Tag Archives: morality

A Redistribution

Posted on by
Reply

Erik Cafarella had a Letter to the Editor in Friday’s The Wall Street Journal in which he took notice of the added costs of ethanol mandates for our gasoline fuels.  The headline of his letter suggested that ethanol should be required to compete in a free market rather than be given a free ride via government mandate.

I offer a redistribution alternative that Progressives and their Democrat cronies should love.

Tax ethanol-laced gasoline, in that competitive market, at a higher rate than unadulterated gasoline.  Then send the extra tax money to the poor, whose food costs are elevated by the Federal mandate to produce ethanol.

How could a Progressive or Democrat deny our poor this boon?

Sanctuary Cities and Taxpayer Money

Posted on by
Reply

San Francisco has held itself out as a sanctuary city—a city that will take in and protect illegal aliens from Federal law and Federal law enforcers.  Aside from the legal aspects of violating Federal law, this is in keeping with federalism and the 9th and 10th Amendments, and it does not run afoul of Article I, Section 10.  Even were such a thing legal, though, it’s a foolish move, but as the motorboat skipper who currently sits in the Secretary of State’s chair has said, in the United States folks have the right to be stupid.

It’s a bit of a reach, however, for the city to demand taxpayer money to pay the legal expenses of illegal aliens as they’re haled into court to answer for their illegal entry or for deportation proceedings.  San Francisco Supervisor David Campos:

We are proud to be a sanctuary city.  And we’re not only proud to stand up for that, but we’re going to invest the resources needed to make sure that the 44,000 undocumented people who live in the city and county of San Francisco have, at a minimum, legal representation if they’re taken into immigration court.

Leaving aside the…misunderstanding…Campos illustrates—the reason these folks are undocumented is because they’re here illegally—this is a demand for taxpayers to pay for these illegal aliens’ legal costs.  If there’s truly a belief on the part of the (legal) residents of the city that such costs should be covered, there’d be no problem raising the fund out of private donations.

Surely, too, a city that insists on subsidizing housing costs in a limited supply market has better use for the taxpayers’ money.  Beyond that, as any high school student learns in his economics class, when something gets subsidized—when the cost of that thing gets artificially lowered from the perspective of potential customers—demand for that thing rises.  This move by San Francisco isn’t going to make life easier for the existing illegal aliens, it’s only going to get the city even more illegal aliens—adding to the strain on that already limited housing supply and thinning, among other city facilities, the available housing subsidies.

“Former detainees” claim that their “lack of access to an immigration lawyer turned their lives upside down.”  This is inaccurate.  What turned their lives upside down were two things: their decision to pull up stakes and come to the United States—a courageous move and often well done—and their decision to enter our country illegally.  The consequences of that second decision only flow from that decision, they do not at all turn upside down lives that already were so.

In some respects, the concerns of the illegal aliens and those who support them are valid: it should be much easier to enter our nation legally, and our immigration system desperately wants reform in this area.  Such reform, far from contradicting our need to secure our borders, complements such border reform quite nicely.  These, though, are reforms that only the Federal government can achieve.  If the sanctuary cities want meaningful help for their illegal aliens, they should consider spending the funds they want to allocate to “legal representation” on efforts to move the Federal government to effect those two reforms.

That would reduce the number of illegal aliens in the cities’ “sanctuaries” quite nicely.

Moral Contextualizing

Posted on by
Reply

Moral contextualizing is the Saul Alinsky-esque technique of applying a context to behaviors in order to assess their morality—in particular, to assess the behaviors of men in the past within the context of today’s views of morality rather than the views extant at the time.

Paul Isaac had some thoughts on the matter in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal:

The real issue is “contextualization” per se, which seems to be an aggressive technique to create false dialectics against historical straw men and to demand an implicit intellectual monopoly of the would-be contextualizers’ perspective on the defined hobbyhorse as the moral alternative, thereby defining other perspectives as both outdated and immoral.

That’s a big part of it.  Another part of the thing is the hypocrisy of the moral equivalence that these contextualizers assert in order to claim the holy superiority of their chosen, and debate-forbidden, positions.

Veterans Administration Strikes Again

Posted on by
Reply

And once again, its blow contributes to a death. This time, it’s the VA’s Talihina, Oklahoma, facility, and this place allowed maggots to breed in the injury of a veteran.

Executive Director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive but were not the cause of his death. He said the man came into the center with an infection.

Deering tried to play down the incident:

He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.  He succumbed as a result of the sepsis.

This is the level of attention, much less actual medical care, our veterans get from the VA.  Never mind that if this facility’s imitation medical personnel had taken the infection seriously, they would have noticed the maggots and maybe done something about them.  And maybe cleaned up the flies and the flies’ eggs whence the maggots came.  And maybe cleaned up the whole facility a little bit.

Four persons, a physician’s assistant and the Talihina facility’s Director of Nursing and two other nurses, have been allowed to resign over the matter.  Never mind any accountability for these.  Never mind the allegedly attending physician responsible for this veteran’s care receiving being held accountable, so far, at least.

It’s long past time to get rid of the VA and to use its budget and what would have been its budgets in succeeding years to provide vouchers for our veterans so they can get the care they need from the doctors and hospitals they choose.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Gerrymandering, Politics, and Race

Posted on by
Reply

The (eight Justice) Supreme Court is going to take up the question of gerrymandering and Congressional districts in Virginia and North Carolina.  In fact, the case the Court is hearing is narrower than that:

drawing legislative districts based on race.

Never mind that the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates race-based districting: the VRA

generally prohibits reducing minority-voting power through redistricting[]

which, of course, explicitly requires race-based districting in order to “protect” that “power.”

Indeed, the whole divide[] between white and minority voters nonsense with which Jess Bravin opened his piece at the link is just a tacit summary of the Left’s racism.  We’re all Americans.  Full stop.  Any “divide” is nothing but an artificiality, fueled by the Left’s fundamental identity policies that end up masking real abuses.

Were the Left, and now the courts, serious about how bad gerrymandering is, they’d agree to its elimination altogether.  Congressional districts should be squares enclosing substantially equal sized populations, differing from those straight-line boundaries only at the borders between states, and drawn without regard to the Left’s identity politics concerning which special groups of Americans are resident in which districts.