Category: Guest Authors

Corporate Tax Makes US Strike Out

By Chris Freind

Imagine a baseball team with a self-imposed rule requiring its players to brandish a 50-ounce bat, while the other teams use the standard 32-ounce slugger — a huge difference when facing 95 MPH pitches.

Inarguably, there would be two results:

A. The team with the dumb rule would be in last place, for swinging significantly heavier bats would produce fewer hits, and thus fewer runs.

B. The players and coaches on that team would flee to greener pastures — namely teams without such a self-defeating rule. And players’ values would immediately rise because their productivity would increase. Less restrictive rules would free up players to focus on what they do best, and the extra coin in their pockets would provide even more incentive to work harder.

Common sense clearly dictates that the last place team re-evaluate its policies, make the necessary adjustments, and halt the exodus of its players. How? By allowing its players to use lighter bats, thereby creating a winning environment and achieving a financial windfall in the process.

Naturally, it would be insanity to go in the other direction — digging in even further, and threatening sanctions against anyone leaving the team.

Even a team so obtuse as to establish such a counter-productive rule would undoubtedly see the error of its ways and rectify a bad situation. Right?

Wrong. Welcome to the United States Congress, where both parties adamantly refuse to change one of the single largest factors keeping America in a stagnant, no-growth status: the world’s highest corporate tax.

The latest story regarding the onerous U.S. tax rate is making headlines — and waves — around the world, as American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is attempting to buy Britain-based AstraZeneca (so far, four offers have been rejected). While Pfizer’s target has an extremely promising pipeline of cutting edge anti-cancer medicines, there is another compelling reason to acquire the foreign-based firm: massive tax savings.

If the deal goes through, Pfizer would “re-domicile” in the U.K., substantially lowering its corporate tax rate. Britain finally got with the program a decade ago, when it awakened and realized that its rate — over 30 percent — was driving away business. Since then, the rate has been lowered steadily, attracting wealth and working capital to its shores. The Brits now levy a 21 percent business tax, which will soon drop to 20 percent and possibly lower.

Compare that to the United States’ tax rate of 35 percent, and it’s a no-brainer why any CEO favors moving overseas. Making matters worse, the effective rates are actually higher, once state and local taxes are factored into the equation. So in Pennsylvania, a company pays the highest federal corporate tax on the planet, on top of the nation’s second-highest state corporate net income tax (9.9 percent), on top of local taxes (and Philadelphia is, cumulatively, the highest-taxed city in America).

But that’s not all. There are even more job-killing corporate taxes in the Keystone State, including the capital stock and franchise tax, several gross receipts taxes, public utility realty tax, gross premiums tax, and financial institutions taxes, including the Bank and Trust Company Shares Tax, Title Insurance Shares Tax, and the Mutual Thrift Institutions Tax. Getting the picture?

Rather than fix the problem — steadily sky-high rates that stifle innovation, cause job cuts, place a cap on new hires, and take capital from the free market (where it could be invested in projects and people) — Congress and many states continue to stand by their draconian policies. Instead of asking why companies flee, and what can be done to halt the exodus, government instead advocates penalizing those with the foresight to seek a more secure location, with some congressmen even advocating to make it a crime for businesses to leave.

In Pfizer’s case, it could potentially save $1 billion per year in taxes. And the money saved could hire more people, increase research and development, expand operations, bolster ancillary business, and otherwise fuel a productive economic engine. Unfortunately, that investment would occur overseas, creating little benefit in America. All this because our elected officials are too lazy and or too stupid to do what must be done: lower the tax rates.

Several points to consider:

1. There will undoubtedly be partisan comments that it’s the Democrats’ fault. True, that party deludes itself into believing higher taxes and making the rich (both people and corporations) “pay their fair share” will solve all of America’s problems. But this, like every major challenge America faces, has its roots in bipartisan failure. When it controlled the White House and Congress, the GOP did absolutely nothing to improve the situation (ditto for Pennsylvania, where Gov. Corbett and record Republican majorities accomplished squat in improving the state’s business climate and tax code).

To reverse this, it will take a leader with a clear, articulated vision and strong will. Sadly, calls for such a person keep echoing back, unanswered.

2. It’s bad enough that our taxes are so high, but to make the sin mortal, the money raised is squandered. High taxes can never be justified, but the pill might not be so bitter if at least the money was wisely spent. We all know otherwise.

3. Are there some lobbyist-generated loopholes in the tax code that allow for some corporate deductions? Sure. But they amount to a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, nowhere near enough to stop the hemorrhaging. If they were the panacea, companies wouldn’t have left and countless others would not be considering the same (such as Pfizer and Walgreens). The solution is not smoke-and-mirror deductions that benefit a select few, but a total overhaul of the tax code so that it is universally fair and competitive.

4. Politicians immediately posture against proposed mergers that could take jobs and cash overseas. But it should be obvious that, if American tax rates were competitive, such an exodus could be avoided in the first place. Same goes for the states: if tax rates are too high, expect companies to migrate to more favorable locations around the country.

“We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” So said the great Winston Churchill, and his countrymen have taken note. Yet Uncle Sam remains stuck in the bucket, continually striking out while knee deep in a mess of its own making.

 

Corporate Tax Makes US Strike Out

Blacks Still Await Educational Equality

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court handed down its epoch-making decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The aftermath of Brown changed a great deal, from the role of the Court in our constitutional and political order to the national attitude toward civil rights and the very foundations of our political discourse.

It didn’t much change education.

There is much to say about Brown, and much that will be said. On the constitutional question, many conservatives at the time — and many conservatives now — shared the views of Barry Goldwater, who was himself an advocate of desegregation. “It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision,” he wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative.  “I believe that it is both wise and just for Negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority.” Senator Goldwater’s complaint was constitutional:
To my knowledge it has never been seriously argued — the argument certainly was not made by the Supreme Court — that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to alter the Constitutional scheme with regard to education. Indeed, in the famous school integration decision, Brown v. Board of Education  (1954), the Supreme Court justices expressly acknowledged that they were not being guided by the intentions of the amendment’s authors. “In approaching this problem,” Chief Justice Warren said “we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the amendment was adopted. . . . We must consider public education in the light of its full development and in its present place in American life throughout the nation.” In effect, the Court said that what matters is not the ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution, but the Court’s ideas. It was only by engrafting its own views onto the established law of the land that the Court was able to reach the decision it did.
That was the view of most of the editors of National Review at the time, although the remarkable discovery I made — remarkable to me, at least — in my recent course of reading this magazine from its first issue through the middle 1960s is how relatively little we had to say about those questions. Brown  is remarked upon, and so is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but compared with issues such as Communism and the Vietnam War, they occupy very little space, and they are considered mainly, though not exclusively, in legal terms. Those terms are of course important, and conservatives who are instinctively inclined to agree with Senator Goldwater would do well to consider the contrary opinion of Robert Bork, whose views on such matters are not to be discounted lightly:
The Court’s realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
Justice Clarence Thomas, noting that Brown was roundly criticized for its reliance upon sociological and psychological theory, comes to a similarly straightforward conclusion. The Court, he writes, “did not need to rely upon any psychological or social-science research in order to announce the simple, yet fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race.”

