Category: Guest Authors

Scientific Doom Via Self Satisfaction

By Jim Vanore

In science, self-satisfaction is death. — Jacques Monod

As Features Editor for the Cape May County Herald during the housing boom of the early 2000s, I assigned a story on lumber alternatives for new housing construction to a relatively new assistant.

Several days after I assigned the story, he turned in (what he thought was) the finished product. His 1,200 words praised a new, sustainable wood source that was not widely available and used by only three builders in the entire county—all of whom he had interviewed for the article.

“Why,” I asked, “are there only three companies using this material?”

“it’s just too expensive,” he replied quite assertively.

“Then you should state that in the article,” I said. “Plus, I see where you only interviewed three people—in fact, the only three that use this lumber.” I handed the paper back to him. “Now get me some interviews with contractors that don’t use the material, and find out why. In essence, get their side of this.”

The kid was damn mad about this. “How many more contractors do you want?” he demanded.

“Well,” I said in my best avuncular tone, “you got three that use the stuff; now get three that do not.”

As he continued to silently stare at what he apparently thought was his completely unreasonable editor, I told him what all journalists should know, but most of whom must constantly be reminded: “A newspaper’s job is to be objective,” I said. “Give both sides of the story, if you will. When we stop allowing both sides of an argument to plead their case, we lose credibility.”

He added two more interviews with contractors that had decidedly opposite views to the first three, making the overall article (somewhat) more impartial. But for the rest of his time under my supervision, he held my proclivity for fact-finding against me.

He wasn’t a journalist; never really let himself develop into one. You can study journalism, you can be trained as a journalist, but unless you develop a journalist’s heart…

Having spent my early grammar school years within walking distance of Independence Hall, my journalist’s heart was nurtured on the history of the United States. That heart experienced its first cardiovascular contractions when I learned of what went on at those antique desks inside the hall (we could sit in them in the early 1950s) back in 1776. It experienced a shot of adrenaline when I studied the Constitution a short time later, and settled into a steady rhythm by the time I read—and understood—the Bill of Rights.

But just as with physical cardiac health, you need a journalistic EKG once in a while to make sure you’re not suffering from arrhythmia. The Philadelphia Inquirer provided me with an unscheduled checkup on page A27 of their June 13 edition. In an article unabashedly titled, “Don’t give equal time to climate-change deniers,” the author, an environmental professor at a local college, proposes that the media close off any further discussion because, he wrote: “There is only one side of this story.”

He—like my young editorial assistant mentioned above—displayed his indignation at an unnamed news organization that aired a segment on global warming which presented those who said we should be concerned, and those who held the opposite view. Imagine! They actually presented both sides of an argument!

Scientific Doom Via Self Satisfaction is Excerpted from Good Writers Block

Let Us Be Isolationists

By Chris Freind

 

The great ship moved silently through the water.

Actually, it didn’t, as a 60,000-ton, 1,000-foot-long aircraft carrier does nothing quietly. In fact, the approach of such a warship is known far in advance. So as Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov recently entered Dutch waters — an overt show of force, given that its normal route would have taken her around Ireland — defense protocol was to scramble a Dutch naval vessel to “escort” the foreign ship until it passed. In addition to sending the unmistakable message that all potential threats will be met aggressively, shadowing a foreign ship allows for invaluable intelligence-gathering.

But there was one small problem.

The Dutch couldn’t find a single navy ship. Not one.

Incomprehensibly, they didn’t have a coast guard vessel either — inexcusable considering that the Netherlands possesses a strategically crucial coastline. So instead, it sent up an old propeller plane with zero surveillance capability to greet the Kuznetsov. That sound you may have heard was the Russian crew’s hysterical laughter.

Why the embarrassing response? Because the Dutch retired their entire fleet of dedicated maritime patrol aircraft 12 years ago, and the Royal Netherlands Navy was unavailable — not because the fleet was dispatched around the world protecting shipping lanes or fighting piracy, but because in reality it no longer exists, having been massively shrunk due to defense budget cuts.

But the problems of the Dutch — par for the course for most NATO countries — should come as a shock to no one. And it all boils down to appalling European ungratefulness and American stupidity.

