Tag Archives: morality

Racism Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

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…or even to your neighborhood.

[T]he Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory.

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”  It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.

This is just racism being manufactured where none necessarily exists.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan:

Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong.

He added his claim that

[d]ata from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged discrimination and segregation.

We’ll make up a racism beef; that’ll solve the problem.  Malarkey.  We need, instead, to address actual causes—lack of jobs, exacerbated by a failed recovery and stagnant economy; failure of family structures; poverty impacted heavily (but not exclusively) by the foregoing.  Racial “imbalance” has nothing to do with this; it’s just a club with which Progressives will attempt to beat those who disagree with them—just as they did the banks with CRA, contributing heavily therewith to the housing bubble.

Man-Caused Disasters

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…and the men who cause them.  The disasters are no big deal, certainly aren’t actual terrorism, so the men who cause them also are no big deal; certainly they’re not terrorists.

Of course we should continue to release them from Guantanamo.  That’s what President Barack Obama said last May at the National Defense University.

I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis[.]

Never mind that the ones he has in mind are Saudi citizens, and that they’ll go to Yemen.  Or these minor details:

  • Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen…is now the greatest al Qaeda threat to the US homeland according to US intelligence
    • formed in part by several former Guantanamo Bay detainees who were released in 2006.
  • Merger between former GITMO detainees from Saudi Arabia and the AQ escapees in Yemen formed al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
  • Recent spate of prison breaks across the Middle East and North Africa…such escapes by al Qaeda often lead to the formation of the next affiliate
    • July 21 in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, many of the most hardened al Qaeda prisoners [escaped]
    • Second prison north of Baghdad was breached at about the same time with similar results
    • 1,000 inmates in Libya, many incarcerated on terrorism charges, escaped in late July from a Benghazi prison in an operation coordinated with gunmen from outside the prison walls
    • July 30 Taliban fighters…broke 250 prisoners out of a Pakistani jail
  • Recidivism rate of released GITMO detainees reaches 25%

But these are just guys doing bad things; they’re not actual terrorists.  The war against terror is winding down, and al Qaeda is on the run.

Sure.

A Good Little Republican

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Here‘s Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R) on Obamacare and Obamacare state “insurance” exchanges:

My approach is not to complain about things, but to get it done best we can.  It’s our responsibility.

There’s a good little, courteously compliant Republican.

No, Governor, it’s your responsibility to act against the irresponsible, never to meekly accept it as your lot.  You work for the people of Iowa, not the Progressives of DC.

Car Pooling

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…but only the union way.

In the past month, San Francisco International Airport officials have been citing and arresting drivers from mobile-app enabled rideshare companies that pick up and drop off passengers, an airport spokesman said.  Airport spokesman Doug Yakel said there have been seven citizen arrests issued to “various offenders” since July 10.  The airport had issued cease and desist letters to several rideshare companies, including Lyft, Sidecarv and Uber, in April.

Notice that these are not “professional” drivers—not union cabbies—that are being harassed.  CBS San Francisco points out that the harasses are “drivers participating in a mobile app arrangement typified by Sidecar.”

Naturally, a union—a taxi union in this case—objects to rideshare at “their” airport.  The competition might save the customers money (good for them, bad for the protected class), and it might save gas (good for the environment, bad for—well, not much of anyone).

But there’s a solution afoot:

The state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates and licenses passenger carriers, has been looking into how to regulate these new types of companies.

Of course.  Because we Americans are just too stupid to be trusted to do anything on our own, without a Know Better Government’s regulation to tell us what to do, how to do it, and when we should do it.

Big Brother Behavior Mod

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You’ve seen in some of the news media reports on a new Federal government team designed to facilitate the government’s ability to persuade us to do various things it thinks appropriate for us.  The team being formed to spearhead this effort is colloquially called a “Nudge Team” because it’s ostensibly intended only to suggest to us better, more efficient ways to achieve goals.

As you might expect, I have some thoughts on this.

The formative document is called, interestingly enough, “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights,” and it has this illuminating statement in the opening paragraph:

In 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which through a process of rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government….

Notice that: advance government priorities, not those of a Sovereign citizen.  The next paragraph fleshes this out:

The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help…scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials.

The government intends to engage in “behavioral interventions” to “persuade” us to their (more efficiently achieved) goals.

But wait—isn’t that just ordinary advertising, something every business man, from a one-man home office business to the GEs and Bank of Americas, does to get us to buy their products?

Investor’s Business Daily talks about the government not having a clear idea of what is “good for us” (never minding the primacy of the government’s goals for us), that the government can’t be trusted to stop at any particular point—the slippery slope concern—and the (subtle at first) loss of our individual liberties as the government gets this sort of program rolling along.

IBD is right on all counts, but it’s that last that’s most important of the three.  And that leads me to my concerns.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising when businesses or individuals do this.  It is, after all, limited to more or less friendly persuasion.  We’re also free to walk away from it at any time, whether by changing the channel, hitting the mute button, turning the page in our magazine or newspaper, or closing the door on the salesman.

Not so much when it’s the government doing the “advertising.”  Government has too many ways to suggest that we heed its blandishments, from the way it “guides” potential contractors in its project notices, or “encourages” folks to get onto its food stamp program, all the way up to, and including, enemies lists and open assaults by Federal agencies on organizations that disagree with the government.

Along with that is a concept that’s being lost in modern America (and which loss facilitates government dominance of our activities): not everything done in the private sector is appropriate for the government to do also.  More strongly than that, most things done in the private sector are wholly inappropriate for government to do.  When the government does engage in what is for the private sector, freedom is put in peril.

One source of the risk is that government tends, in the end, not to do alongside private individuals or enterprises the things that we do, but to do those things instead.  This isn’t because government can do these things more efficiently.  Rather, it’s because government can do them more cheaply than the private sector: government can—must—do this with OPM, with taxpayer money.  From the beginnings of this crowding out, government winds up saying to us, “No need for you to do these things; we’ve got this.”  From there it’s a short step to, “Butt out.  This is government business.”  It’s a (subtle, but the more insidious for that) threat to our liberty.

Nudge team “persuasion” is on that latter list; it’s wholly inappropriate for our government to involve itself in such a thing.  Especially given the avowed behavior modification aspect of it.

The government’s central…Nudge Team…document can be seen here and here.