Choices

Liberals want to be your Mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose.
Conservatives want to be your Daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do.
Libertarians want to treat you like an adult.

(David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer)


Aside:  Boaz rejects the unidimensional liberal-conservative continuum as too simple to represent reality, which it surely is. Hayek used a triangle, with liberal, conservative, and libertarian at the corners.

Here's another depiction, a 2 x 2 table with four cells, each cell representing a different ideological position. Better might be a square with the positions at the four corners. A particular person's ideological position would be a point somewhere inside the square, the perfect moderate at dead center. It's interesting to set that up and try to decide where you'd put the dot representing yourself.

		Government Intervention in Economic Affairs
		For	Against
Expansion of personal freedoms	For	Liberal	Libertarian
	Against	Authoritarian	Conservative

JFK

Kennedy was a Democrat?

Two-minute speech, quite amazing:   Income Tax Cut, JFK Hopes To Spur Economy 1962/8/13

What to make of this? I think what it means is that in 1963, Democrats and Republicans basically agreed on macro-economics, even if they didn't agree about much else. That must have made the overall job of governing much easier, for both parties.

That consensus dissolved as Democrats moved further and further to the left. Obama's economic views and policies today are pretty much the opposite of Kennedy's: Obama wants more taxes and more government spending, regardless of deficits. And just as Kennedy presumably represented the views of fellow Democrats in Congress back then, Obama represents the mainstream of today's Democrats.

The problem for the GOP is that "meeting in the center" now means meeting at a place well to the left of where it once was. Standing on their own principles gets them portrayed as obstructionists, as the ones responsible for gridlock. Whatever anyone might think of the GOP, it's not hard to see why they see that as deeply unfair. In their view, Democrats, with the assistance of a strongly liberal media, are trying to turn that line along the left shoulder into the new center line -- and crippling the economy in the process.

Byron

NPR outdoes itself

NPR’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination this morning headlined the Dallas of 1963 as “The City of Hate”, a reputation the city is still trying to leave behind. For NPR it was all about right-wingers and race.

Nowhere in their report was there a whisper of a hint that JFK was shot by a hardcore Leftist. Anyone who didn’t know better would come away from NPR's report believing he was killed by a hate-filled, racist, right-wing fanatic.

As a taxpayer, I'm so proud to be supporting NPR's operations.

Byron

Caught

The Great Prevaricator

ObamaCare may be remembered as a turning point in American history. It may be remembered as the time when Americans woke up to the heart of the administrative entitlement state, and began the process of dismantling it and restoring limited government.

ObamaCare, notice, never got majority approval in public opinion polls. In other words, the American people knew better and didn't want it, but Congressional Democrats went ahead, anyway, all by themselves. It's the liberal-progressive understanding of "representative government" and how it's to be wielded by elites over the ignorant masses, the backward, racist, religion-besotted subjects, the goobers, hicks, and rubes.

The fact that none of these elites had even read the law they were voting for was not supposed to matter.

They went ahead and did it in public and on the record, so they've got no place to hide now. People who love nothing better than to be in the public spotlight are scurrying like rats for places to hide.  Good luck with that.

Roll tape.

Byron

Perfect

It just keeps getting better:


House passes bill to keep your insurance...

Obama vows to veto...


You do that, champ. Please.

Question: How many elected Democrats (Senators, House members, state and local officials) are on video embracing ObamaCare and assuring people that if you like the insurance you have, you will be able to keep it?

Answer: I don't know, but it's got to be a large number -- 27 Senators is one estimate, 4 of those up for re-election. The campaign ads write themselves, and they are likely to be devastating.

Reap what you sow.

The game for Democrats will be to put as much distance as they can between themselves and Barack Obama. But, hey, let's go to the video tape...

Byron

He taught Constitutional Law?

Excellent article followed by quite a few insightful comments from readers:

Chuck Todd: C’mon, Obama has no power to make this ObamaCare fix

Obama, the chief executive, is promising, for a period of time, simply to not enforce a law passed by Congress, and insurance companies are supposed to trust him on that.  He's asking the states not to enforce the law, either -- and both they and the insurance companies are supposed to trust him on that, also, as they try to undo three years of work revising rates and policy offerings, and getting those approved by state insurance commissioners and boards.

Under the Obama Regime, this inexcusable shambles is what passes as public administration and the Rule of Law.

The depth of incompetence and misfeasance here is genuinely stunning.

