Tag Archives: responsibilities

Poking My Nose

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…into an arena where my experience is limited and dated. But I’m gonna do it, anyway. My experience is this: I hold a private pilot license; although I haven’t had the opportunity to fly for some years: I’m non-current.  However, I do have several hundred hours in fighter aircraft simulators, accumulated when I worked as Test Director for the world class manufacturer of military aircraft simulators—which hours include extensive time flying in instrument conditions, albeit without the buffeting of real-world winds and wind gusts.

The helicopter that crashed in California killing all nine of its occupants, including the pilot, Kobe Bryant and his daughter, his daughter’s basketball coach, and those five additional unfortunates, didn’t have a warning system in its instrument suite that might have helped the pilot recognize his physical situation.  That system is a Terrain Awareness And Warning System, which could have greatly raised the pilot’s understanding of his location relative to the terrain, not just below him, but around him, as well.

It’s no big deal that the pilot didn’t have TAWS on his helicopter.  However, I would have expected that an experienced pilot would have known better than to fly in that terrain/weather without it.

Fiscal Management

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In Tuesday’s Progressive-Democratic Party primary debate, Joe Biden made the claim that he couldn’t afford child care in 1972 on his then-income of $42,000/year.

Jan Brewer, ex-governor of Arizona, had a thought on that via Twitter:

“Jan Brewer @GovBrewer · 12h
“Biden just said he couldn’t afford child care in 1972 when he was making $42,000/yr. Today, that’d be $256,000/yr.  Really Joe?  If you can’t run your own household efficiently, I don’t think you can run our country!

“Vote @realDonaldTrump!”

She used an inflation rate of a bit over 3.5% to get there. I used an inflation rate of 3% to get a bit under $174,000. Over that long time frame, inflation rates bounce around; our two estimates, though, effectively bracket the situation.

Brewer’s point is eminently valid. If Biden can’t hack his own household budget, how can he be expected run our nation’s budget?

Oh, wait—the Progressive-Democrat thinks that, as President, he’ll be able to give himself a raise at convenience through tax increases and to borrow at will because…government.

Empty Rhetoric

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More of it, this time from European signatories of the failed-at-birth Iran nuclear weapons deal. Iran has announced that it’s going to disregard entirely the deal’s limits on Iran’s production of weapons grade uranium, and in response, Britain, France, and Germany have said they’re going to trigger the dispute resolution mechanism that’s written into the deal.  That mechanism, on a finding of serious violation, involves getting the UN Security Council to reimpose UN-originated sanctions on Iran.

Of course, Britain, France, and Germany know full well that two other members of the Security Council, Russia and the People’s Republic of China, will veto any meaningful resolution, making the three’s decision meaningless chit-chat, intended for nothing more than dishonest virtue signaling (excuse the redundancy). The three also said, in the same statement, that

they weren’t joining Washington’s “campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran.”

And so the three continue to duck away from meaningful action against a nation that attacks its own people, funds and instigates terrorism around the Middle East and Europe, and is bent on getting a nuclear weapon with which to “wipe Israel from the map.”

Hmm….

Private Charity

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Readers of this blog know that I’ve long championed private charity as better suited to working our social ills than Government welfare—better economically, better for individual liberty, better for personal responsibility/morality.

Karl Zinsmeister, Editor in Chief of Philanthropy Magazine, offered some ways in which this is shown empirically to be true in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, which was adapted from his piece in the magazine’s winter 2020 issue.  One statistic that jumped out at me is this one:

77 million citizens volunteer time and labor [annually]

At Progressive-Democrats’ minimum wage, that works out to just under $1.2 billion per year that’s donated freely and on individual initiative. At current minimum wages, that still comes to nearly $560 million donated freely—at greater personal cost, too, to hear those pushing the higher minimum wage insist no one can live on such a puny wage.

Those numbers understate the donated time and labor contributed.  Many of those tasks done voluntarily are skilled tasks, and so are worth more in the doing.  Many of those volunteering time and labor are skilled individuals drawing high pay, and so their donated labor is worth far more.

But this is what progressive editorialists and political candidates openly call[ing] for deep cuts in the charitable deduction, an end to tax protections for churches and other charities, the taxing down of personal fortunes, and new regimes in which government becomes the sole ministrant of societal needs want to do away with.

Because these Know Betters are the font of what should be the target of largesse, who should pay for that largesse and how much, and how that largesse should be delivered—not the folks whose money, time, and labor would be confiscated.

What She Said

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The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died last Monday, had some thoughts on morals and society in her 1995 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Liberals and conservatives, radicals and socialists, disagreed about specific policies, but they were agreed on the principle that any measure of relief, for example (or charity, for that matter), had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the recipients….
… This principle stipulated that the condition of the “able-bodied pauper” (it did not apply to the sick, aged or children) be less “eligible”—that is, less desirable, less favorable—than the condition of the independent laborer. And “less-eligibility” meant not only that the pauper receive less by way of relief than the laborer did from his wages, but also that he receive it in such a way as to make pauperism less respectable than work—to “stigmatize” it….
In the past few decades we have deliberately divorced poor relief from moral principles, sanctions or incentives. This reflects in part the theory that society is responsible for all social problems and should therefore assume the task of solving them. …
The divorce of social policy from moral principles—the de-moralization of social policy—also reflects the spirit of relativism that is so pervasive in our time.

Absolutely, what she said. Now we’re at the start of a new year. It’s a good time to set about correcting that moral failure.

RTWT.