Krauthammer on WI

Rubicon: A river in Wisconsin

In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It's the perfect cozy setup.

The Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats' strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

Obama's Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell, no.

Once established, unions become a deeply conservative force. It's part of an idea deep in the intellectual germ plasm of the left: The idea that people and society are perfectible, and when that perfection is at last achieved, history will come to an end. Groups favored by the current set-up naturally want to end history right now.

(Marx, for example, believed that historical change is driven by by class struggle, an idea that found great resonance with the labor movement. Because classes would no longer exist in Marx's vision of the Communist utopia, history would culminate and end in that perfect, classless society. A glorious vision, but without the slightest contact with reality; Marxist economics are, to put it gently, an incoherent mess.)

It's ironic that the only reliable driver of change turns out to be the capitalist free market, which organized labor views as a threat to their status quo. They are right about that, of course -- change is always a threat to the status quo, by definition. It's a threat to everybody's status quo. Big corporations don't like free market capitalism any more than big labor does. But if particular groups were granted the power to stop economic development when it happens to favor them, economic development would have been stopped a long time ago, and we'd still be living in huts, scratching a primitive living out of the dirt.

Byron

Theft by collusion

Makes me a proud taxpayer...

Michael Barone:

But [Obama] did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”

Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of EVERY PENNY of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats.

In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

NPR/Corp for Public Broadcasting is another example of the same thing. They claimed not to be getting much in the way of government support. But now that it's threatened, they're running a full-bore campaign -- on their taxpayer-subsidized broadcasts -- to keep the taxpayer subsidy coming. In other words, I'm buying the bullets that these people use to shoot my wallet.

There's just no excuse for it. There are many fine programs on "public broadcasting," and those will be picked up by Discovery Channel, National Geographic, A&E, History Channel, etc. But it's just so darned comfortable being attached to the Government nipple...

Byron

Another mismatch

Rumsfeld Flummoxes Andrea Mitchell

Hitler vs. Stalin

Hitler or Stalin: Who Killed More?

Interesting article, but it's not quite the right question. The better question is the toll of Fascism vs. Communism. Add Mao's count and Communism wins the competition by a good margin. But even that's not quite right, since both Nazism and Communism were different forms of the same thing, centrally-administered, totalitarian Socialism. So the true number of deaths is the grand total, not A vs. B. That the Left's boogeyman would be Capitalism says as much about the Left as anyone should need to know.

Byron

Wisc teacher union sick-out

This illegal and tone-deaf action seems sure to backfire with taxpayers and lawmakers. Arrogance tends to result in tactical errors of this sort.

The governor should immediately order them back to work, require lost time to be made up on their own weekends, and fire anybody who refuses to comply. If you can fire and replace the nation's air traffic controllers, you can sure as hell fire and replace some Wisconsin school teachers.

Byron

Have teacher unions nuked the fridge?

Teachers unions dropped $40 million on the midterm election, which Democrats desperately needed — and which did them almost no good in the end anyway.

The public has grown angry over decades of accelerated spending and federal interference in education with little to show for all of the resources sunk into it. The government protects education as a near-monopoly, where only the wealthy can have actual, real choice in how their children are educated.

Union control of education has led to mediocrity rather than excellence, and sclerosis where there should be innovation.

Thirty years ago, the public saw teachers as underpaid and overworked professionals trying to prepare the next generation for leadership. These days, the teachers unions are doing their best to present an image of arrogant entitlement combined with an inability to withstand scrutiny and accountability. When that $40 million failed to rescue Democrats from their midterm debacle, it may well have been a nuke-the-fridge moment that brought a dawning realization of the political albatross that teachers unions have become.

Precisely.

High-Speed Rail

Slow-Joe Biden, of course, is all for it. His reputation as a moron is well-earned and rock-solid.

High-speed rail is a fast track to government waste

Governing ought to be about making wise choices. What's disheartening about the Obama administration's embrace of high-speed rail is that it ignores history, evidence and logic. The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail is not an "investment in the future"; it's mostly a waste of money.

Here in New Mexico, we have the Rail Runner between Santa Fe and the southern rim of Albuquerque. It exists as a a monument to former Gov. Bill Richardson's deep belief that economic development means glomming onto every temporary Federal subsidy you can lay hands on. It's a boondoggle of the first order, one the citizens of the state will be paying for in virtual perpetuity. It doesn't even seem to be good for emergency use -- when it got extra snowy and cold a couple of weeks ago, it couldn't run because the tracks shrunk or something.

