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In addition to his blogging, occassionally we run across columns or articles by others who make what Curt thinks are very insightful points about the political or cultural situation in our country, and likes to share them here. We don’t necessarily endorse every word, nor know enough about the writers to give our blessing to their personal life or other columns! But we hope you enjoy these, and we plan to update this periodically.
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To Obama, Legal Precedents Are All About Politics
By Byron York, from
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/obama-legal-precedents-are-all-about-politics/466961
In 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by huge bipartisan votes -- 342 to 67 in the House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.
Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and also creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional. In Boston on Wednesday, Stuart Delery, an attorney for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, urged the First Circuit Court of Appeals to find DOMA violates the Constitution by discriminating against gays and lesbians. "I'm not here to defend [the law] on any standard," Delery told the court.
What was striking about Delery's request that a federal court strike down DOMA was that just a day or two before, President Obama railed at the very notion that a federal court would strike down any law passed by Congress.
"I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama said Monday about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation's highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that "an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law."
Obama immediately ran into a barrage of questions. How can the Supreme Court overturning a law be "unprecedented" when the court has done it more than 150 times in U.S. history? And does the president even recognize the court's authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress?
Backtracking, Obama said the next day that "the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it." He also claimed, without convincing many people, that he called the Obamacare case "unprecedented" because it's been a while since the court overturned "a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care."
But what about that "strong majority"? When reporters pointed out that Obamacare passed the House by a narrow margin of 219 to 212 votes, White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly revised "strong majority" to simply "majority."
But all that backing and filling -- including Carney's claim that Obama was misunderstood "because he is a law professor" -- was before the DOMA arguments made news. If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare?
The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one. And perhaps counterproductively, the president's decision to bring up Obamacare's history in Congress could end up reminding the public of the tangled circumstances of its passage. Even with a huge majority in the House, Democrats barely passed the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition. And in the Senate, Obamacare succeeded as the result of a set of freakish circumstances that allowed Democrats to pass an unpopular measure into law.
Those circumstances included the wrongful prosecution of a Republican senator (Ted Stevens), resulting in his seat going to a Democrat; the defection of another Republican senator (Arlen Specter) to the Democrats; and a change in one state's laws (Massachusetts) to allow a Democratic governor to immediately appoint a Democrat to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and give the Senate a 60-vote Democratic supermajority. And then there were the policy payoffs to some Democratic senators who were undecided about the bill. Even then, Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for just 134 days before Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, who ran specifically on the platform of stopping Obamacare. But in those 134 days, Democrats managed to pass an unpopular bill into law without a single vote to spare.
Now, the timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration's arguments over constitutionality. And the flap over Obama's remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June.
A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA's defenders will remind the administration of the president's respect for duly constituted and passed laws.
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The Wall Street Journal
http://pdf.patriotpost.us.s3.amazonaws.com/2011-11-09-chronicle.pdf
The Occupy Wall Street protesters aren't good at articulating what they want, but one of their demands is 'end corporate welfare.' Well, welcome aboard. Some of us have been fighting crony capitalism for decades, and it's good to have new allies if liberals have awakened to the dangers of the corporate welfare state.
Corporate welfare is the offer of special favors -- cash grants, loans, guarantees, bailouts and special tax breaks -- to specific industries or firms. The government doesn't track the overall cost of these programs, but in 2008 the Cato Institute made an attempt and came up with $92 billion for fiscal 2006, which is more than the U.S. government spends on homeland security. That annual cost may have doubled to $200 billion in this new era of industry bailouts and subsidies. ... This industrial policy model of government as a financial partner with business can sound appealing, but the government's record in picking winners and losers has been dreadful. Some of the most expensive flops include the Supersonic Transport plane of the mid-1970s, Jimmy Carter's $2 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation (the precursor to clean energy), Amtrak, which hasn't turned a profit in four decades, and the most expensive public-private partnership debacle of all time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have lost $142 billion of taxpayer money. ...