NATO rules stipulate that member nations dedicate at least 2 percent of gross domestic product every year to defense spending, yet only four countries met that requirement last year, with the NATO average being 1.6 percent (which has been declining for decades). The United States, on the other hand, spent 4.1 percent, carrying the water for all the slacker countries, as it always does. And to what end?

Our “allies” skimp on defense so they can gleefully fund all their socialist pet projects, knowing full well that the American security guarantee remains staunchly in place. Their “let the Americans do the heavy lifting while we party it up” mentality is the ultimate slap in the face, a giant middle finger to the nation whose Greatest Generation saved their hides (and the world) from the most brutal regimes in history, during both World War II and the Cold War.

And we have only ourselves to blame for perpetuating this humiliation — something that needs to be rectified.

We don’t need Europe the way we did during the Cold War, so it’s time to stop our carte blanche policy and step back. The Europeans need to step up to the plate — for once — and start defending themselves. We should nullify outdated treaties from a different era and remove the bulk of our forces, leaving the continent to their own devices. In addition to weaning Europe off America’s never-ending (and unappreciated) generosity, it would be a boon to our economy, as billions would be spent at home rather than in foreign economies. The same goes for South Korea, where thousands of troops serve only a symbolic, albeit expensive, function.

Instead of having troops stationed in over 130 countries, our leaders should use smarter domestic policy that would result in less blood and treasure needlessly expended overseas.

And a prime example is Iraq.

In response to the recent turmoil in Iraq, a die-hard Republican remarked, “Obama is losing the Iraq victory that George W. Bush won.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, while Bush spearheaded the war effort, scores of Democrats went along by voting for the resolution. Second, and infinitely more important, there was never was a victory to lose. The chaos now engulfing Iraq, which threatens the entire Middle East, is the predictable outcome of a massive bipartisan failure, one predicated on the mentality of being the “world’s policeman.”

The intervention in Iraq should never have occurred, but since America’s modus operandi seems to be “shoot first and analyze later,” it was inevitable. Now, with thousands of Americans dead or maimed, and trillions spent, there is nothing to show for the Iraq War but anarchy and unspeakable brutality.

Ironically, America serving as the Middle East’s policeman has created a nation of lawlessness, a breeding ground for the planet’s most evil. Before the invasion, sectarian violence and car bombs were nonexistent in Iraq, as Saddam Hussein kept everything in check. A brutal dictator, to be sure, but one who hadn’t threatened or harmed America. Yet we removed him with no regard to consequences, expecting a coronation of roses but instead receiving a nonstop bouquet of bullets and bombs.

America’s invasion and subsequent dismantling of Iraq (its army, police, and political structure) with absolutely no plan for “what to do next” created a power vacuum that exists to this day. Now, two of that country’s largest cities have fallen to radical fundamentalists who are worse than the extremists they are battling. And of course, once again, there is talk of American involvement to “fix” the situation.

Three things are abundantly clear:

1. Despite all the justifications to invade Iraq, the real reason was oil, both for America and the world. But guess what? America has more energy resources in the lower 48 than almost the entire Middle East combined, and when Alaska’s mammoth resources are added, it’s a no-brainer. We need to drill responsibly to completely free ourselves of our unwinnable Middle Eastern entanglements. Not only would it throttle our economy into hyper-drive, as cheap fuel would revive America’s moribund manufacturing base, but it would immeasurably bolster national security.

2. Time to cut our losses. There is no solution for Iraq, at least not one America can produce. We need to monitor the situation closely, but from afar, cruise missiles on standby. But under no circumstances should American boots ever be on the ground there again. Enough is enough.

3. America obviously needs to protect its interests overseas, act as a respectful leader of the world, and be a beacon of light to billions. But in doing so it should heed the vision of another president named George, whose prescience about avoiding foreign entanglements is as applicable today as when he served as our first elected leader.

And the best way to do that is to arrest our misguided policy of playing policeman to the world.

Let Us Be Isolationists

Another Botched Abortion

By Janet Morana

Lakisha Wilson would be alive  if we cared about women’s health. Because if we did, if we really cared about women’s health, we would have banned abortion long ago, as soon as it became obvious that abortion was equally deadly in the front office and the back alley.