One of the arguments made for it was that it would save money by taking traffic off of I-25 between the two cities. So, naturally, we are now in the midst of a long, expensive project to add lanes to I-25...

Byron

Paul Ryan Rules!

Terrific interview. The guy could hardly be better:

Video: Ryan slams Obama for “punt” on budget crisis

Dr. Gosnell

It's widely argued that Gosnell's operation would never have been allowed to operate had it been located in one of the white suburbs of Philadelphia, instead of in the inner city. That's no doubt true. But Ed Morrissey below thinks there's more to it than that:


Philly DA: State agencies responsible for Gosnell’s atrocities

The reason why the state of Pennsylvania didn’t bother to inspect Gosnell’s clinic is because of the political pressure on agencies to protect the operation of abortion clinics. It’s politically incorrect to portray abortions as outpatient surgery, which is exactly what it is, and to apply the same standards on abortion clinics as any other outpatient surgery center.

Abortion supporters want to portray the procedure as so routine and inconsequential that it doesn’t require oversight — and that leaves women at the mercy of predators like Gosnell. In Pennsylvania, abortion clinics aren’t required to register as outpatient surgical centers, and the state didn’t even bother to enforce the regulations that did apply to Gosnell’s clinic, even after women turned up in emergencies rooms and morgues after Gosnell’s treatments.

The Gosnell case is a multiple-murder case that properly cuts across all the disagreements about reproductive choice. Protecting abortion rights should never entail protecting a butcher like Gosnell, and there's no reason it should. "Safe, legal, and rare" is a good slogan, but 'safe' was let slide by the agencies that were charged with enforcing it. If Morrissey is right about the pressures that led to that, and it looks like he is, then a great strategic mistake by the pro-choice side is involved here. It's short-sighted to allow a clinic like his to operate, because when it eventually comes to light, which it will, the ricochet is going to hurt the pro-choice position most of all. And that's without engaging the moral issues connected with, in effect, facilitating what went on in that place; most people will look at this and decide that issues of strategy are by far the least of it.

Byron

Good grief

71% OF ALL VEGAS HOMEOWNERS UNDER WATER...

Headlines like that would be a lot less worrying if we had an economy and job market roaring back from recession, as we had under other administrations. Instead we have stagnation and a monstrous over-hanging debt from throwing money down the government-expanding Obamanomics rat hole.

"Obamanomics": It's to economics as socialism is to common sense:

Job openings fall for second straight month...

Byron

Not white hats vs. black

As usual. As Reynolds says, the fall of Mubarak is not the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is, after all, the Arab Mideast. Mubarak is a cocktail of bad and good. Whoever follows him will be another cocktail of bad and good. In that part of the world, it's always a matter of identifying the lesser evil. Was Ayatollah Khomeini a lesser evil than the Shah? Is Ahmadinejad a lesser evil than the Ayatollah?

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Only worse. My bet is that Egypt goes with the tide of history, in a distinctly Islamic direction.

Byron

Instapundit --

THIS PASSAGE HAS RELEVANCE for those who are excessively optimistic about a “fight the power” revolution in Egypt:

Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, “The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.

In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a “complete” ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so – without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak’s authority?

Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt’s First Lady, continues to campaign against the practice, which she has denounced as “physical and psychological violence against children.” Last May 1, she appeared at Aswan City alongside the provincial governor and other local officials to declare the province free of it. And on October 28, Mrs Mubarak inaugurated an African conference on stopping genital mutilation.

The most authoritative Egyptian Muslim scholars continue to recommend genital mutilation.

It’s not the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Pathetic

This is a farce. $74 billion is a pittance, a token. It's obvious that Democrats are not even a little bit serious about getting spending under control. It's like they're on crack.

Byron


Senate Dems reject GOP budget proposal, warn against government shutdown

Setting the stage for another showdown over government spending, top Senate Democrats rejected the House Republicans’ new budget proposal Thursday, but said they were ruling out a government shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan to slash $74 billion from the federal budget “unworkable” and “more draconian than we originally anticipated,” but said he would not consider a government shutdown “under any circumstances.”

Wonderful...