Conservatives, at the time, were torn between their desire that government should make no distinctions between the races and their antagonism toward judicial imperialism. Conservatives, then as now, also were deeply influenced by their belief that the law could only do so much to remake social realities. The Republican party has a remarkably consistent belief, from the Lincoln era through the present day, that the main drivers of salubrious social change must be free enterprise and economic self-improvement. It is for that reason that Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — “Mr. Republican,” the Senate’s leading conservative — floated a largely forgotten proposal in 1946 that would have been the most sweeping civil-rights reform since the Reconstruction amendments, focusing mainly on the problem of employment discrimination. David Freeman Engstrom revisited that episode in a  2006 article and documented that the Taft bill, unlike many similar earlier offerings, contained very strong enforcement mechanisms, giving it real teeth, up to and including the implementation of hiring quotas. The Taft measure won the support of the noted black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, but was rejected by the NAACP and the AFL, the latter in part very probably because, as Mr. Engstrom notes, the Taft plan would have “exposed union locals to regulation.”

The post-Reconstruction Republican party believed at its core that the South was backward because it was poor, rather than poor because it was backward, and this line of thinking was implicitly and sometimes explicitly extended to African Americans throughout the country, as it is today. The theory was that incremental social change, driven largely by improvements in economic conditions, would accomplish what mere de jure equality could not. James Burnham, writing on the tenth anniversary of Brown  in the June 2, 1964, edition of National Review, sharply criticizedBrown and the Court, partly for the attempt to superimpose the justices’ idealism over state and local law, as well as what he called “natural” processes, but because the post-Brown regime failed to deliver: “The verdict pronounced by the facts leaps to the eye, and is implicit even in the many tenth-anniversary recapitulations published in the journals that rate Brown  alongside the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence. Brown is an abysmal failure, strictly on its own terms.” Mr. Burnham’s next paragraph could be published today with only a slight revision of the numbers:
The rate of school integration — the specific problem dealt with in Brown — has been no more rapid in this decade since 1954 than in the decade before 1954, when, without benefit of the Court, it was progressing slowly but continuously under the influence of economic change, social pressures, shifts in community sentiment, and the state of local law. Today, after a decade of Brown , 91 per cent of Negro students in the Southern and Border states still attend segregated schools. . . . In the Northern cities, the widespread de facto school segregation, resulting from residential patterns, has not been significantly changed.
Mr. Burnham’s observations in 1964 are not radically different from those of Eleanor Barkhorn writing in The Atlantic just last year. She notes that in 1969, after the Department of Education had begun robust enforcement of Brown , 77 percent of black and 55 percent of Hispanic students attended schools that were predominantly minority, whereas in 2010 the numbers had hardly budged for blacks (74 percent) and moved in the direction of more segregation for Hispanics (80 percent). And in 2010, she reports, more than 40 percent of minority students attended schools that were almost exclusively (90–100 percent) nonwhite.
It is for that reason that the constitutional debate, important as it may be, seems to me sterile.

Those Taft Republicans were in many, perhaps most, ways correct about the relationship between economic progress and broader social progress. Until after World War II, the South was desperately poor compared with the rest of the country, with incomes on average one-third those in the Northeast. The post-war economic boom was the main factor in changing that — no law, no public policy, no federal program was nearly as significant. For all the talk about economic inequality, sustained, robust growth and economic innovation can incrementally but radically change our quality of life. A middle-income American in the Northeast 100 years ago was much better off than a middle-income Southerner, but both were very poor by our standards. The difference between them was nowhere near so great in real terms as the difference between them and us.

African Americans have been as well served by economic innovation and growth as anybody — probably more so. There is no performance gap in, say, the car that a black family living in a largely black neighborhood in a largely black city can buy compared with what a white family in a white neighborhood in a white city can buy. A black family with $25,000 to spend has the same choices as a white family with $25,000 to spend. A black family that can afford a Mercedes has the same choices as a white family that can afford a Mercedes. The same is true for most products.

It is not true for education, the most important product that is still delivered on a Soviet central-planning model rather than through markets. A middle-class black family living in a largely black neighborhood is likely to be served by relatively inferior public schools. Across income groups, blacks are less well-served by the monopoly education system than whites are. That is not so much a product of the fact that African Americans are relatively poor, though they are, as of the fact that they reside in relatively poor communities. There are many young people in families of very modest means who benefit from going to schools in communities populated by people who are much better off than they. (I was one of those.) But that benefit is, statistically speaking, less available to black families. And as a practical matter, it is almost certain to remain so as long as K–12 education is dominated by model in which ZIP code is destiny.

Brown was and is important as a statement of principle, but law has a limited ability to change the facts on the ground. Free markets, on the other hand, remake the physical world anew with revolutionary speed. One of the footnotes to the Brown  decision considers possible remedies, one of which — “Negro children should forthwith be admitted to schools of their choice” — suggests what is still an excellent policy option, though one that should be applied universally rather than restricted to black students. The relative lack of black educational progress in the post-Brown  era highlights not only the deficiencies of the politically dominated model of economic production — and education is an economic good — but draws attention to the critical distinction between government funding of services and government provision of services. Food stamps have not interfered with innovation in the growing, distribution, preservation, or retailing of food, because government does not attempt to operate  farms, food-distribution networks, or grocery stores. It does operate schools, with consequences that have been disastrous generally but especially for African Americans. Even accounting for the income disparity between blacks and whites, the groceries, clothes, housing, electronics, automobiles, and other normal market goods is radically better for black Americans today than it was 30 years ago, to say nothing of 60 years ago. The same cannot be said of schools.

We may celebrate the sentiment behind Brown, but it would be far better to take meaningful steps to make the aspirations of 1954 into a reality sometime before 2054. When the politicians make their sentimental speeches about how far we’ve come since then, ask them where they stand on school choice, consumer-driven education, and other reforms. And then ask yourself which party is still living in 1954.

Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

Blacks Still Await Educational Equality

Blacks Still Await Educational Equality

Prosperous Pennsylvania Blueprint

Commonwealth Foundation has created a well-thought plan to save the state. Call it a Prosperous Pennsylvania Blueprint.  Below is the executive summary.  The complete report in the form of a pdf can be found here. For the record,  BillLawrenceOnline   most vehemently opposes  leasing the Turnpike, which is a public resource. Our suggestion is to make it a freeway eliminating traffic snarls and allowing for far more entrances and, especially, egresses to be built . This would increase its utility and improve traffic flow in Pennsylvania  far less expensively than building new roads.

It should further be noted that  expensive I-76 makes the Port of Philadelphia less competitive with New York/New Jersey — no tolls on I-80 after all — and tolls are a rather inefficient way of collecting revenue due to the cost of infrastructure and personnel.

And E-ZPass, frankly has too much of a hint of Big Brother for us.

Freedom is good.

By Elizabeth Stelle, Bob Dick, Jessica Barnett

Over the past six fiscal years, the commonwealth has spent more than it has taken in.  This fiscal gap is projected to widen as expenditures are on pace to grow faster than future revenue. Such a structural deficit poses a threat to the very foundations of economic growth and job creation that lead to prosperity for Pennsylvania’s taxpayers.

From 1970 to 2014, state government spending rose from $4 billion to nearly $67 billion—the highest in state history. Adjusting for inflation, that’s an increase of $3,163 per resident.

This decades-long pattern has placed an undue burden on the backs of state taxpayers.  Pennsylvania has the 10th highest state and local tax burden in the nation.  Meanwhile, state and local government debt has grown to a combined $125 billion—nearly $10,000 per resident.

High spending, taxes, and debt hinders Pennsylvania families’ opportunities for prosperity.  The commonwealth is near the bottom in most state rankings of economic climate and has lagged the rest of the nation in job and income growth for decades.

Unfortunately, the prospects for improvement are overshadowed by the challenges lawmakers face in balancing our state budget.

Recent budgets relied heavily on temporary federal stimulus dollars and one-time revenue sources, creating an imbalance between spending and revenue that has not yet been resolved. Spending on Public Welfare—the largest department in the commonwealth’s budget—continues to grow faster than taxpayers’ income.  Debt payments and prison costs continue to eat a large share of the state budget.

The most pressing threat to our fiscal house is a looming public pension crisis.  With $47 billion (and growing) in unfunded pension liabilities between the two statewide plans for public employees, state pension contributions will skyrocket by 143% in the next five years.

This report outlines reforms to help build a foundation for lasting prosperity.  Our analysis focuses on three categories of reform.

First we address short-term fiscal reforms to deal with challenges facing our state budget.  We also identify long-term reforms to bring spending in line with inflation while reducing the size of government and the burden on taxpayers.  Finally, we discuss policy reforms aimed at economic growth.

These recommendations include:

–Cut corporate welfare spending—including Redevelopment Assistance Capital Spending, the Commonwealth Financing Authority, and the Horse Race Development Fund—and targeted tax incentives in favor of tax relief for all.

–Utilize part of the legislative reserve fund.

–Reduce reliance on driver charges and general tax revenue to fund mass transit, and shift to greater user fees.

–Allow school districts to use fund reserves to invest in pension funds and receive a credit for their future pension costs.

–Privatize and utilize competitively-bid management contracts for “yellow-pages” government, including state liquor stores, the Pennsylvania Lottery and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

–Enact comprehensive welfare reform to slow the rate of spending growth while also reducing poverty.

–Enact long-term care reform to encourage private long-term care insurance and reduce reliance on government programs.

–Increase school choice programs to provide families with greater educational opportunities at a lower cost per student.

–Limit future increases in government spending to inflation plus population growth.

–Lower the overall tax burden, rather than relying on economic development programs, to encourage economic growth.

–Enact a Right-to-Work law to make Pennsylvania more competitive with other states in attracting business investment.

Combined, these reforms detail a blueprint for a stable fiscal house that will provide opportunities for prosperity for all Pennsylvania families.

 

Pennsylvania Toll Booth Prosperous Pennsylvania Blueprint

Prosperous Pennsylvania Blueprint has mostly great ideas but the Turnpike belongs to the people. Get rid of the toll booths.

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt

Courtesy of National Review

By Victor Davis Hanson

It doesn’t matter if you belong to the 0.1 percent as long as you say the right things.

The qualifications of a Tommy “Dude” Vietor or Ben Rhodes that placed them in the Situation Room during Obama-administration crises were not years of distinguished public service, military service, prior elected office, a string of impressive publications, an academic career, previous diplomatic postings, or any of the usual criteria that have placed others at the nerve center of America in times of crisis. Their trajectory was based on yeoman partisan PR work, and largely on being young, hip, and well connected politically. I don’t think either of these operatives has a particular worldview or competency that would promote the interests of the United States. But they do talk well, know the right people, and are hip. Again, they have no real expertise or even ideology other than that.

Al Gore is said to be our leading green activist, and the Steyer brothers the most preeminent green political donors. But do they really believe in reducing carbon emissions to cool down the planet?

Not really. The latter made much of their fortune in the sort of high-stakes speculations that the Left supposedly despises. Many of their financial payoffs derived from promoting coal burning abroad, of the sort most liberals wish to stop.

As for Gore, he cannot really believe in big green government or he would not have tried to beat the capital-gains tax hike when he peddled his failed cable network to a petrodollar-rich Al Jazeera, whose cash comes from the very sources of energy that Gore claims he hates. Do you make millions, and then in eleventh-century fashion repent so that you can enjoy them all the more? Gore certainly in the past has not lived modestly; the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore going — housing, travel, and tastes — is quite stunning. Both the Steyers and the Gores of our human comedy know that it is lucrative business to appear green, and that by doing so one can keep one’s personal life largely exempt from scrutiny in general and charges of hypocrisy in particular. For them, 21st-century liberalism is a useful badge, a fashion not unlike wearing good shades or having the right sort of cell phone.

The 1 percent fetish is also not really ideological. Elizabeth Warren, one of its greatest supporters, is not just a 1 percent but a 0.1 percent grandee. Her house, habits, household income, past corporate consulting, and net worth all reflect a desire for profits and refinement not accorded to most Americans. Her life is about as much a part of the 99.9 percent as she is Native American. She is not worried about welders getting some work on the Keystone Pipeline or farmworkers put out of their jobs in Mendota, Calif., over a baitfish.