Americans understand that powerful government invariably favors the powerful, who have the means and access to massage Congress and the bureaucracy that average citizens do not. This really is aid to the 1% paid by the other 99%. Yet the parade of subsidies gets longer each year, perhaps, as the old joke goes, because in Washington Republicans love corporations and Democrats love welfare. As House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan puts it: 'How can we save billions of dollars from unjustified subsidy and entitlement programs, if we can't get corporate America off the dole?'"
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Profits Are for People
By Walter E. Williams
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/walter-e-williams/2011/10/26/profits-are-for-people/
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding "people before profits" -- as if profit motivation were the source of mankind's troubles -- when it's often the absence of profit motivation that's the true villain.
First, let's get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They're what are left after other production costs -- such as wages, rent and interest -- have been paid. Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won't offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.
Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is the role played by profits, namely that of forcing producers to cater to the wants and desires of the common man. When's the last time we've heard widespread complaints about our clothing stores, supermarkets, computer stores or appliance stores? We are far likelier to hear people complaining about services they receive from the post office, motor vehicle and police departments, boards of education and other government agencies. The fundamental difference between the areas of general satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the pursuit of profits is present in one and not the other.
The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it's not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.
Free market capitalism is unforgiving. Producers please customers, in a cost-minimizing fashion, and make a profit, or they face losses or go bankrupt. It's this market discipline that some businesses seek to avoid. That's why they descend upon Washington calling for crony capitalism -- government bailouts, subsidies and special privileges. They wish to reduce the power of consumers and stockholders, who hold little sympathy for blunders and will give them the ax on a moment's notice.
Having Congress on their side means business can be less attentive to the will of consumers. Congress can keep them afloat with bailouts, as it did in the cases of General Motors and Chrysler, with the justification that such companies are "too big to fail." Nonsense! If General Motors and Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt, it wouldn't have meant that their productive assets, such as assembly lines and tools, would have gone poof and disappeared into thin air. Bankruptcy would have led to a change in ownership of those assets by someone who might have managed them better. The bailout enabled them to avoid the full consequences of their blunders.
By the way, we often hear people say, with a tone of saintliness, "We're a nonprofit organization," as if that alone translates into decency, objectivity and selflessness. They want us to think they're in it for the good of society and not for those "evil" profits. If we gave it just a little thought and asked what kind of organization throughout mankind's history has accounted for his greatest grief, the answer wouldn't be a free market, private, profit-making enterprise; it would be government, the largest nonprofit organization.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are following the path predicted by the great philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat, who said in "The Law" that "instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general." In other words, the protesters don't want to end crony capitalism, with its handouts and government favoritism; they want to participate in it.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
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The Washington Times
October 20, 2011
"A majority of Americans disapprove of what President Obama has done in office. He promised hope and change but delivered disappointment and stagnation. The unemployment rate is stuck at 9.1 percent. The poverty rate is at 15.1 percent, tied for the worst performance since the Census started tracking numbers in 1959. White House policies of class warfare and redistribution are impoverishing America, and the public is starting to feel worked over. ... During the recession, the average duration of unemployment increased from 16.6 weeks in December 2007 to a shade over 24 weeks by June 2009. That figure is now 40.5 weeks, the longest it has been in more than six decades. The longer a person is unemployed, the harder it is for him to find a job, as job skills erode and potential employers question whether it might be more prudent to hire someone else without big gaps in their work history. Mr. Obama’s solution involves having the federal government declare the long-term unemployed a legally protected class. His American Jobs Act would subject businesses to frivolous lawsuits if they decide against hiring someone who has been jobless for an extended time. Doing so would serve as one more disincentive for companies to hire or hold interviews for open positions, making it even harder for the jobless to find work. ... Ultimately, Americans will not find their pocketbooks thickening so long as Uncle Sam strangles entrepreneurs with regulatory red tape. Companies need to have certainty that they will be able to keep the proceeds of their investments in the future before they will start hiring again and pay their employees more."