Earlier this spring we watched the CEO of General Motors get a public dressing-down because her company failed to recall cars to perform a very inexpensive fix until thirteen people had died. The broken-hearted families of some of these GM victims have been interviewed on television and we feel for them. We understand their grief. We know that losing a loved one from a completely preventable cause feels woefully unfair.

We may never see the family of Lakisha Wilson on TV. We will not be shown what her family is going through, knowing that they lost this beautiful 22-year-old woman because of a harmful and deadly procedure that should have been recalled decades ago. Certainly no CEO will face a congressional grilling. Did you see Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards facing angry politicians after one of her clinics let Tonya Reaves bleed to death in Chicago? No.

When abortion is the cause of death, there is a whole new set of rules. It’s not mentioned in the media. Death certificates are tailored to make it seem that it wasn’t the abortion that killed these women. The pro-aborts on Twitter barely make a sound. But the fact remains that Lakisha Wilson would be alive today if she hadn’t gone to Preterm clinic in Cleveland to end the life of her baby. And her child would still be kicking in her womb.

The cloak of silence around abortion is so heavy that we would not even know of Lakisha’s death had it not been for the pro-life protesters and sidewalk counselors who watched her taken away by ambulance, and we would not have heard the total nonchalance with which a clinic worker summoned an ambulance to attend a to a young woman who was not breathing if not for the tireless efforts of our friends at Operation Rescue. They are leading a press conference today to make sure people do learn of Lakisha and what killed her.

There is never a reason compelling enough to kill an unborn child, but somehow we as a society have learned to avert our eyes. We cannot let this willful blindness obscure the truth about abortion. It is a harmful product that kills women and their children, and it needs to be recalled before one more mother exercises her freedom of choice and dies in the process.

Please go to RecallAbortion.com and sign the petition to demand that abortion is taken off the market.

And if you are not convinced then read my book, Recall Abortion where there is compelling evidence as to why this product called abortion should be recalled!

 

Janet Morana is executive director of Priests for Life and co-founder of  Silent No More Awareness Campaign.  This column and more like it can be read on Janet’s Blog.

Another Botched Abortion

Another Botched Abortion

Radar Guns Bad Idea

Radar Guns Bad Idea

Every few years, an issue appears in Pennsylvania that raises people’s antennas, only to fall off the radar months later.

Hopefully, this time will be no exception, as there is yet another attempt in Harrisburg to allow local police to use radar. In the interests of Pennsylvanians and police alike, the best thing would be seeing this bill’s progress arrested so that it fails in a speedy manner, locking up the issue for years to come.

One of the things Pennsylvania has done right over the years is not permitting municipal police to use radar — the only state with such a prohibition.

Yet, there is a clamor from certain special interests — namely local governments and some police departments — to reverse that policy and arm police with radar guns. Their official rationale is “safety,” but we all know better. The real reason is blatantly obvious: Revenue collection. So because local governments squander millions in taxpayer money and now face record budget shortfalls, they want to break the backs of citizens by employing an onerous and unnecessary entrapment system that not only is counterproductive, but also takes valuable resources away from where they are truly needed.

Consider:

1. The police are doing just fine nabbing speeders, thank you very much. Proof? Pop in to any district judge’s courtroom and the place is packed. Law enforcement has plenty of methods for nailing speeders, all performed in real time (stopwatch, distance between two points etc.. Therefore, radar is inherently unnecessaryand would cost taxpayers more money — not just the initial cost, but also training programs and system upkeep.

2. Is radar use subject to abuse, as some claim? Sure, especially in Podunk where Uncle Cletus serves as police chief, judge and jury, but to generalize that police across the board are not to be trusted is a grossly misguided indictment. The legitimate concern is that unintentional mistakes will be made (such as radar guns not continuously calibrated), rather than deliberate game-playing.

3. Radar would relegate police officers to becoming revenue collectors (more than they already are) — and that’s not why they joined the force. Sure, maintaining safety on the roads is an important function of the police, but gunning people all day long just to fill township coffers is way beneath the talents of officers, not to mention creating intense boredom, which dulls their overall skills. And if radar use became law, bank on countless police departments receiving a portion of the revenue — a huge conflict of interest.