Ditto Paul Krugman. He is eloquent about inequality and about the sort of insider privileges that give so much to so few. But nothing about his own circumstances suggests that he lives the life he professes, as opposed to professing abstractions that psychologically make the quite different life he lives more palatable. Certainly, Krugman’s liberalism means that few care that he once worked in the Reagan administration, that he was a paid adviser to Enron, or that he has just taken a part-time $225,000 post-retirement job at City University of New York — one that, at least initially, requires no teaching. Given what CUNY is said to pay its exploited part-timers, the university could have offered 75 courses with the salary it will be paying Krugman. Or, put another way, Professor Krugman will make the same as do 75 part-timers who each teach one class — and thus one class more than Krugman will teach. Bravo for Professor Krugman to have marketed himself so well and to have earned all the compensation that the market will bear — and too bad for the part-timers, who don’t understand market-based economics, where there are winners like Krugman and losers like themselves who can’t earn commensurate hanging-around money. One last question: Is part-time teacher Krugman going to study the inequality inherent in the modern university’s exploitation of part-time teachers?

Such hypocrisy taxes Krugman’s supporters to find ingenious arguments for the idea that noble ends justify almost any means, and so they argue that Krugman’s advocacy for research into income equality trumps this minor embarrassment, or that he can be very rich and still fight the 1 percent, or that the salary in the metrosexual world of the Boston–New York–Washington corridor is not all that high. Of course, the CUNY billet is likely just a small stream that feeds into Krugman’s other sizable income rivers. Indeed, he more likely belongs not just to the 1 percent, but to the same 0.1 percent as Senator Warren, which he so castigates. When President Obama exclaimed that at some point one needs to know when one has made enough money, Krugman would have agreed. He could now put that agreement into action by donating his salary to double the meager wages of 75 part-timers, who, unlike himself, are contracted professors who really do teach and are not “generously” compensated.

Does the NAACP stand as our watchdog over racism? In theory, yes; in fact, not so much. The L.A. branch was quite content to overlook Donald Sterling’s sterling racialism, given his donations. Sterling apparently thought that supporting the local NAACP either was not antithetical to his racist sloppy talk and rental practices, or was a wise investment in progressive insurance.

Al Sharpton receiving a “person of the year” award from the same branch of the NAACP is no less absurd than Donald Sterling’s “lifetime-achievement award” — given that Sharpton is on record as an anti-Semite, homophobe, inciter of riot, former FBI informant, tax delinquent, and convicted defamer of a district attorney. But the NAACP brand nowadays functions much like our green culture, as a sort of way to display correct coolness. It surely would not go after Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonya Sotomayor — or Barack Obama — for either using racialist speech or denigrating others on the basis of race or tribe. Such a fact is widely accepted because it is just as widely assumed that the NAACP has become something fossilized, like Betamax in its waning days, as it existed for a bit longer because it had once thrived.

Too many modern liberal fetishes are predicated on the medieval notion of exemption, and should not be taken as anything much other than useful pretensions or smart career moves — something like joining the Masonic lodge in the 1920s in small-town America. Charter schools are bad, and troubled public schools are noble, but the coastal elites, whether at Sidwell Friends or the Menlo School, assume that they should not sacrifice their children on the altar of their own ideology.

Diversions of Central Valley canal water from agriculture to fish are good, but diversions of Hetch Hetchy canal water from San Francisco to fish are bad. Dreaming about salmon jumping in a hot Central Valley river is a lot easier than bathing with recycled grey water three times a week.

Concern for the Sierra toad and frog should stop logging-road and mountain development, but incinerating fauna with solar mirrors or grinding up eagles and hawks in wind turbines is the necessary price of green membership.

The Koch brothers have allegedly polluted politics with their ill-gotten cash; the Steyer brothers have not with their coal money. The revolving door is what right-wing operators do, not what a Tommy Vietor or Peter Orszag does. Affirmative action is necessary to stop “old boy” hiring and power wielding, but the sort of incestuous D.C. relationships that the Carneys or the Rhodes brothers have (Jay Carney’s wife, Claire Shipman, is a senior correspondent for ABC News; Ben Rhodes’s brother, David, is the president of CBS News) are not what we are talking about.

The issues per se are not so important. No prominent progressive really believes that his children belong in a public school with the “other.” He does not wish to live in an integrated neighborhood in order to promote his notion of high-density, non-suburban racial assimilation. A Che poster does not mean you want to live somewhere like Venezuela and wait in line for toilet paper.

The liberal is not immune from the material allurements of the 1 percent. Whizzing off on a private jet or climbing into a huge black ten-mile-a-gallon SUV limo is no problem. You do not necessarily denounce all racist stereotyping, given that sometimes attacking friendly bigots could be a headache. Taking the Google bus with like kind instead of the messy public bus or the uncertainties of the commuter train does not mean you are against mass transit for “them.” You surely don’t want the Coastal Commission enforcing beach-access rights for hoi polloi when who knows how many of the 99 percent wish to walk right by your deck in Malibu. It would be like ruining your beach view with a wind farm.

Liberalism offers a wise investment for a politician, a celebrity, an academic, or a journalist, by letting him take out inexpensive insurance against a politically incorrect slip of the tongue. Donald Sterling almost achieved exemption by his donations to Democratic candidates and the NAACP and his trial-lawyer billions; he lost it by keeping his ossified Republican registration while being an old, sick white guy who said the sort of reprehensible racist things that one hears sometimes in bits and pieces from some NBA players.

So, in medieval fashion, liberalism serves as a powerful psychological crutch: You can be noble in the abstract to assuage worries of not being so at all in the concrete. It adds a hip flourish to the otherwise mundane pursuit of power, lucre, and influence that plays out on the golf course, at the Malibu party, in front-row seats at NBA games, or in the tony Martha’s Vineyard summer home. About three decades ago, sipping a fine wine at a Napa bed and breakfast, or getting the right Italian-granite and teak flooring, became a force multiplier of being loudly liberal.

If a liberal has a really nice Chevy Chase estate or Upper West Side brownstone or Tahoe summer home, it is important to sound all the more liberal. Or maybe it is just the opposite: You cannot sound credibly liberal unless you first have the correct liberal address and square footage. The joke is on us. Having lots of stuff and lots of money, while deriding the system that provides it, is perverse, but perverse in a postmodern sense: You fools love the free market, where you didn’t do too well; we whose parents or selves did very well in it don’t like it all that much. How postmodern — like guffawing that lots of smoke came out of that Gulfstream ride, or lecturing about inequality from Rancho Mirage or the back nine at Augusta.

We are told that the Kennedys, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, and others like them are noble because they vote against their class interests. But they really do not; they vote for them. Liberalism is now the domain of the elite, and antithetical to the aspirations of the upper middle class that lacks the capital and tastes of the 0.1 percent. The higher the taxes, the more numerous the regulations, the greater the redistribution, so all the more the elite liberal distances himself from those less cool who breathe down his neck, and the less guilty he feels about the growing divide between him and the poor he worries about, but never worries about enough to associate with.

Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

 

 

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt

 

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt

Democrats Attack First Amendment

By The Editors of National Review

Displeased with recent legal victories in which free speech has prevailed over limitations on political speech imposed by Congress, Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), Mark Udall (D., Colo.), and other Senate Democrats have introduced a constitutional amendment that would not only set aside the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence and invest Congress with virtually unlimited power to regulate the political activism of private citizens, alone or in groups, but would also give the federal government and the states the power to shut down newspapers, television stations, and radio networks that displease them. This is an all-out assault on the First Amendment and an act of vandalism against the Constitution.

The amendment is being put forward purportedly as a means of enabling campaign-finance regulations and limiting the allegedly corrupting power of money in politics. It is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s free-speech rulings in Citizens United and McCutcheon , cases that resulted from the federal government’s trying in the first instance to ban a film critical of a presidential candidate and in the second instance to prevent a private citizen from making small donations — in the symbolic amount of $1,776, to be precise — to twelve candidates he supported. Both times the Court sided with free speech, and both times Democrats howled in outrage.

American law has long held that the right to free speech, the right to free association, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances are to be read broadly, and that the exercise of those rights necessitates a hands-off approach to the means by which they are exercised. For example, the right to freedom of the press implies the right to own or operate a press, and any attempt to confiscate or control the machinery and equipment by which freedom of the press is exercised constitutes an attack on freedom of the press itself.

In the Citizens United dispute, those who would subjugate free speech to government power argued that corporations do not enjoy the same free-speech rights as individuals, and that the film in question, having been financed by a nonprofit corporation, should not be protected by the First Amendment. The problem with that line of reasoning is that American law does not distinguish between media corporations and other kinds of corporations; if Citizens United does not enjoy First Amendment protection, then neither does the New York Times Company or Penguin Books.

The Democrats’ proposed amendment would allow Congress to regulate not only money expenditures on behalf of political candidates and causes but also “in kind” contributions. Under the Democrats’ reasoning, an editorial endorsement from the Washington Post , the daily pronunciations of pundits on MSNBC or Fox News, or Barnes & Noble’s deciding to energetically market a political book that catches its attention would, as in-kind assistance to a political cause, fall under the same regulatory shadow as the advocacy of any other group. The Democrats say that this is not their intention, and maybe it isn’t, but the amendment they are contemplating would enable precisely that, in effect repealing the First Amendment.

Congress has some power to regulate formal political campaigns, as Justice Roberts and other First Amendment defenders have noted. The purpose of campaign-finance laws is to prevent bribery, quid pro quo corruption. But the limits that were struck down in McCutcheon had nothing to do with how large a check a donor may write to a candidate; they had to do with how many candidates a donor may write a check to, and the Court ruled, correctly, that there was no constitutional basis for limiting that. Citizens United was not even about donations to a candidate, but whether private citizens could pool their money to criticize a public figure. Free speech won that time, too, and that has infuriated Democrats. Those who make the simpleminded argument that money and speech are different things should consider that a press of the sort necessary to compete with the New York Times costs hundreds of millions of dollars and that Dan Rather’s attempts to sabotage the election of George W. Bush were worth more in dollar terms than anything that Charles and David Koch or George Soros have contemplated.

Restrictions on what citizens may and may not do to advocate a candidate or a political position are fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment, the purpose of which is to protect political advocacy, and with the American notion of liberty. Such restrictions serve no purpose other than to let incumbents control the terms on which political contests are fought. Democrats have no principled objection to what they denounce, when convenient, as “big money” — see their relationships with the American Federation of Teachers or Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire who has promised to deliver $100 million to those who support global-warming legislation. What they object to, rather, is money moving through channels that do not confer advantages upon Democrats. The Left is comfortably ensconced in the unions, the public sector, the educational bureaucracies, and the traditional media, and groups such as Citizens United and True the Vote and thousands of others create new competition in the political marketplace. This amendment is not about cleaning up elections — it’s about the Democrats’ seeking to lock their critics out of the public square.

A constitutional amendment is a perfectly legitimate means of shaping public policy, and a number of them have caught conservatives’ attention over the years. The question here is not the idea of a constitutional amendment but the content of this proposed amendment, which would place virtually all political activism — and most political speech of any consequence — under federal regulation. It is a cynical and dangerous attack on the First Amendment, and should be met not only with resistance but with contempt — for the amendment itself, and for the sort of power-mad men who would propose it.

Democrats Attack First Amendment

Democrats Attack First Amendment

NBA Hypocrisy Reprised

By Chris Freind

He lunged, grabbed his boss and violently choked him. After being restrained and told to leave, the man returned, attacked his victim yet again by punching him in the face, and threatened to kill him. It was just the latest in a string of serious incidents involving the employee.

How much jail time did this violent offender receive? None.

Incomprehensibly, he wasn’t even fired, and for good reason: He played in that bastion of hypocrisy, the NBA.

Let’s get this straight. Latrell Sprewell, who played for the Golden State Warriors at the time of his assault, received a suspension and fine, with the NBA sending the message that a player physically attacking his coach will merely get slapped on the fingers. Compare that with the punishment handed out to Donald Sterling, the race-mongering owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, who gets banned from the NBA for life, fined millions, and may be forced to sell the team — for making incredibly racist comments during a private conversation, which, if Sterling didn’t give his consent to have recorded, may have been illegally obtained.

In handing down Sterling’s harsh sentence, the league has shown its immense hypocrisy, allowing criminal acts, but banning legal — no matter how repugnant — activity. Welcome to Amerika.

The biggest irony is that race relations, not to mention freedom, will take a hit because of the NBA’s actions. Consider:

1. First, let’s state the obvious: In the most elegant parlance, Donald Sterling is a scumbag. He has an unsavory past, possessing what clearly seems to be a discriminatory mindset. As a real estate mogul, he received a record $2.75 million fine for racial discrimination in renting. Sterling could even have faced criminal charges. But harboring racist tendencies, especially in private, isn’t a crime.

2. With such a checkered history, why didn’t the NBA address these issues over the years? It would be one thing if Sterling had been censored repeatedly, and this latest incident was the final straw, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Unfathomably, the NBA claimed it had no real knowledge of Sterling’s past.

3. The spectre of people willfully accepting their privacy rights being violated is terrifying. When commentators and politicians use phrases like, “There is no more privacy,” we might as well hang it up, for if that’s the case, America’s uniqueness is gone. Respect for freedom of speech and privacy rights — even for the most reviled — has set America apart from every other nation in history. If those things dissipate, the world’s last beacon of light will be extinguished. And at that point, we actually become worse than countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, because we had greatness, but voluntarily gave it away, whereas those places have always been disdainful of individual rights.

