Other People's Money

Sooner or Later ... - Glenn Reynolds

Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.

Remembering Margaret Thatcher

Why watch a fictional portrayal concocted by her political adversaries in Hollywood when you can watch the "Iron Lady" herself? Here she is speaking to Parliament as Prime Minister of the UK (1979 to 1990).

Socialized Medicine

Annals of Government Medicine - John Hinderaker

An investigation reveals that under socialized medicine in the U.K., the death panel process has been delegated to hospital staff who designate patients “do not resuscitate” without the knowledge of the patient or his family and occasionally through clerical error:

Elderly patients are being condemned to an early death by hospitals making secret use of “do not resuscitate” orders, an investigation has found.

Elizabeth Warren and the Social Contract

Back in my college days I would often get caught in traffic while driving my economy car on Southern California' s freeways. During one of these traffic snarls a driver in an expensive new luxury car crept by in the left lane. It struck me as ironic that even though he was certainly traveling in style, he was stuck on the same congested roads that I was.

Upon further reflection it occurred to me that I also enjoyed many the same of the great benefits of our society as he did. Same roads. Same public schools and colleges. Same law enforcement. Same national defense. Same national parks. And yet I, like everyone else in my income bracket, had never paid a dime in income taxes. What a great country this is.

And yet, for some it is never enough. The politics of redistribution has a highly addictive quality to both the recipients and the political middle-men. The recipient of direct subsidies and material giveaways comes to expect an ever increasing level of benefits and security. The political middle-man gains a sense of self-gratification and self-importance as the ever-widening circle of recipients becomes more deeply dependent and loyal to their perceived benefactors. But it cannot go on forever. Eventually the demands outstrip the resources and promises must be broken.

But it was immoral to make the promises in the first place. The promises cannot be kept and they create false expectations in others.

And even without any direct subsidies and giveaways, it is important to remember that every U.S. resident receives a steady stream of benefits every day by just residing in this country.

Elizabeth Warren and liberalism, twisting the ‘social contract’ - George F. Will

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

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Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.

Should People be Forced to Share Their Money?

My money: I deserve to keep it all - J.E. Dyer

Of course we all deserve to keep our own money. If it is ill-gotten – stolen, swindled – then it’s the crime that deprives us of it, not any inherent function of the armed authorities to prowl the land in search of “undeserved” bank balances.

The question of what we “deserve” boils down to which came first, the individual human with rights, or the state. America was founded on the principle that the individual human with rights comes first. Any idea that violates that principle is counter to our founding idea. It is not possible to reconcile with our founding principle the idea of collective schemes in which we make some modification to “what we deserve.” We either deserve to keep all our own earnings – money – wealth – goods – or we do not have unalienable rights.

Now, what we decide to do with our own money will inevitably involve government functions of some kind. People have to have a government in some form. A certain minimum set of public services is essential to corporate human life. The American founding idea is that we the people decide what government will do, and we decide how much money government will have to do it with. Then we contribute out of what is inalienably ours.

The Curious Background of Barack Obama

Two items on Barack Obama's background: One humorous, the other scholarly.

Breaking: A Power Line DC Bureau Exclusive! “Operation Chaos” Exposed!! - Steven Hayward

Rush: Gentlemen, I’m really starting to worry that our plan of placing our hand-picked, CIA-groomed Manchurian candidate Obama in the White House to unravel liberalism from within is working too well and too fast.

The Chosen One - Angelo M. Codevilla

Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii's most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones.

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In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.'s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government's then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

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The point here is that this network was formed precisely to help the careers of kindred folk, while ruining those of others, and to move the requisite money and influence unaccountably, erasing evidence that it had done so. Exercising influence abroad on America's behalf—the network's founding purpose—never got in the way of playing a partisan role in American life and, of course, of taking care of its own.

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In sum, Barack Obama grew intertwined with the narrow, self-referential left side of the American Left. They helped one another believe they had come up the hard way, as underprivileged but brilliant, square-jawed tribunes of the common man. Their common problem, however, is that their agendas are antagonistic to people unlike themselves, and that they cannot keep from showing their contempt for the common folk in whose name they would ride to power.

Federal Red Ink, Part 3

Entrepreneur warns against dangers of government in economics - Doug Robinson

During the process of establishing a car company, Kirkham had several experiences that shaped his political views about socialism and the merits of a free-market system unfettered by government. When Kirkham visited the Polish MiG factory for the first time in 1995, the lights were off and the machines silent — there was not enough money to pay the electric bill. Each morning, thousands of men came to work, dressed in rags, and did nothing all day. They simply stood by their machines until it was time to go home. Kirkham was so moved by the experience that he took a photo of the darkened factory, only to have a guard point a machine gun at him, forbidding him from taking more photos.

The Cold War and socialism had collapsed a few years earlier, but Poland was still trying to dig its way out of the past. "All the laws and legacies of socialism were still there," says Kirkham.

