We knew (at least those of us not idiots) that it was criminally insane from an economic standpoint, but it also turns out that it was an environmental disaster.
Low-Information Voters
Well, they’re getting it good and hard.
Ten Bullets
Why they may not be enough.
Control-freak fascist morons.
Light And Scattered Blogging
We have relatives visiting from out of town, and are driving up to the Carmel and the Central Coast for a couple days. I probably won’t bring a computer. Back on the air on Saturday, likely.
The Rose Parade
We’re sitting in the grandstand at Colorado and Orange Grove, across from the Norton Simon museum. It’s the beginning of the route. I may tweet pics @Rand_Simberg.
Health Care, Housing, And Education
All get worse when government “helps.”
The Constitution
The Left is now quite open in its contempt for it, and the law.
Thomas More would have been appalled:
…And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Laws are for the little people.
The War On Science
David Gregory
…and his legal jeopardy:
Chief Lanier is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If she does not charge Mr. Gregory with the felony, she sends a message to the crime-ridden city that the laws don’t apply to the rich and powerful. However, if she books him on breaking the city’s onerous firearms law, it will further illuminate how ridiculous the laws are for law-abiding people to follow.
A real journalist would be challenging the DC authorities to charge him, to point out just how ludicrous and unfair these laws are. But NBC doesn’t have any of those.
The Zero-Sum Thinking
…of a small-minded class warfare president:
…the worst thing that you’ve done internationally is what you’ve done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.
There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.
In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.
There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.
Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn’t mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.
But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.
And in all of his policies, that’s exactly what he does.