4. Police have better things to do. There are only so many cops to go around, yet the crimes they investigate are increasing exponentially. It is imperative that we use those limited law enforcement resources as efficiently as possible — and radar use doesn’t qualify. For every officer engaged in speed trap duty, it’s one fewer expert we have dusting for fingerprints, forensically examining a crime scene, interviewing witnesses and otherwise going after murderers, rapists and robbers.

It’s a lesson learned from the NSA spying debacle. All the untold billions and countless man hours spent wastefully reading law-abiding citizens’ emails was that much less time and resources dedicated to going after the real bad guys — like the Boston bombers. We have to be smarter with the tools and talents we have.

5. Radar would become yet another tool in the arsenal of deception, stoking a negativity in how citizens view police and leading to an “us against them” relationship on both sides. As it is, some police departments in other states (as well as Pennsylvania State Police) routinely hide radar guns on “broken-down” vehicles and farm tractors to catch those driving a bit too fast. Going to those lengths foments anger and leads to the bigger question of “what’s next?” If they are willing to deceive to that extent just for traffic violations, what else will they do in the name of “justice?”

Worse, local radar use would lead to increased use of unmarked cars in speed trap stings, with more positioned on private property (such as residential driveways and business parking lots). Not only does that practice smack of coercion and intimidation, but it is extremely dangerous, especially to women, when pulled over by a unmarked unit. The state law that should be passed would be one banning the use of unmarked cars in traffic/speeding duty. They serve no productive purpose.

With all the problems confronting police, stooping to the level of deception that radar invites — just to monetize routine traffic violations — transforms the respect that our men and women in blue deserve, into resentment.

The ways to deter speeding are easy: Eliminate ridiculously low speed limits (often changing with little or no warning) set for the sole purpose of nailing otherwise law-abiding drivers, and bolster police presence on a municipality’s roads with marked cars. It’s an easy equation, and not just for speeding: Increased police presence equals reduction in crime. It’s common sense.

From both the civil libertarian and utilitarian perspectives, let’s ask our legislators to place the radar gun bill where it belongs — completely off the political radar screen.

Benghazi Constructs

By Victor Davis Hanson

Almost everything the administration has alleged about Benghazi has proven false. Yet also, in Machiavellian fashion, the Obama group successfully peddled useful fictions, effectively deluded the country, adroitly ensured President Obama’s reelection, and cast aspersions on those who sought the truth.

In that sense, so far, the lies about Benghazi have won, the truth has failed.

So what really happened?

The Obama administration felt that it was behind the curve concerning the 2011 unrest in Libya. The so-called Arab Spring revolutions had toppled other governments in North Africa, and it seemed that protesters would do the same in Syria and Libya.

Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice did not want to be “on the wrong side of history,” especially given that it looked as if Moammar Qaddafi was likely to fall soon and needed only a little nudge. Given that the British and French were out in front, “lead from behind” seemed a safe, cheap way for the U.S. to intervene and yet not quite intervene — a sort of larger version of a drone strike.

But after Qaddafi’s fall, almost everything that followed proved the U.S. intervention to be a failure. The Americans had ceded leadership to France and Britain and seemed to boast about that fact. They had distorted the U.N. resolutions by going way beyond establishing no-fly zones and sending humanitarian aid. Obama had shown no interest in sending in postbellum peacekeeping troops or in organizing a U.N. force to prevent a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean. The result was a mess for most of 2011–12, as post-Qaddafi Libya settled into something like Somalia or the Sudan.

Al-Qaeda franchises emerged just as the parent organization had been declared to be on the run. Rumors spread that jihadists were arming themselves from the unprotected Qaddafi arsenal in the fashion of an unsettled Iraq around May 2003. Syria’s Assad had no intention of stepping down as ordered by President Obama. And so a full-scale civil war began in Syria, and the Arab Spring descended into tribal violence.