A couple of years later, he watched as 20,000 employees were ordered to leave the MiG factory — they were officially out of work. "I watched them get on their bikes and pedal home in the snow," says Kirkham. "This company that couldn't fail, failed. This factory was government run and government supported. The next few days, I had 100 men line up outside my door, begging for work."

If that didn't cement Kirkham's opinion of government intrusion during his early years in Poland, then an illness did. He contracted systemic strep infection, which left him with a temperature of 105 degrees. For the second time, he found himself at the mercy of government health care in a foreign country. After Kirkham was placed on a stretcher at the factory, Polish workers stuffed cash in his pockets so he could bribe doctors. He was forced to lie in a hospital hallway because no rooms were available. The nearest antibiotics were two hours away.

"Socialist hospitals are terrifying," says Kirkham. "They wont treat you unless you bribe them. In truth, though, they never asked me for a bribe — I was an American and employing a lot of people."

EU in Financial Trouble

The Eurozone Crisis Won’t Just Go Away - Dave Schuler

The eurozone confronts a choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution or open-ended official support. The existence of this choice proves that an enduring union will at the very least need deeper financial integration and greater fiscal support than was originally envisaged. How will the politics of these choices now play out? I truly have no idea. I wonder whether anybody does.

Economic Crisis in Spain

Spain’s Socialist Utopia Mugged by Reality - Soeren Kern

Spain’s ailing economy too is a symptom of much broader problem, including the inability of the social welfare economic model to create jobs, as well as a highly paternalistic labor market that benefits an older generation seeking to preserve the status quo. Although Spain’s economic crisis has affected workers in all age groups, youth unemployment is more than double the overall jobless rate of 21.2 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Around half of Spain’s youth are unemployed and the other half that is working often does so under highly exploitative employment conditions.

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Opinion polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists on May 22, as voters punish them for the government’s handling of the economic crisis and the painful austerity measures aimed at avoiding a debt default. Polls published in the centre-left El País and the center-right El Mundo newspapers predicted broad losses for the Socialists including in strongholds such as Barcelona, Seville, and the Castilla-La Mancha region. According to El Mundo, the Socialist Party is “on the edge of a catastrophe.”

Government Handouts

Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues - Elizabeth MacDonald

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.

But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times.

Also, an estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau, based on 2009 data. An estimated 46.5 million get Social Security; 42.6 million get Medicare; 42.4 million get Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million get housing subsidies; and 3.2 million get Veterans' benefits.

And the handouts from the government have been growing. Government cash handouts account for a whopping 79% of household growth since 2007, even as household tax payments--for things like the income and payroll tax, among other taxes--have fallen by $312 billion.

Those Pesky Death Panels

The Reality of Death Panels - Mike Stopa

SUPPORTERS OF President Obama’s health care reform law have relentlessly derided Sarah Palin’s notion of “death panels’’ as a vulgar rhetorical technique, with no basis in reality, devised merely to scare a gullible, uneducated citizenry into rallying to repeal the law. The death panel notion persists, however, because it denotes, in a pithy way, the economic realities of scarcity inherent in nationalizing a rapidly developing, high-technology industry on which people’s lives depend in a rather immediate way. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that vulgar notions (and jokes) invariably contain a “subtle and spiritual idea.’’ The subtle and spiritual idea behind “death panels’’ is that life-prolonging medical technology is an expensive, limited commodity and if the market doesn’t determine who gets it, someone else will.

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To the extent that ObamaCare ultimately succeeds in imposing uniformity on basic health care, it will likely lead to the creation of secondary markets for providing insurance against various health eventualities and access to “heroic’’ procedures to extend life. Water runs downhill and it’s a good thing that it does. First, we need to have people buy the expensive medicines and experimental technologies. Europe has discovered this as its regulated system of medicine has driven its pharmaceutical industry farther and farther behind that of the United States. Capping costs kills innovation.

But, in addition, Palin is right. Death panels are an inevitable consequence of socialized medicine. The law of scarcity demands them.

A mature discussion of health care must recognize basic economics so that we can think ahead on how to satisfy the demands of those who are not satisfied with base-level care.

Socialist Subversives

The Second Time is Farce: Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today - Ron Radosh

The idea was to consciously create a fiscal crisis of the state. ACORN’s chief strategist, Peter Dreier, explained this in an article, “The Case for Transitional Reform,” which appeared in the journal Social Policy in February 1979. Dreier called for injecting “unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis,” producing a “revolution of rising entitlements” that “cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class.” Once a “fiscal crisis in the public sector” occurred, the movement could push for creation of “socialist norms” being advanced as the only possible solution.