Coming Soon: A 300-Percent Increase in Foreclosures

So what will this mean when the last moratorium is lifted, the last show-me-the-note lawsuit gets thrown out of court, and the last loan modification has failed? . . there could be roughly three times as many homes on the market as there are now. Lawler points to 1,445,000 completed foreclosures and short sales at the end of 2010, compared with 4,296,01 mortgages that are past due by 90 days or more.

Aside: Eight or nine years ago, Central Avenue (old Rt. 66) coming from the east into Albuquerque had an incredible number of very large sales lots offering manufactured homes, ready to be towed onto your lot. These are far cheaper than a regular house, and there was a huge market for them because they were what a lot of people could afford. (They were especially numerous in fast-growing states that attract lots of retirees and the less affluent: Florida and Arizona, and I'll bet Nevada, too.) When sub-prime mortgages, liar loans, etc., became available the sales places on Central just disappeared, it seemed like over night, went from a couple of dozen, at least, to none. Now I notice a couple are in business again, and I suspect that more will be opening.

One way to describe what happened is that a market had developed to answer the demand for detached housing from people who could not qualify for a mortgage to buy a site-built house. Barney Frank and his ilk destroyed that market, people went from dwellings they could afford to ones they couldn't, and the rest is a sad, wasteful, monumentally expensive and destructive story that is still years from being over.

When the manufactured home sales lots come back in force along Central Avenue, I think it will be an indicator that housing markets have come back to some rational equilibrium. The lesson, of course, is that you mess with markets at your peril, and everybody else's peril, too. Unfortunately, it's a lesson that liberal Democrats are incapable of learning.

Byron

Number games, NPR

This morning, NPR trumpeted a drop in the unemployment rate to 9.0%, as if that means the economy is in recovery. Spinning the news, an NPR tradition -- "...And we do it on your dime!"

Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.0%, but the economy only added 36,000 jobs. Canada, with one-tenth our population, added 69,200 (via drudgereport.com).

The only way the unemployment rate can drop when only 36,000 jobs are added is if lots of people are giving up and dropping out of the labor force.

And what do you know:

...the civilian labor force dropped from 153,690,000 in December to 153,186,000 in January after a recent November peak of 153,950,000. That was a drop of 504,000 in January from December, and 764,000 in two months. The participation rate dropped from 64.5% in November to 64.3% in December and 64.2% in January. (via hotair.com)

None of those numbers were reported by NPR -- they know which side of the bread their butter's on.

Byron

Quote

Taking Federalism Seriously: Lopez and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act

The Framers, after all, certainly considered the limited nature of the federal government to be the primary protector of individual freedom; the Bill of Rights was merely a back-up system. We have now reached the point at which the back-up system is virtually all that is left of the original liberty-protecting scheme. And as NASA engineers say, once you start relying on the back-ups, you're already in trouble.

"Even more important, an overweening federal government stretched beyond its constitutional limitations lacks fundamental legitimacy. Legitimacy, after all, comes not from the possession of the badges of office, but from the rightful possession of the office and the rightful use of its authority. It has not escaped the attention of many Americans that the federal government has exceeded its constitutional bounds, and that realization plays a major part in the widespread hostility toward the federal government that is manifest today.

---

The Commerce Clause seems to be the worm in the apple -- progressively expansionist interpretations eating away at any limitation on Federal power.

Of course, there are many on the left who think federalism is an archaic notion, and that power is better concentrated in the central government. It's basically a disagreement about centralized vs. distributed decision-making. But the historical record is so clearly in favor of distributed decision-making, in both politics and economics, that only a certain degree of ignorance and wishful thinking on the left can explain why this is still being fought over.

Byron

Weak link in mandate ruling

The Weak Link in Judge Vinson’s Opinion Striking Down the Mandate

I'm not a lawyer, but the gist seems to be that Judge Vinson's ruling hinges on his view that the Federal Government does not have unlimited regulatory powers under the Commerce Clause, only limited and enumerated ones.

Problem is, previous rulings by the Supreme Court have already given the Federal Government those unlimited powers under a doctrine of "necessary and proper."

So, although the Supreme Court could change all that, a District Court judge like Vinson is bound by Supreme Court precedent; he cannot overturn current law; that is, he can't legislate from the bench.

This is going to the Supreme Court in any case, so we'll see.

Byron