Tag Archives: rights

An Example

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…of socialism’s control of private enterprise. California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom has issued this diktat for how California-domiciled businesses must operate vis-à-vis the waning Wuhan Virus situation in that State.

Businesses were told by the state that they will have three options related to vaccines and mask mandates. Business owners can provide information to customers and not require anything at all. They can implement “vaccine verification” to determine which people must wear a mask, or they can require everyone to wear a mask.

Those three, and no other, options. Never mind that a business might wish, instead, to provide separate (not necessarily masked) seating for those not vaccinated. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to not ask at all a customer’s medical status regarding the virus. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to discriminate between not vaccinated by individual choice and not vaccinated by already having had the virus and recovered from it, and so not needing vaccination (another individual choice). That’s not allowed.

No business decision to do nothing at all, including not spending money on a State-mandated information campaign aimed at business’ customers. That’s not allowed.

No business decision to…. Don’t even think about it. That’s not allowed.

No, this is the socialist government dictating to private enterprise how it must operate. This is the socialist government dictating to private enterprise the government-allowed performance options.

Socialism: government control of the means of production. Government control of private enterprise.

Socialism: private enterprise isn’t private—it’s government enterprise.

An Illegal Offering?

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The Biden administration intends to lease some Federal lands in the waters roughly between Long Island and New Jersey, ostensibly to build a wind farm there.

The problem with that intent is this:

The proposed “competitive lease sale”…the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) [an arm of the Interior Department] is seeking feedback on several mandates tied to the sale, including the requirement “to create good-paying union jobs and engage with all stakeholders and ocean users[.]”
The “announcement of new proposed lease stipulations puts a priority on creating and sustaining good-paying union jobs….”

And there’s the problem. In addition to President Joe Biden’s (D) administration picking and choosing winners and losers in this enterprise—unethical at best, and completely out of bounds for the government of a free nation—the openly stated requirement for union jobs is illegal to the point of unconstitutional.

Picking winners and losers: the lease sale is, by design, not at all a competitive offering. Open shop companies—companies that are not unionized—are deliberately excluded from even bidding on the contract. That also creates artificially inflated costs to us taxpayers for any of these leases through that lack of competition and through the unions getting a free hand to raise their wage demands.

Illegal, unconstitutional: those non-union companies are denied their statutory rights to competitively bid at all for these Federal contracts. Beyond that, those non-union companies are denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied an opportunity to compete at all, much less on an equal footing, for participation in the contracts.

All non-union employees of those companies, individually and severally, are denied their equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied any opportunity to earn a paycheck under those contracts solely on the basis of their not being union members.

Congressman Colin Allred (D, TX) Makes the Case

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The good Congressman tried to make the case for HR1 in his Letter to the Thursday Wall Street Journal

What HR1 does is simple: it sets national standards for access to vote by mail, early voting, and voter registration so that our democracy isn’t radically different from state to state.

HR1 also nationalizes a number of other aspects of voting currently set by the individual States (as well as giving the Federal government veto authority over any moves a State might make in contradiction, but that’s an extra little fillip).

Unwittingly, though, the Progressive-Democratic Party Representative from Texas has made a critical aspect of the case against HR1.

Our 50 States do not exist merely as counties to the central government, existing solely for the convenience of enforcing laws handed down from the center. They are, instead, 50 different, enthusiastic, ongoing experiments in democracy. The good citizens of Maine have different imperatives than those of Illinois or Texas, and those citizens have different imperatives than those of California or Oregon.

And that’s a core strength of our nation.

Disingenuosity in Wisconsin’s Legislature

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A bill that would prevent election workers from correcting mistakes a voter makes on his absentee ballot is making its way through the State’s legislature. The bill would

would clarify that only voters or their witnesses can correct a mistake on an absentee ballot.

After all, as Congresswoman Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) put it:

Because [absentee voting] is a privilege, there’s got to be some responsibility that the voter has to exercise that privilege. And I think that responsibility is to do it right and legally.

The disingenuosity is illustrated by Congresswoman Lisa Subek (D-Madison):

I don’t care if absentee voting is a privilege. That doesn’t mean you should have to pass a test, or make sure that you dot every I and cross every T. If someone makes an innocent, honest mistake, it is appalling that we’re not going to then let their ballot count.

Subek cynically exaggerates what the bill does. There’s no test (other than the implied one of being able to read well enough to read the ballot—but witnesses and others approved by the voter can help with that—and every uncrossed i or undotted t do not disqualify the ballot.

The biggest bit of dishonesty (here, not mere disingenuousness) is her claim of not letting the ballot count. The bill explicitly allows the voter in question, or his witness, to correct the error, thereby making the ballot count.

It’s only invalid ballots that wouldn’t count, especially were the bill to pass.

College Entrance Discrimination

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A letter writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of racial discrimination, at least as practiced by Harvard, in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case.

If the plaintiffs…win, you can bet that elite college- and graduate-admissions offices around the country will establish workarounds to assure that opportunities remain for admittance of significant numbers of underrepresented minorities.

Therefore, he asserts,

The justices would be wise to take a pass on the Harvard case, or to affirm the lower courts’ decisions.

Which decisions upheld Harvard’s practice of racial discrimination for admission to its ivy-coated halls.

Harvard, to the letter writer’s first plaint, already uses “workarounds”—opaque and obscure criteria for assessing admissions “essays” and “descriptions of what this means to me” for starters—in selecting entrants on the basis of race while nonselecting other entrants on the basis of race.

Were the letter writer serious, he’d stop demanding free passes for the “underrepresented minorities” solely on the basis of their under-representation; that’s just racism under another guise. They’re underrepresented because they’re not qualified.

The solution is not free passes at the late date of college admissions applications, it’s getting these high school “graduates” actually educated and qualified.

More importantly, the solution is working to correct the K-12 systems and broken families that are the cause of unqualified-ness. But that takes actual work, and it’ll be a generational struggle to correct the ills so deeply embedded in what we’re pleased to call our education system. That solution is not the feel-good quick fix of which the Left is so enamored.

Another letter writer, however, takes a markedly differ view of the matter.

It [The Supreme Court] ought to take this case and apply strict scrutiny to the rationales advanced to justify treating some students more favorably than others merely on account of their ancestry.

But that doesn’t go far enough. As Chief Justice John Roberts already has said, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. On this, he’s right.

There is no justification for discriminating on “account of ancestry.” No more strict scrutiny; end the use of race as a discriminant, no matter how far down the list of selection criteria. Any—any—use of race as a selection criterion is rank racism.

Full stop.