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Autocrats Gotta Know Their Limitations, Too
By David Limbaugh (Archive) ·
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/david-limbaugh/2011/08/19/autocrats-gotta-know-their-limitations-too/
Friday, August 19, 2011
Why aren't more people offended by the autocrat President Obama for always telling people what to do on economic matters when he obviously has no idea what he's doing?
I might have used the term "dictator" or "tyrant," but seeing as Obama is telling carmakers what kind of cars they should make, "autocrat" is especially fitting.
You can't make this up. He told carmakers that they should concentrate on building smaller and more fuel-efficient automobiles. He said: "You can't just make money on SUVs and trucks. There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market."
That's right. That's exactly what he said, unless my sources misreported the beleaguered chief executive. With no experience in business and with no appreciation for how markets work, he's telling businessmen they need to understand the market.
Anyone who understood the market wouldn't suggest that suppliers start making product they have no reason to believe would be sold. Anyone who understood the market would know that a private-sector manufacturer's fiat works no better than a president's to stimulate demand, unless, perhaps, there were a monopoly environment and manufacturers could collude to produce only the product that they wanted to sell, and even then it would be highly unlikely.
But this is nothing new for Obama, who once convened a group of businessmen to tell them they had to start hiring more people, as if the decision to hire more people were solely a function of an employer's will rather than involving a cost benefit analysis -- and as if their hiring more people would jump-start the economy.
Then there was the time he said that under his then proposed health care plan (he never actually had his own concrete plan), waste would be greatly reduced because he would get doctors together to discuss their procedures and ensure there wasn't duplication of tests and services.
This is truly breathtaking stuff, folks. High-school students should know better than to make such statements. I'd be embarrassed for Obama except that the liberal media never call him out on such ludicrous assertions and thus the poor fellow apparently doesn't even realize he has become a parody of himself.
This is unnerving. How can someone have made it this far in life with such fundamental cluelessness? Has everyone only told him "yes" the past few decades, or was he too arrogant to listen to dissenting answers?
Was it Socrates or "Dirty" Harry Callahan who said, "A man's gotta know his limitations"?
Well, Harry learned that lesson from life experiences -- experiences that we must assume Obama missed. From what we know of his scandalously sketchy background and what we observe of his behavior in office, it would seem that Obama had no life experiences following adolescence other than academics and politics in their various forms. He appears to have no idea why things don't happen automatically as they did on the professors' chalkboards.
As an academically indoctrinated central planner whose tutors trained him to believe the government can create economic growth by using borrowed federal money to pay people to dig ditches and fill them back up again, it's no wonder he is mystified that his stimulus package didn't create jobs.
But he's more than mystified. He's frustrated, because he believes he ought to have carte blanche authority -- akin to that of the econ professor to create widgets with the snap of a finger -- to inaugurate round two, with the building of high-speed rail, more infrastructure and anything else he darn well pleases.
I trust you know I'm not fabricating this. Just the other day, he repeated his lament that he has to work within this messy system called "democracy." He believes that if he just had sole control, he could match in the real world the economic results the professors produced in the classroom.
Meanwhile, Obama is conducting his government-subsidized campaign bus tour as if everything were just wonderful, except for the refusal of American businesses to do as he says.
But there is a silver lining. Though Obama doesn't have the humility or wisdom to know what he doesn't know, the American people are fed up to the point that the liberal media's shameless covering for him is no longer working.
The latest Gallup poll shows that only 26 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy and that a whopping 71 percent disapprove. Even fewer, 24 percent, approve of his job creating performance. If a Republican president were in office, there would be wall-to-wall coverage on this.
Oh, how we must pray and work our tails off to ensure that this national nightmare will come to an end in 2012 and that we can then begin, in earnest and with humility, the arduous process of restoring America's financial stability.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
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