The U.S. decided to round up the most dangerous weapons of Qaddafi’s arsenal and to stealthily monitor the growing though supposedly nonexistent al-Qaeda presence in the detritus of Libya. A large CIA contingent was dispatched to Benghazi; nearby, a “consulate” opened. Ambassador Chris Stevens did his best to coordinate U.S. stealth efforts with what passed for a Libyan government. Rumors, never confirmed, spread that the CIA was shipping some of the Qaddafi arsenal to anti-Assad forces in Syria, hopefully the more secular insurgents. Other talk mentioned al-Qaeda prisoners held for interrogation by the CIA — another no-go topic in the 2012 campaign narrative of a defunct al-Qaeda, a secular Muslim Brotherhood, and an Obama who sees and hears no interrogations.

Stevens and others privately warned that the U.S. presence lacked sufficient security; they feared that the U.S. was doing enough to incite a terrorist response, but not enough to ensure the protection of its own forces if one was launched. But it was a reelection year. A Black Hawk Down firefight might in untimely fashion remind the public of the entire Libyan debacle. Security was not beefed up, and for a time the violence seemed to taper off.

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, there were warnings of planned terrorist attacks on overseas U.S. facilities, especially in Libya, perhaps because the CIA presence was large and visible but not invincible. In an era of lead-from-behind diplomacy, terrorists were not convinced of any dangers from another U.S. armed intervention.

Some rumors later floated around that the consulate hit was in response to the drone assassination of Yahya al-Libi, others that it was prompted by stories of CIA arms transfers, yet others that it was linked to efforts to free captured terrorists. Who knows? But few seemed to care. In any case, the State Department had two general goals: to keep Libya from unraveling and to do so without another U.S. intervention. That translated into a de facto refusal to beef up security just two months before the election, and at a time when most other nations with a presence in Libya were packing up and getting out.

When a coordinated jihadist attack did target the consulate and CIA facility in Benghazi, Washington was entirely taken by surprise. It is not clear to what degree military authorities believed that they could have sent military help to those under attack in Benghazi with good chances of success, or whether they wished to do so but were refused permission.

Clearly, the president did not consider the attack on U.S. facilities a developing national turning point on a level with his decision to take out bin Laden. There were to be no photo-ops of the Benghazi situation room.

On the evening of September 11, by the time Obama was apprised of the strike, there was no chance the U.S. was poised to achieve a great victory, as it had in the bin Laden mission. The president had a busy campaign-fundraising schedule the next day, and so he retired early in the expectation that the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could manage the lose/lose crisis.

Disaster followed, as the jihadists overwhelmed meager U.S. security and killed, over a period of several hours, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; Sean Smith, the U.S. Foreign Service information-management officer; and two CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. Outrage spread immediately as Americans learned that a U.S. ambassador was easily reached by terrorists and just as easily killed.

There were local claims in various places in the Middle East, many of them dubious, that an obnoxious video by a Coptic Egyptian resident in the U.S. had helped intensify the 9/11-anniversary violence elsewhere. Almost immediately the administration latched onto this narrative and massaged it to meet its own political needs.
That the unexpected and unforeseen disaster was due entirely to a reactionary Coptic, anti-Muslim provocateur, ensconced on U.S. soil, who had sown bigotry and religious hatred in a video released months earlier, proved a T-ball home run for Barack Obama.

Mr. Nakoula was in a sense the perfect fall guy. The video was amateurish, the producer a small-time con artist and cheat. Obama went into action in his accustomed teleprompted cadences, denouncing the forces of intolerance and chest-beating his own anguish at such illiberality on U.S. soil.

More importantly, the video as a casus violentiae  was particularly resonant with an administration that had labored to remove the idea of Islamic extremism as a font of terrorism and instead had set up various smokescreens (e.g., jihad as a personal journey, terrorism as workplace violence, the Muslim Brotherhood as largely secular — not to mention overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, NASA’s Muslim-outreach mission, etc.). The more Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama hammered the theme of Mr. Nakoula as the guilty party, the more they could showcase their own multicultural bona fides and perhaps thereby explain away the violence (e.g., Obama’s iconic status still resonated in the Middle East; Libya was not a den of jihadists; al-Qaeda was still on the run; extremist right-wing Western provocateurs were still part of the problem).

