Tag Archives: rights

All Your Prosperity Belong to Me

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT), who caucuses with the Progressive-Democrats, has joined the Progressive-Democratic Party’s race to the bottom.  The President wannabe has proposed his cynically named For the 99.8% Act, which is targeted explicitly against the 588 Americans he hates the most: the 588 most successful of us.  His bill would deny these few Americans their ability to pass on the outcome of their success to their heirs, their families; his bill would overtly punish these most successful—and their families—for their success.

It’s a bill that’s borne of personal animosity and rank envy.  It’s a bill that would

establish a 45% tax on the value of an estate between $3.5 million and $10 million; a 50% tax on the value of an estate between $10 million and $50 million; a 55% tax on the value of an estate in excess of $50 million; and a 77% tax on the value of an estate above $1 billion….

Sanders rationalized his punitively confiscatory tax by claiming that what’s really needed is

stronger investment in skills, higher paying jobs, and a more progressive tax system.

He is ignoring the fact that the more progressive our tax system, the more it and the purveyors of progressivism punish success.  He is ignoring the fact that folks like the Walton family, the Kochs, and Jeff Bezos—from whom alone he would confiscate some $304 billion—have created more jobs and more higher paying jobs and have done more investment in work skills than anything Government has done.

Sanders is ignoring the fact that that money doesn’t sit in some vault as cash or gold bullion.  It’s invested, plowed back into the economy to create innovation, businesses, jobs, philanthropy, educational opportunities—even health coverage plans—all things Government cannot do as well, if at all.

For all Sanders’ and his Progressive-Democrat cronies’ rationalizations to the contrary, this bill and its ilk are nothing but the actualization of their mindless resentment of the achievements of others.

The Party’s Core Philosophy

Posted on by
Reply

And it even attacks its own.  In a Wall Street Journal article centered on Beto O’Rourke’s potential for a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential campaign, there appeared this giveaway.

[S]ome Democrats have privately groused that he should have shared some of the $80 million he raised in 2018 with fellow candidates in the party.

There is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s core ideology: their demand to redistribute OPM, ideally to their own special interests.

“That’s not the O’Rourke campaign’s money.  He didn’t earn that.  He had help.”

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Race-Based Admissions at UNC

Posted on by
Reply

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is under fire and in the courts over its fundamentally racist admissions policy.  Plaintiffs are arguing that UNC violates Supreme Court rulings by giving too much weight to applicants’ race. The problem, though, is that any weight to race is too much, is fundamentally racist.  The Supreme Court’s rulings don’t go far enough to bar this behavior.  As things stand, though, the plaintiffs have a case IMNSHO.

UNC admissions readers frequently highlight the applicant’s race, citing one reader’s comment that even with an ACT score of 26, they should “give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.” Another reader wrote, “Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid,” the plaintiffs said.
Steve Farmer, the university’s vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, said in response: “Language in this exchange does not reflect Carolina’s values or our admissions process.”

Farmer is being disingenuous. The language clearly reflects both UNC’s values—emphasizing race as they do—and that language equally clearly reflects the fact that UNC does use race emphatically in its admissions process. The notes are right there on the applicants’ forms.

UNC says it has studied race-neutral approaches to admission for many years….

The only race-neutral approach possible for admission—or for any other purpose anywhere—is to not consider race at all. Any inclusion of race (or gender, or…), even as a “plus” factor, necessarily segregates in favor of one group at the direct expense of another.

If UNC truly wanted diversity, it would achieve it by admitting the best students regardless of race, or ethnicity, or gender.  The resulting student population would be a microcosm of the underlying population from which it was drawn.

If that didn’t produce a diversity reflecting the more general population, the correction would not be to play race games with high school graduates, it would be to commit university personnel and resources to improving the K-12 education so those high school grads would more closely reflect the underlying demographics.  And to press other universities and colleges to do the same.

But that would take actual work and dirty hands, not virtue signaling.

Talk and Sovereignty

Posted on by
Reply

French President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on a “debating tour” of France in response to the uproar surrounding his gas tax increases, decision to impose from the center a “carbon free” economy on France, and the yellow vest demonstrations against first the tax increases and subsequently in broader opposition to that overweening centrality of governance.

And Macron laid bare his basic misunderstanding of his own political environment and of the nature of French sovereignty.  He’s already met with 600 mayors in Normandy, and there he laid out his basic tenets.

Macron said he was there to hear the concerns of the French and promised that the questions raised by the citizens would be given consideration.

Given consideration.  But no commitment actually to answer those questions satisfactorily to “the citizens.”  And this:

We won’t agree on everything, that’s normal, that’s democracy. But at least we’ll show we are a people who are not afraid to talk, exchange, and debate[.]

Talk, exchange, and debate.  Chit-chat, not action.  We’ll put on this show, though.

And who is this “we” that won’t agree on everything?  Disagreement among the citizens is, indeed, the stuff and core of democracy.  But government?  Government has nothing with which to agree or disagree; that’s a non sequitur.  Government has only to obey the instructions of its employers, those citizens.

Or does the French government (not only Macron, and not only the present administration), the head of a legal system one of whose basic tenets is that the burden is on a government-accused man to prove his innocence rather than on the government to prove his guilt, conceive that the people work for the government and not the other way around?

Not even Rousseau went that far.

Privacy in a Technological World

Posted on by
Reply

In a ruling rejecting an application for a search warrant, Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, operating in the Northern District of California, had this remark in particular.

Citizens do not contemplate waiving their civil rights when using new technology, and the Supreme Court has concluded that, to find otherwise, would leave individuals “at the mercy of advancing technology.”

Encouragingly, this remark also cited (via the quote in the remark above) a Supreme Court ruling, Carpenter v United States [citations omitted]:

We have kept this attention to Founding-era under-standings in mind when applying the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance tools.  As technology has enhanced the Government’s capacity to encroach upon areas normally guarded from inquisitive eyes, this Court has sought to “assure[ ] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” For that reason, we rejected in Kyllo a “mechanical interpretation” of the Fourth Amendment and held that use of a thermal imager to detect heat radiating from the side of the defendant’s home was a search. Because any other conclusion would leave homeowners “at the mercy of advancing technology,” we determined that the Government—absent a warrant—could not capitalize on such new sense-enhancing technology to explore what was happening within the home.

The Founders wrote our Constitution to be technology agnostic, and in fact there is no mention of technology qua technology in it.

Westmore’s ruling can be read here. Carpenter can be read here (it’s long).