost of the ethanol subsidy/mandate in our gasoline has been well documented as appearing not only in the cost of our gasoline, but in the cost our food, as well.

Wind energy provides another example of an expensive, and failed, “green” energy subsidy.  The Wall Street Journal writes

Twenty-nine states have these rules requiring local utilities to purchase between 20% and 33% of their electric power from renewable sources.

Minnesota, in particular, the WSJ reports, required as recently as 2007 that utilities in the state push their use of renewable energy  to 25% by 2025, to 12% by this year.  That means wind energy because in that Midwestern and northern state, the sun doesn’t shine as much as it does in New Mexico or Arizona.

The Minnesota Rural Electric Association says its members lost $70 million last year because these utilities are forced to buy wind power they “can’t use and can’t sell.”  Even so, residential utility bills for MREA’s customers run $50 to $100 per year higher than they would absent the mandate.  That’s not chump change for Mr Everyman.

What are Minnesotans getting for their extra $100 of energy expenditures?  Nada.  Not more energy.  The wind does not blow all the time, so the wind mills stand idle while still costing money.  When the wind blows too hard, the wind mills must be shut down, so they stand idle while still costing money.

Not more jobs.  Minnesota’s wind-generated electricity doesn’t come from wind mills built in Minnesota.  They import it from North Dakota.  When the wind is blowing just right.

The WSJ also described a study published this year by the Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based market-oriented think tank, that compared states with renewable energy mandates with those that allow utilities to purchase the cheapest electricity available.

The states with mandates paid 31.9% more for electricity than states without them.  Residents of North Dakota, a state without a mandate, pay $7.63 per kilowatt hour for electricity.  Neighboring Minnesota pays $10.76.

Hmm….

France and the US

Posted on by
Reply

Guy Milliere has an interesting article on the French elections last Sunday and on the decline of a once proud nation (the article was written before the elections, but what he wrote remains valid today–RTWT).

Milliere decries the failure of France and sees its present strait as no better than the precipice, beginning with:

…among the 10 candidates in the first round [of the French presidential elections last month], three were Trotskyites advocating a Leninist revolution; a disciple of Lyndon La Rouche; a former Norwegian judge who appears to think she is an environmental Robespierre (Eva Joly); a populist from the extreme right (Marine Le Pen); a moderate who would find his place in the left wing of the American Democratic Party (François Bayrou); a Gaullist speaking as if it were still 1965 (Nicolas Dupont Aignan); a very « socialist » Socialist (François Hollande); and the outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bonapartist who, in the UK, would be to the left of the Labour Party.

At least with a two-party system (and occasional third-party spoiler) like ours (or even a three-party system with occasional spoiler flashes in the pan, as in Great Britain), the fringe groups don’t have much post-election effect, beyond the spoiling aspect of turning an election from one main party to the other.

But Milliere continued:

…no candidate defended free-market principles;…all of the candidates harshly attacked the financial world, multinational corporations, and globalization;…of the two finalists, one[‘s]… program appears to have been written before the development of the Internet.

Now we get to the parallels.  President Obama’s hostility toward free market principles, and toward business generally and banks explicitly, are both manifest (his claims to the contrary even as he follows them with screeds against the fat cats notwithstanding) and rooted in (and unchanged from) the late ’60s and early ’70s radical “community organizing” of his mentors.

Milliere went on:

France’s problems date from long before the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.  [It is a] country where no budget has been balanced since 1974, and where public expenditures have risen continuously in recent decades to represent a crippling 56% of its gross domestic product….  It is a country whose public debt is growing far faster than the public debt of its main economic partners in Europe, and will hit 87% of GDP this year (actually 146%, if what France owes to the European Union is included).  It is a country where reports on the inevitable failure of pension systems were presented to successive governments for over 25 years without a decision being proposed or taken.  It is a country where the…number of people living in poverty is between eight and ten million out of a population of 65 million.  It is also a country where…two-thirds of all higher education diplomas are worthless on the labor market.  Graduates with Master’s degree become fast-food servers or cashiers in a supermarket—if a position is available.

So it is in the US.  Our current economic disaster has been years, and administrations, in the making: very few actually balanced (as opposed to accounting gimmick balancing) budgets and national debt exploding over the last three years.  We’ve been ignoring the impending failure of our entitlement programs for decades, even though the originally forecast date range of their bankruptcy has moved very little in all that time.  Nearly 45 million Americans are currently receiving food stamps, which is roughly the same 14% of our population as is Milliere’s Frenchmen living in poverty; although, according to the CBO report at the link, that number is 70% higher than it was in 2007, immediately before the housing bubble burst.  And we insist on loaning taxpayer monies to students who wish to degree in gender studies, women’s contemporary literary issues, or basket weaving instead of in the productive STEM skills that a burgeoning and technologically evolving economy needs for national survival.

It’s necessary to change course.  And that course change must be in the direction of smaller, limited government that leaves more of our money, and our responsibility, in our hands.

Or we’ll end up like France.