Someone in the administration quickly discovered that Nakoula had technically violated the terms of his parole, and he was summarily jailed. Nakoula’s incarceration spoke volumes: The Middle East could appreciate that the real culprit was now behind bars. The U.S. had hunted down its own right-wing extremists, and Muslims now had no more reason to explode in spontaneous anger at such bigotry. Finding the real culprits, as the president had once promised, had now been accomplished.

The Nakoula construct, however, posed immediate problems. There were initial intelligence reports (confirmed by the Libyan president himself) that the deaths were caused by al-Qaeda terrorists. There was evidence that U.S. officials had had warnings about the premeditated attacks beforehand but largely discounted them. There was some evidence that the U.S. military might have been able to disrupt the terrorist forces, given that they were not spontaneous crowds who came out of nowhere and could melt away just as easily.

By and large the administration quite brilliantly finessed Benghazi. It turned the tables on the skeptics in the Romney campaign by suggesting that they were using the deaths of brave Americans to score political points. The president and his team cited the fog of war for the initial confusion. They promised in the light of day to go after the perpetrators — a pledge of action that they most surely did not pursue wholeheartedly as the election neared. Western hatred and intolerance, not radical Islam, had caused the deaths, with all the obvious red–blue domestic political implications.

In some senses, the administration photo-ops and spiking the ball on the bin Laden raid (“GM is alive, bin Laden is dead”) paled in comparison with the talking points and party line that immediately created the spontaneous-riot/evil-videomaker theme. Skeptics were deemed to be the politicizers, though the real politicizers were the ones who had distorted the truth.

Finally, time would cure all. The only real worry in the fall of 2012 was reelection. Once Benghazi fizzled in the second debate, with moderator Candy Crowley’s insistence that a presidential reference to generic terror was synonymous with an admission of a deliberate act of political and religious terrorism (as if the road-rage driver who leaves in his wake terror on the highway were a political terrorist), the deaths of Benghazi had entered the black hole of House investigations. The concerned administration officials rightly assumed that, with time, a sort of “What difference —  at this point, what difference does it make?” or “Dude, this was like two years ago” attitude would eventually make Benghazi a sort of bad memory. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and his associates in this regard were largely right, as the media snapped to attention and reduced inquirers to the status of conspiracy theorists.

What then are we left with?

Were there political reasons why requests for additional security were ignored, suggesting that American lives were not as critical as President Obama’s reelection? At what time on the night of the attack did the president go to bed, and who made decisions not to order military assistance? What was the CIA doing in Benghazi, and what effect did its activities have on our security status? Were reports that the hit was retaliation for a U.S. drone attack accurate? What exactly did top-ranking officials of the CIA initially testify about the attacks, and were their original statements contradicted by later assertions? Who in the administration massaged intelligence synopses and sent out memos to head off accusations of failed leadership? Did the administration pressure (as if pressure were needed) media outlets to downplay the story? Why did our U.N. ambassador assert falsehoods, and why was she selected to be such a spokesman? Who ordered Mr. Nakoula jailed and kept him behind bars? Why were the real perpetrators never seriously pursued as promised? Did the personal problems of CIA director David Petraeus, the administration’s initial reaction to them, his various testimonies, and his sudden post-election resignation have any interconnections? Have all those who participated in the defense of the Benghazi facilities been fully heard from? And have those who were in the chain of command responsible for holding back succor on the night of the attack? What information was redacted in documents requested by Congress or under the Freedom of Information Act, and by whom?

Until these questions are answered, we are left with the strong possibility that the lethal attacks might have been deterred with adequate security, or even neutralized in mediis rebus : that high administration officials subsequently and deliberately misled the public, the U.N., our allies, and the relatives of the dead; that the president of the United States did not consider the attacks a crisis, or at least a crisis that could offer political opportunities, and subsequently and knowingly lied about the causes of the attack; that the U.S. government deliberately jailed a U.S. legal resident for reasons other than those alleged; that a U.S. election was influenced by administration deception; that the U.S. government was engaged in covert actions that might have been connected to the violence or were themselves ill conceived; that top intelligence officials did not tell the truth; and that almost immediately top administration handlers chose to construct a fantasy in lieu of reporting the facts about the death of four Americans.

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

Benghazi Constructs

Benghazi Constructs

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