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Writing in the current issue, Piven presents a clarion call for a new mass movement, one that the magazine publishes as an editorial statement representing its editors. (It is currently under the magazine’s firewall.) She begins by noting that nothing is taking place to deal with ending what she claims is an unemployment rate of 15 million people. To regain the 5 percent rate of 2007, she estimates there would have to be 300,000 jobs created each month for several years, something that is next to impossible.

Thus Piven asks a question: “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” In other words, the kind of action her protégé George Wiley fomented in the 70s with the NWRO. She admonishes the Left not to wait for “the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism,” but to up the ante at present to pressure for “big new [government] initiatives in infrastructure and green energy” that could “ward off the darkness.”

A Thanksgiving Reminder

Paul Rahe: America's First Socialist Republic - Scott Johnson

Quoting Professor Paul Rahe:

On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers This year, it is especially appropriate that we do so -- as we pause, in the midst of an economic maelstrom, to count our remaining blessings and to reflect on the consequences of our election of a President and a Congress intent on "spread[ing] the wealth around."

We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered "how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery." And "after much debate of things," he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that "they should set corn every man for his own particular" and assign "to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end."

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, "for it made all hands very industrious" and "much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." ...

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one's own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man's labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

Read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.

The Right to be a Sponge

Expropriate the Expropriators! - John Hinderaker

In Marxist theory, the Communist Party represented the interests of productive workers, the value of whose labor is expropriated by others. That was wrong, but at least it had a certain coherence. Greek Communists (and more generally, 21st century socialists) stand for something quite different: the "right" to be supported by the labor of others (in the Greek case, Germans); the "right" to be a sponge, forever; the "right" to be an exploiter. It would be hard to think of a less attractive political program.

California - March 2010

Dronism - Victor Davis Hanson

It is taboo to ask our failing youth a simple question, “What exactly have you done the last month to ensure your birthright to the world’s most sophisticated lifestyle propped up by advanced math, science, social stability, and political tranquility?”

It other words, our elite is becoming more elite and refined, while our non-elite is becoming more rough around the edges. But they share a disturbing commonality: both expect something that they are not willing to invest in.

Low-tax Texas beats big-government California - Michael Barone

In the two decades after World War II California, with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar California's expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model for the nation. Few experts praised Texas' low-tax, low-services government.

Now it is California's ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas' approach has generated more creativity and opportunity. So it's not surprising that Texas voters preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington. What's surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have proved so successful in Texas.

Billions in red ink drowning California's cities, schools and counties, too - Steve Bartin

Here's the money quote about saving the status quo:

"We cannot survive without raising taxes," Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone said. "We're just going to sit and wallow in deficits until somebody steps up."

How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy - John Ellis

In short, California is a disaster for business. The state has piled up so many taxes, regulations and mandates that businesses are leaving the state. Just this week I learned that a spare part order for my Lennox fireplace is delayed because Lennox is moving this division of its business to Tennessee. Wealthy individuals are also fleeing the state to avoid the country's highest tax bracket. When both wealth and wealth creation leave the state, tax revenues leave with them.

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The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Sun and Socialism - Victor Davis Hanson

So far, the sunny socialist state has gotten by on two general truths: Most people won’t leave the beautiful coastlines, sunny weather, and scenic landscapes no matter how high the taxes go to subsidize less productive or more needy others; and, second, lots of tourists will visit to bask in the beauty and warmth — and pay quite a lot for even that brief taste of natural paradise.

Yet those smug assurances of the Lala Land redistributive state may be ending. An estimated 3,500 upper-income Californians are leaving their beautiful state each week. They seem to think that crumbling highways, schools rated at near to last in the nation, 5 to 7 million illegal aliens, and overfilling prisons aren’t worth the 10 percent sales tax, 10 percent income tax, and 63-cent-a-gallon combined state and federal gasoline taxes. And they don’t think that Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, or the California legislature can or wants to fix things.

What's the Fuss?

The U.S. House of Representatives passes the health care bill. What's the problem? We're the richest and most powerful economy in the world. Certainly we can afford to help everyone get the medical care they need. Right?

Actually not. Take a look at The U.S. Debt Clock. This handy little page includes convenient boxes listing the U.S. National Debt (currently approaching $12 trillion) and the number of U.S. Taxpayers (currently about 108 million). But the real kicker is the total U.S. Unfunded Liabilities. This is the amount of future obligations for Social Security and Medicare which the U.S. government has taken responsibility for, but does not have the ANY money set aside to cover (hence the term "unfunded").

Folks, the current U.S. Unfunded Liabilities is a whopping $106 trillion. Yes, that's "trillion" with a 'T'. That future obligation represents a knee-buckling $1,000,000 per taxpayer. This is madness. The current total national assets is only $74 trillion. So we are already obligated 50% above our current assets.

And it's in this sort of economic situation that our Representatives in Washington have voted to saddle U.S. taxpayers to even more trillions in obligations. We are promising benefits which cannot be delivered while simultaneously burdening future generations with expenditures they cannot afford.