4. Or — and this is by far the biggest issue — does an “offending” player or owner, who happens to be a particular ethnicity, get a free pass? If so, the NBA, and those cheering Sterling’s ban, should at least have the guts to state that such a double standard is acceptable.

It’s great for leaders and the media to publicly chastise Sterling — as they should — stating that bigotry and ignorance won’t be tolerated. But how many of these folks are consistent? How many cut off all ties to Jesse Jackson when he disparaged Jews by calling them “Hymies” and referring to New York City as “Hymietown,” or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s pastor, after his virulent racist and anti-American outbursts? Not many. Both still operate free of protest and condemnation.

Incredibly, one “sports expert” told CBS that even though the “N” word is often used during NBA games (virtually always by black players) the league shouldn’t try to stop such language or levy penalties. “The ‘N’ word is always going to have a negative image associated with it, but it doesn’t compare to the racist remarks by Sterling,” stated Ronald Oswalt, CEO of Sports Marketing Experts, which operates one of the nation’s largest NBA blogs. “Being around NBA players, the ‘N’ word is just second nature and habit for some of them.“

What they’re actually saying is that certain language (the N-word) should be tolerated for a particular group of people.

Sorry. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That apologist mentality is just warped. Sure, there are varying degrees of racism, but ultimately, racism is racism. You can’t excuse and justify it in some cases, but not others. Doing so will never move society ahead. Never.

The quickest way to widen the gulf between races is for leaders on both sides to espouse blatant hypocrisy, picking and choosing which racist comments — and by whom they are said — to criticize. In the same way the “average” American increasingly believes politicians favor the well-connected, resulting in an all-time high mistrust of government, selectively meting out condemnation for racial incidents only builds a powder keg of resentment. People may not agree with how something is done, but if they feel it is done equally and without favoritism, they can live with it. That’s the whole point of the Equal Protection Clause — the law is applied equally. When that concept falters, so do people’s inclination to work together.

5. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is attempting to gain the support of three-quarters of NBA owners to force Sterling to sell the Clippers. Two points:

If the NBA has any guts, every owner voting against Sterling should personally put up a share of the team’s $575 million value, and, upon buying it, donate all the proceeds to nonprofit organizations fighting racism (in all its forms) and advocating fairness in housing, and establish scholarship funds for minority children. Following that, they should sell the team to the highest bidder, with the proceeds again going to charity. Of course, they won’t do that.

» Assuming the NBA gets the votes, and that Sterling fights the decision in court, the NBA will almost certainly settle, for good reason. Sterling’s lawyers will, during the discovery phase of the case, uncover many skeletons in the closets of hypocritical owners. They should be mindful of the proverb, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

This issue is infinitely bigger than Donald Sterling and the NBA. It is about how we view each other as Americans, and more important, as people. It is about how we tackle difficult issues, and how solutions can only be realized if all are treated equally, with special privilege for none. It’s time, once and for all, to stop seeing things in black and white, and start living in a colorblind society, since we are all members of the only “race” that matters — the human race.

 

NBA Hypocrisy Reprised

Giving Vapors

By The Editors of National Review

The FDA is proposing broad new regulations on the sale of so-called electronic cigarettes, which are devices that provide their users with a jolt of nicotine in the form of vapor. The sole sensible regulation contemplated by the FDA — forbidding sales to minors — is itself superfluous, such sales already being forbidden in every state.

Every state but Oregon, that is. In a strange little twist, the FDA’s proposed regulation may end up enabling the very business it is intended to restrict: Oregon does not specifically prohibit the sale of e-cigarettes to minors (which is probably a legislative oversight) but rather has categorically prohibited the sale of such products until such a time as the FDA should issue regulations.

E-cigarettes are the new Public Enemy No. 1 for anti-tobacco and anti-smoking activists, even though they contain no tobacco and produce no smoke. States and localities have been aggressive about policing the sale and use of them (some, such as New York City, rather too aggressive), but the nation’s self-appointed health police will be satisfied with nothing less than national action against the menace of silly-looking nicotine vaporizers. The health effects of vaporizers relative to cigarettes are the subject of some debate; some doctors suggest them to patients who wish to quit smoking. But the proposed FDA rules go well beyond health and safety concerns. They would prohibit, among other things, the sale of flavored nicotine vaporizing fluids, on the theory that bubblegum-flavored nicotine vapor will act as a gateway drug and our kindergartens soon will be full of toddlers puffing away on Cohibas during recess. This is an example of the FDA’s being confused about its mission, which is to ensure the safety of products that are sold to the public, not to decide which products the public should prefer. Smoking is unhealthy, but it is not the role of the FDA to substitute its own judgment, or the judgment of anti-smoking activists, for private judgment. Likewise, proposed regulations that would ban the offer of free product samples to adults, censor advertisements, and restrict the channels of retail sales are not intended to make the product safer but to discourage its use.

Other proposed FDA regulations, such as requiring manufacturers to register with the federal government and to comply with an onerous federal product-review process, will be quietly welcomed by the larger firms in the industry, because they will help to clear the field of competition from smaller firms that cannot afford the high costs of compliance.

Regulation is generally handled more sensibly at the state and local level, but we federalists and localists must appreciate that some of our states and cities are run by fanatics. On Tuesday of next week, new rules in New York City will ban the use of e-cigarettes wherever smoking is banned — which is effectively every public space in the city short of street corners — even though the traditional health rationale for smoking restrictions does not apply in the case of vaporizers. New York in May will raise the age of majority to 21 as far as tobacco and nicotine products are concerned. The city’s nannies are blissfully immune to the irony that e-cigarettes gained popularity in part as a response to restrictions on traditional tobacco products, including their banishment from bars and restaurants.

The FDA is also proposing regulations on cigars, which the Western world has managed to consume without the oversight of Washington since at least the 15th century.

Nearly three-fourths of the population of this country not only does without smoking but has never smoked, according to the American Lung Association. The campaign of public education about the health effects of smoking has been won and then some. But the nation’s nannies must have a vice to decry, and e-cigarettes give them the vapors.

 

BillLawrenceOnline.com Giving Vapors

 

 

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Penn State Should Fire New President

By Chris Freind

It is a lurid tale.

A prestigious university, and its incredibly storied football program, is caught up in a sexual-abuse scandal. Even worse, an iconic football figure might have been unduly protected to the detriment of the victims.

Despite initial hopes that the situation would resolve itself quickly and quietly — sparing the university from excoriating criticism — the opposite occurred. What began as a trickle of articles snowballed into hard-hitting exposes published by world-renowned media outlets. The floodgates, flung wide open, unleashed a torrent of new stories as previously undisclosed information continued to surface.