Byron

Splat

Only 106,000 Americans Signed Up For Obamacare in October: Less than two percent of the 7 million Americans officials expect to do so.

And these are the phony shopping-cart numbers, NOT the number of people who have actually bought policies.

Meanwhile:  HHS says 396,261 Americans have been determined or assessed eligible for Medicaid or CHIP (children's Medicaid), so the welfare tab is skyrocketing.

Add in the adverse selection among signups and this is a dumpster fire of the first order.

The older and sicker are signing up for ObamaCare, while the poor are signing up for Medicaid. The young and healthy, on whose backs this whole scheme is supposed to rest, are AWOL, and those under 26 can stay on their parents' policy, anyway.  

The system of fines for failing to sign up won't work, because it can only be enforced by IRS subtracting the fine from your tax refund. You simply change your withholding so there is no refund.

Centralized planning at its best!

Byron

It's all about choice

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/

Using a novel interpretation of Colorado’s charter-school law, Douglas County set up a virtual “charter school” by giving students vouchers worth 75 percent of the state’s per-pupil funding to take to any school of their choice. The ACLU sued over the program, and while the district triumphed in appellate court, the program remains on pause while Douglas County awaits a date with the Colorado Supreme Court. If the district prevails there, it will offer a voucher model that almost any school district could emulate.

An arrangement like this will stimulate the growth of a genuine educational market -- which is what's desperately needed  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Hating the very thought of competition, the public school establishment will fight any idea like this to their last breath. Endlessly execrable systems, like the one in Washington, D.C, know perfectly well that in a competitive market they'd end up on the junk pile where they belong at something approaching light speed.

(The atrocious D.C. school system claims to spend $18,475 per student, highest in the nation, but this is widely reported to be a gross understatement, with the true amount nearly $30,000 per student:  http://www.cato.org/blog/census-bureau-confirms-dc-spends-29409-pupil )

Byron

In a nutshell

HealthCare.gov: How political fear was pitted against technical needs

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign...

But they weren't running it, except for a faux-beta version that wasn't even pilot tested. It's mind boggling.

Obama, of course, had no personal experience of failure, because he's never done anything on his own, in his entire life. It's a big, wonderful, affirmative action world for Obama.

Credit where it's due, what he's genuinely good at is jumping up to take the credit when things go well, and blaming others when they don't -- "I'm just as angry about this as you are."

As far as I can remember, he's never taken responsibility for a single thing that didn't work out, not one. When Benghazi was underway, he did a duck-and-cover and went back to bed.

Class act, no?

No.

Byron

Arab Spring Update

Syria becomes largest home to al Qaeda; jihadists find safe haven to plot attacks
More Al Qaeda members now living in Syria than in any other country on earth


My goodness, Obama's signature Hope-and-Change(TM) foreign policy adventure is certainly proceeding nicely, isn't it?

Al Qaeda has stolen the revolution to overthrow Assad, the uprising that we encouraged with mighty doses of facile ObamaRhetoric(TM).  But, of course, there was no follow-up in the form of the actual military support that would have given the rebels half a chance, and that they had every reason to expect as they stepped up and put their lives on the line. Instead, Obama pulled a Benghazi and left the poor bastards hung out to be exterminated. That created the opening for Syria to become a major base for al Qaeda, which it now is, bordering Israel.  Good show, Commander-in-Chief Obama!

Having stabbed the rebels in the back, Obama faces a choice between Assad and al Qaeda. Now that Assad has been certified as having destroyed his chemical weapons, the obviously rational move would be to support him against al Qaeda, because they are the vastly larger threat to the U.S.  If there's any rocket surgery involved in that decision, sorry, but I don't see it.

So, anybody want to estimate the probability of Obama deciding that way? I'll place my chip on zero.

(He may try to take refuge in the theory that Assad and al Qaeda will grind each other to dust, so all we have to do is stand by and watch it happen. I think that's wishful thinking. Al Qaeda is not a conventional army, and its minimal logistical requirements mean that it does not need to control the cities, but merely to terrorize them. About all al Qaeda requires are operational bases for recruitment and training, and those can be villages in the hinterlands. To root out and defeat al Qaeda, Assad would need an army many times the size of any he could hope to assemble, train, and supply.)

After Obama's second term at long last expires, how many years will it take to undo the foreign relations mess this puffed-up fool leaves behind? OK, just the over-under:  I'd guess 10.  Unless Benghazi Hillary follows him. In that case, I don't even want to guess.  

Byron