Time to retire it. Let’s do it for the women.
Those Nutjob Founding Fathers
Obama tells students, hey, don’t sweat this tyranny stuff. Big Brother Barack loves you!
As others point out, this experiment in self government was born from a justified fear and rejection of tyranny. Yeah, what would George Washington, John Adams or James Madison know about tyranny? And then there’s this wingnut:
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and those will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Man, that black guy, Fred Douglas, must be one of those crazy militia types.
Jonah has more thoughts:
I like America’s instinctual fear of tyranny. It is single best bulwark against, you know, tyranny. It’s a bipartisan tendency by the way. Conservatives tend to fret most over government exceeding its Constitutional authority to encroach on civil society. The left tends to fret over excesses in the government’s constitutional obligation to protect our citizens from crime and foreign threats. Libertarians have an abundance of both concerns. Not surprisingly, I tend to find the left’s excesses more annoying than the right’s (“Oh no, the state is trying too hard to fight our enemies!”) but both instincts are healthy and shared to one extent or another by all Americans. It is the fundamental dogma of Americanness and I for one would hate to see it erode further.
It’s just another facet of the president’s lack of understanding of the founding principles, and his deep aversion to limited government and Constitutional principles.
“Like Touching Infinity”
Life aboard an Antarctic research ship.
I suspect that astronauts aboard the ISS have similar perspectives, and more spectacular views.
Where Are The Startups?
A lot of people, including me, have accused the administration (and the Congress, when Democrats were in charge) of waging a war on business, but it’s really a war on small business and startups:
…what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.
Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.
But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.
Countries where those attitudes prevail tend not to produce as much entrepreneurialism, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as those attitudes have gained ascendance among America’s political class and media elite, we’ve seen less entrepreneurialism here.
It doesn’t bode well for the future.
The Racist Democrats
You know it’s getting bad when people like Peter Beinart notice it.
I’ve lost all fear of the accusation, myself. I think it’s losing its political juice, because it’s hard to take it seriously any more, coming from these racist hypocrites.
The Federal Code
The Founders would never have imagined such an expansion of federal police powers and crimes. Most of it is probably unconstitutional, under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Time to resurrect them.
NASA’s Latest Ambitious Plans
To send a man where many men (and women) have gone before:
The complex and dangerous three-day mission, dubbed “Chariot I,” is expected to pass through six states and include two brief transfers in Atlanta and Louisville in both directions, at a reported total cost of $360 dollars plus taxes and fees.
“For almost as long as our nation has existed, man has gazed upon a map of the eastern United States and dreamed of traveling to Cleveland, the largest metropolitan area in Ohio,” NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr. said at a press conference announcing the agency’s first major initiative since the discontinuation of the space shuttle program. “Until now, the immense physical and psychological risks involved in any manned mission had put that dream sadly out of reach.”
They’d never be able to do it that cheaply, unless they use Greyhound. As Clark Lindsey notes:
Of course, this mission cannot be carried out with a commercial bus but only with NASA’s $20B SBS (Senate Bus System). NASA has many studies to confirm this.
Though somehow, we never actually see their results.
Self-Driving Cars
How soon will they come, and what are the liability issues?
These are sorts of things that will be a drag on flying cars as well.
The End Is Near
…and it’s going to be awesome:
…government-dominated systems are inherently defective. Not because the people who run them aren’t smart and well-intentioned — though they are by no means universally smart and well-intentioned — but because it is the nature of political institutions to be insulated from the information-feedback that characterizes marketplace activity.
Simply put, when Coca-Cola introduces New Coke or McDonald’s introduces the McGratin Croquette (shrimp, mashed potatoes and deep-fried macaroni) and hordes of people don’t show up to buy them, those products go away, and if a company makes enough such unwanted products, it goes away, too. But if you live in The Bronx and your local elementary school is terrible, it does not go bankrupt, and you probably don’t have even 20 other options, though there are 900 kinds of shampoo on the shelves. There are many good ways to invest 12% of your income for retirement, but that’s harder to do when you first have to put 12% into a bad investment, Social Security.
The decline or dismantling of these programs will prevent us from pouring a great deal of good money into bad investments. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and related entitlements make up the largest part of federal spending; combine those with national defense and interest on the debt, and you are talking about nearly the entire federal budget — about 81%, with the rest of it comprising that piddling non-defense discretionary spending that President Obama goes on about.
But where we’re not going to be putting our money is not nearly as important as where we are going to be putting it: into productive enterprises, into the creation of actual goods and services in the real economy.
Here’s the new book
Duck And Cover
It’s not just a relic of the Cold War. Every teacher and schoolkid should be taught this. For that matter, every workplace as well.