Presiding during such a scandal, regardless of culpability, would surely make any university president beleaguered, tarnishing his reputation. So the last place on Earth to expect that president to show up would be the only other university with a bigger sex scandal on its hands, right?

Wrong. Welcome to Penn State.

In competing for the Most Moronic Move Of The Decade award, that’s exactly what Penn State’s Board of Trustees did by hiring Florida State’s Eric Barron as its new president.

It was on Barron’s watch that the controversy currently engulfing Florida State began. In December 2012, an FSU student claimed that she was raped, identifying freshman quarterback sensation Jameis Winston as the perpetrator.

In what had to be one of the worst investigations in history, the Tallahassee police dropped the ball in every way. The lead detective, Scott Angulo, had previously worked for the Seminole Boosters — a nonprofit organization with $150 million in assets that not only helps fund FSU athletics but partially pays the salaries of the football coaching staff and, incredibly, roughly a quarter of Barron’s $602,000 salary. Disturbingly, Angulo waited weeks before interviewing Winston, and it took him two months to file his initial report. Evidence was lost, DNA was never obtained, security video from a bar was never reviewed, witnesses were not aggressively tracked down, and the case was closed without the victim even being notified.

How bad were the police? Prosecutor William Meggs said it best: “They just missed all the basic fundamental stuff that you are supposed to do.”

The bumbling police investigation forced Meggs to close the case for lack of evidence. No charges were filed.

But just as bad was Florida State’s actions, or, more appropriately, lack of action.

According to an investigative report in the New York Times:

“University administrators, in apparent violation of federal law, did not promptly investigate either the rape accusation or (a) witness’s admission that he had videotaped part of the encounter … records show that Florida State’s athletic department knew about the rape accusation early on, in January 2013, when the assistant athletic director called the police to inquire about the case. Even so, the university did nothing about it, allowing Mr. Winston to play the full season without having to answer any questions. After the championship game, in January 2014, university officials asked Mr. Winston to discuss the case, but he declined on advice of his lawyer.”

And now, Florida State is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for possible violations in how it handled the situation.

Does any of this stuff sound vaguely familiar?

Let’s review. It took over a year for Florida State to investigate a serious accusation against a star athlete — conveniently after winning the lucrative national championship — and, in doing so, potentially valuable video evidence was lost. Now, the university is under federal investigation. And all of this occurred during the presidency of Eric Barron.

And yet Penn State hired him? Are we missing something here?

Whether Winston committed a crime, or the sex was consensual, as he claims, now can never be proven. Above all, what should have mattered most to the Penn State trustees — acting in the best interests of students, alumni, professors, fans, and, most important, the victims of Jerry Sandusky — was that Eric Barron was the worst choice to lead Penn State, and should never have been in contention for the presidency.

Even assuming that Barron had no knowledge of Florida State’s mistakes, still not in a million years should he have been considered a candidate. To make him one, and hire him after an “exhaustive” search and vetting process, truly ranks as one of the all-time “what were they thinking?” moments.

And by the way, if the New York Times could discover so much information about the university’s handling of the situation, why couldn’t Penn State’s search team do the same? How exhaustive could the vetting have been? Choosing Barron is like nominating Chris Christie to head up a National Bridge Commission. Hello!

But don’t forget how out-of-touch the Penn State Board of Trustees has been, firing Joe Paterno over the phone (no matter how one feels about Paterno, that is not how you treat someone who gave so much over so many decades), and willingly accepting the egregiously unfair NCAA sanctions without even a whimper of protest.

With all of the other college presidents, chief executives, and otherwise baggage-free candidates throughout the country, the only person the trustees could find to lead Penn State out of its horrendous scandal was someone who was in command during a high-profile sex scandal?

Generals, presidents and CEOs are clearly responsible when things go wrong, regardless of their involvement. The buck stops with them. Period. That’s the price of leadership, and all leaders know that when they reach that level.

In hiring Barron, Penn State is risking a monumental backlash should a high-profile sexual abuse scandal occur within the PSU community. What’s fair and accurate is irrelevant; perception is reality, and the perception among many would be that Penn State didn’t do enough to foster an abuse-free environment. And many would blame Barron based on how the events at Florida State were handled.

And God forbid, what happens if federal investigators determine that President Barron or his top executives had knowledge of the Winston affair but buried it? The embarrassment for the Penn State community would be astronomical.

So here’s what Penn State should do: Dump Barron. Immediately. Given that he doesn’t take the reins until May, it wouldn’t be a huge deal. By coming clean that they made a mistake, the trustees would actually earn the admiration and support of millions for their transparency and honesty. And Penn State could finally find the right leader to guide it out of its minefield.

It is imperative that Penn State trustees realize one inarguable principle: the university is now, and will forever be, different. It will always be under the spotlight, scrutinized — sometimes unfairly — more than any other university on the planet. That is not opinion, but a cold, hard fact.

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Ignoring Minority Rights Means Confrontation

By David French

I deeply respect the rule of law. As an attorney who practices in federal courts across the nation, I respect the rulings of those courts (indeed, much of my career is spent securing rulings from federal courts to protect individual liberties) and — having reviewed the pleadings in Bundy’s case — I do not fault the courts’ orders. John Hinderaker is right , “Legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”
 
But, as Hinderaker notes, that’s not the end of the story. I’d urge you to read Hinderaker’s entire analysis and don’t want to repeat it here. Instead, let me back up a bit and place the Bundy controversy in the larger context of America’s urban/rural divide and the resulting polarization of the increasing powerlessness of rural America.

On March 21, the Wall Street Journal published a prescient piece highlighting geography rather than ideology as a key driver in America’s growing partisan divisions.
 
Yes, there are key differences in ideology, but those ideological divisions are nurtured and cultivated according to where we live. When I lived in Midtown, Manhattan, or Center City, Philadelphia, the culture was dramatically different from our current home base in Maury County, Tennessee. And the differences were not just confined to culture, but also included perceived political and economic interests.
 
While rural America literally sustains life for urban America, many urbanites dislike large-scale farming (this parody  is worth seeing), would like to see the rest of the country essentially transformed into a nature preserve, and argue that to the extent land is “used,” it should be used for selectively-defined “renewable” purposes, like solar energy or wind farms. The result — when urban regions become dominant — has been amply chronicled by Victor Davis Hanson and many others: rural regions increasingly serve urban ones and do so under comprehensive urban regulatory schemes that disrupt lives, destroy livelihoods, and lead to widespread frustration and despair.
 
And all of it is legal.
 
