He’s calling the president’s latest campaign stunt the “Magical Misery Bus Tour.”
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Give War A Chance
I quit reading Paul Krugman long ago, so I hadn’t realized that he was now advocating a war on space. Does he have an exit strategy?
I’ll let Maguire properly lampoon it, but I would note something that people rarely do about a payroll-tax cut:
My impression of the general economic consensus is that hiring people to dig and re-fill holes, or monitor for space aliens, does not provide any more stimulus than any other cash transfer to a person likely to spend it. Handing out money on street corners, the Bernanke helicopter drop, and payroll tax cuts should all be in play.
If a proposed stimulative shovel-ready project adds social value (e.g., a usefual bridge, or a useful bridge repair), then borrow the money for it; if the project adds nothing, it won’t be more stimulative than a cash transfer. Krugman’s belief in the power of make-work and his preference for that over tax cuts, is motivated by somethig other than standard economic textbook theory.
The payroll-tax reduction that we managed to get out of the Democrats was on the employee side (as is fitting with their insistence on demand-side, rather than supply-side economics). It is extra money in the employees’ pockets, which they presumably spend. But it does nothing to ensure that they have jobs. A cut on the employer side, on the other hand, would make it cheaper to hire people. This sort of encapsulates the economic divide between the two parties.
Will David Cameron Be Margaret Thatcher?
There appears to be a subtext in the piece: cometh the hour, cometh the man. But let us not forget that David Cameron’s first instinct, what he chose to promote to the first order of business in a recalled Parliament, was to blame social media, and moot the prospect of shutting down the country’s telecommunications systems at the first hint of a disturbance. Once again, the symptoms and not the causes are being addressed. This is because addressing causes is unpopular and difficult. It is depressing to note that the only prime minister since the Second World War who has had the honesty to candidly and repeatedly speak the truth about the consequences of our post-war welfare fetish was Margaret Thatcher: She pulled no punches, she did not dress up her sentiments or obscure the harshness of her message to such an extent that it lost its meaning, and she revelled in taking on who she saw as the enemies of liberty and of civilization (the socialists at home, the Soviet Union abroad). The result? The economy rallied and Britain was saved from what looked like terminal decline. Her reward? To be generally loathed for being “harsh,” even by many of those who would broadly agree with her.
Mrs. Thatcher’s great strength was that she did not particularly care about being popular — for which, let us not forget, she was rewarded with three election victories. And taking on the status quo is going to make the government unpopular. But David Cameron is no Mrs. Thatcher. The prime minister is not the man to stand up and say what needs to be said. He is still racked with guilt for his privilege and afflicted by that vacuous and peculiarly British concept of “One Nation” conservatism, which seeks to compromise between liberty and safety, and which has largely accepted the post-war settlement as being the foundation of a “civilized” society, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Still, we can hope.
Space Lunacy On The Left
Tea Party in Space on Hatewatch? Really?
The Problem With ObamaCare
…that the 11th Circuit ignored:
The real problem raised by Obamacare is not the unprecedented individual mandate, but rather the expansive scope that the Supreme Court has already given to the federal government’s spending power — which is both the root of the Medicaid issue and perhaps the gravest threat to the federal structure of the Constitution. In U.S. v. Butler (1936), the Supreme Court warned that conditional federal grants could become an “instrument for the total subversion of the governmental powers reserved to the individual states.” So it has proved. But in U.S. v. Printz (1997), the Supreme Court ruled that what offends the “dual sovereignty” of the states is an offense to the federal structure of the Constitution, and must be struck down.
By elision, the Eleventh Circuit deftly avoided Judge Vinson’s invitation to extend the logic of Printz to the domain of conditional federal grants. Perhaps it had little choice, given that Dole is both unworkable and (for the moment) a controlling precedent. Unfortunately, we do not have the same “circuit split” on the Medicaid issue that now guarantees the individual mandate’s rapid ascent to the Supreme Court. But, with any luck, the Supremes will grant certiorari on the Medicaid issue, and at long last squarely face how poisonous federal conditional grants are to the whole philosophy of government that shaped our Constitution.
Let’s hope.
When Did Holder Know?
I think that it’s equally impossible to conceive that Obama didn’t know about Gunwalker. Of course, that’s partly because I agree with some of the commenters — this was never an operation that “went south” (well, it did literally, but not figuratively). It did exactly what it was intended to do all along. What’s amazing is that they thought they could get away with it. But actually, given how supine the gun-hating Obama-loving media has been on the story, they may well have gotten away with it had the Republicans not taken back the House.
Six Ideas
…that the Republican front runners should shamelessly steal from the also rans.
I agree that we have to do more than just repeal SOX and Dodd-Frank — we need real banking and finance reform. I’m not sure just what it would look like, but it wouldn’t look like either of those bills.
Penumbras Of The Second Amendment
An interesting draft legal paper by Glenn Reynolds. He’s looking for comments.
[Update a while later]
Floridians’ freedom is about to be significantly enhanced:
Starting October 1st, any public official who passes or enforces gun regulations below the state level faces a $5,000 personal fine and could even be removed from office by the governor for enacting or enforcing local gun laws.
While Florida has had a law on its books since 1987 that makes it illegal to pass gun regulations beyond state statutes, there was no enforcement mechanism in place. As a result, towns and cities have created ordinances at will. In the process, many of them have criminalized otherwise completely law-abiding citizens who unintentionally ran afoul of arbitrary, localized gun rules.
But thanks to the law recently signed by Governor Rick Scott, that’s all about to change in the Sunshine State.
Emphasis mine. Now that’s my kind of law.
A Worthy Cause
Day by Day is having its annual fund raiser. Support alternative comics.
Rachel Maddow, Space Policy Analyst
I’m not sure what she’s saying here:
We didn’t put a man on the moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is “NO WE CAN’T”, then I don’t want you leading this country.
No, Rachel, we put a man on the moon because we wanted to show that a democratic socialist space program was superior to a totalitarian socialist space program. If we’d done it for profit, it would have taken a lot longer, but we’d still be doing it.