Aurora

The tragedy of Aurora, CO, was not that the bad guy had a gun, because the bad guy will always manage to have a gun. The tragedy was that he was the only one who had a gun.  Gun control fantasists like Michael Bloomberg would have a society where the bad guy would always be the only one with a gun.  Bloomberg has his own armed guards, of course, which nicely marks the point at which rational thought finally rears its head -- or, said another way, the point at which fantasy is overruled by hypocrisy.

It's an absurdity to believe that someone who is willing to break the laws prohibiting murder would let gun control laws stop him from having a gun.  No serious person believes that the U.S. will ever adopt gun control laws as strict as those in Norway, which has among the world's most restrictive legal regimes when it comes to gun ownership.  Yet, last July, a man shot 77 people to death in a mass killing in Norway because no good man with a gun was there to stop him.

Gun control is a fraudulent issue erected on the fantasy that bad guys can be prevented from having a gun.  There is a valid issue, though, concerning gun-free zones, legislated or otherwise, where bad guys are undeterred in the use of their guns, where they feel free to use them.  The logic of the gun-free zone idea is beyond my comprehension, unless it's rooted in a death wish.  The Aurora shooter, however, was not suicidal -- he dropped his weapons when good men with guns arrived on the scene.  Ditto the shooter in Norway.  It seems to me that both killers, in that respect, showed far more rationality than the concept of a gun-free zone represents.

Byron

welfare votes

Obama administration guts work requirements for Clinton-era welfare reform

For Obama Democrats, creating more Government dependents is what it's all about.  Ideally, every last person would be a Government dependent in one way or another, or better yet in multiple ways via multiple entitlements. 

The Perfect Democrat Voter is a person (1) on food stamps, (2) in subsidized housing, (3) enjoying paid-for medical care, and who (4) who pays no income tax and/or receives checks from the IRS under the EITC (negative income tax).

To that end:

(1)  A new campaign has been launched, including TV ads in Spanish, to get more people signed up for food stamps;
(2)  Dodd-Frank was the Democrats' attempt at subsidized home ownership. It wrecked the economy, but they'll try again;
(3)  ObamaCare;
(4)  Nearly half of tax filers pay no Federal income tax and/or get an IRS check, so have no skin in the game.

All of it financed by massive inter-generational deficits as far as the eye can see, and beyond.

Byron

Over the cliff

Off the Tax Cliff He Goes

President Obama wants lower rates for GE and J.P. Morgan than for small business.

Long-committed leftist that he is, Obama's guided by the Marxist schema of social change through class warfare -- a recipe that has proven to be the one way to reliably cripple economic growth and make everyone equally poor.  As for individual liberty, don't both to ask.  In Obama's world, the enforcement of "fairness" through mandatory redistribution means that power necessarily must be primarily political, i.e., police power wielded by Government.

The best jobs will be Government jobs, or jobs in Government-sponsored enterprises. That's already more true today than it's ever been -- the D.C. area is prospering as no other.  For firms, a guaranteed Government contract or concession is vastly preferable to taking your chances in the marketplace, so few tears will be shed for capitalism in those quarters.  But the necessities of cause and effect mean that the inevitable result is an accelerating misallocation of capital, including entrepreneurial talent, gross inefficiency, falling innovation and productivity, competitive failure, and Southern European-style economic collapse.  

Obama believes that such talk of causes and effects can be discounted as merely a way to provide pseudo-scientific cover for powerful vested interests -- the ideology of the 1%.  He's convinced that he can make socialism work, apparently because he thinks nobody with his combination of deep intelligence, deep morality, and political persuasiveness has tried up until now.  But he's wrong about all of that.  We can lament the fact that the socialist blueprint -- which is immensely attractive on paper -- doesn't work in practice, but it doesn't work for good and sufficient reasons.  No quantity of desires and good intentions can make up for that.  Socialism will always sound plausible to the listener who is ignorant of the reasons why it always fails, and this makes him mis-read history and its clear lessons.

When Obama's attempts fail, which they will, he'll blame various and sundry internal "enemies" (Lenin's term was "wreckers") who interfered with his vision and his programs to carry it out.  That line is already being peddled by Obama's lapdog media, but the problems of socialism are inherent problems.  It doesn't work because it can't work, and it can't work because of the way it tries to accomplish what it wants to accomplish.  There may be a planet somewhere populated by beings who are constituted in a way that would allow the socialist dream to be a reality.  But this is not that planet, and we are not those beings.

There's nothing new in our current scenario, going back to Sophocles at least:  The leader of a great nation thinks he knows enough to step outside the causal chain he's part of, that his personal goodness and brilliance can revise the necessities of cause and effect, and make history come out a different way than it must.  He turns out, of course, to be wrong, and the nation suffers for his ignorance and arrogance.  Film at eleven.

Byron