As government grows ever-larger, majority rule becomes more consequential for minority populations. The regulatory state grows, and rural Americans are left with little recourse. The courts won’t overturn regulatory actions absent a clearly-identified liberty interest (with the law granting wide discretion to federal agencies), in many states legislatures are dominated by urban voting blocs, and — particularly in the West — massive federal ownership of land means the voice of the local farmer or landowner is diluted into meaninglessness within the larger national debate.
 
With few options left within conventional politics, rural Americans are beginning to contemplate more dramatic measures, such as the state secession movements  building in Colorado, Maryland, California, and elsewhere. The more viable state secession movements aim to limit urban control by literally removing rural counties from their states and forming new states around geographic regions of common interests.
 
But until there’s a long-term solution, we may very well see more Bundy Ranch moments, where individual Americans (and their allies) simply refuse to consent to laws that destroy their way of life for the sake of regulations that provide no perceivable benefit to others. (I can only imagine my frustration if I had to end a more-than-century-old family lifestyle, arguably for the sake of a turtle that no one will see).
 
The long-term solution is simple to conceptualize but difficult to accomplish: de-escalate the stakes of our political disputes by limiting the power of government over American lives. Americans have always had profound differences, and we live together with those differences when victory for one side doesn’t mean inflicting real harm on the losers. But when victory for one side means the end of a way of life for the losers, instability can and will result.
 
I hope and pray that the dangerous standoff at Bundy Ranch was an aberration and not a harbinger, but until we can limit government’s power, I fear that respect for law will increasingly give way to contempt for the lawmakers.

David French originally published this at National Review.

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Crony Capitalism Crushes America

By Chris Freind

“We actually save money by doing this … natural gas is the equivalent of about $1.50 per gallon. The last time I looked, gas was still over $3 per gallon. The payback period on these trucks is going to be three or four years and our trucks usually last 10 years.”

So stated Aqua America Chairman Nick DeBenedictis as he recently touted the company’s planned acquisition of compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered vehicles.

He’s right about saving money, for two reasons:

A. As the math shows, CNG is considerably cheaper than diesel ($4 per gallon) and gasoline ($3.70 per gallon), so switching to CNG vehicles is a sound business decision.

B. More significantly, taxpayers helped foot the bill, to the tune of $225,000. Yep, those Aqua vehicles, as well as 14 vans purchased last year ($86,000 in taxpayer funds), were partially paid for by Other People’s Money. Namely, ours.

Saving money by having a capital investment pay off is one thing, but achieving that “feat” because of an outright gift from taxpayers is quite another. There are many innocuous-sounding terms for this type of government largesse: Grants, economic development, opportunity zones. But let’s call it what it really is: Corporate welfare.

Aqua America is by no means alone. Numerous corporations throughout the state are receiving funds to convert their vehicles. Twenty million dollars are being allocated through the Natural Gas Energy Development Program (funded by the impact fee imposed on natural gas companies), and another $8 million via the Alternative Fuels Incentive Grant Program.

But why? Why are Pennsylvanians forking over millions to profitable, free-market companies?

Consider:

1. This is nothing new. Presidents, governors and legislators, both Republican and Democrat, are complicit in handing massive amounts of money to private businesses. Often, their political coffers swell after doing so — and their post-political careers seem to become instantly brighter. Quid pro quo or not, the appearance of impropriety leaves an indelibly negative impression upon the pubic.

2. The money doled out to corporations, political friends and special interests could, by definition, be used for more productive purposes. We all complain about potholes and deplorable roads, but the government answer is, “There just isn’t enough money to fix all the roads.” Wrong. There is. And plenty would be left over for other projects. But when tax revenue is wasted on propping up businesses, everything else suffers.

Take the transportation bill passed last year. Despite Pennsylvania already spending $71,000 per road mile (11th highest), and exceeding $660 per person (more than 26 other states), Gov. Corbett and the state Legislature walloped Pennsylvanians with the highest gas taxes in the country to pay for new roads because they chose to keep spending money where it had no place being spent.

Maybe if the government hadn’t bailed out a shipyard to build ships with no buyers, spent taxpayer money to build a baseball stadium for the Yankees’ AAA affiliate, wasted millions on legal fees to stop the NCAA sanctions against Penn State (after the governor had agreed to those sanctions), and dished out huge consulting fees trying to outsource the lottery to a foreign firm, to name a few, there would be enough money to actually fix our roads and bridges without bending citizens over a barrel.

3. Before doling out cash to private sector companies to buy natural gas vehicles, it would have made more sense to put that money toward the massive state fleet, from police cars to dump trucks. But that hasn’t happened at anywhere close to the pace it should have, with Corbett saying it will take seven to 10 years.

4. We have come to expect reckless spending from our elected officials. All talk “fiscal responsibility” on the campaign trail, but the vast majority fall in line once they arrive at the capital. They play the go-along, get-along game and bring home the bacon as a way of ensuring re-election.

But far and away the biggest hypocrites are business leaders. For the most part, they are politically active Republicans, often deriding government interference in the marketplace. “Get government off our backs,” is their constant refrain to the pols. Yet, they seldom practice what they preach.

When there is a bill that could benefit them or their industry, they lobby hard for passage (such as the car dealers’ successful effort getting Chris Christie to derail Tesla Motors). When there is a regulation that would give them a competitive advantage, they advocate for it. And yes, when there is government handout, they are the first in line at the trough.

If a company, or entire industry, cannot make it on its own, that’s life. The strong shall survive and the free market will rid itself of outdated and mismanaged entities unable to do what it takes to be profitable. But government should not be Santa Claus, and has no place interfering in a company’s fortunes — or misfortunes.

Conversely, if a business is well-managed, it has no need for corporate welfare. Sure, business leaders can make justifications about how well the money will be spent or how many jobs it will help create. But as we all know — business leaders included — it’s still just a handout, nothing more.

Where does it end? That’s the problem; it doesn’t, and we are all paying dearly for the “let me get mine” mentality. From the $1.2 trillion annual giveaway to Wall Street firms (“quantitative easing,” whatever that means) that simply help the rich become wealthy (funded by imaginary funny money, to boot) to freely giving taxpayer money to companies buying new trucks, government has become the go-to source for cash.

It’s no coincidence that federal, state and municipal debt levels are at all-time highs, and that basic government services, from trash collection to education, are being curtailed or eliminated. Yet, the connected still have their hand out, always wanting more — and getting it.

The Piper is calling, but business and government keep turning a blind eye and a deaf ear. And when it finally dawns on them that the problem needs to be fixed, it will be akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

As Thomas Jefferson stated, “We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest, (but) if (the people) becomes inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.”

Wrong tense, Mr. Jefferson.

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