Economics, Political Commentary

At Some Point…

16 Comments

…you have grabbed enough power:

The Founders of the United States were deep students of politics and history, and they shared Aristotle’s concern. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” James Madison and others held that the “first object of government” was to protect the rights of property. Numerous provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights were incorporated to protect the property rights of citizens from the power of the government.

Whatever else might be said about him, President Obama operates on a different philosophy of government from that of the Founders. As Michelle Malkin observes, he spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his administration this week: “I think at some point you have made enough money.”

The Founders thought that at some point the government had enough power. Obama, however, is a devout believer in unlimited government. The common denominator among so-called health care reform and financial regulatory reform as well as Obama’s other big proposals is the augmented power they confer on the government in general and the executive branch in particular.

But don’t call him a socialist.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Not United Nations

12 Comments

It’s a club of thugs, that long ago outlived its usefulness:

We are reminded once more of the truth that Solzhenitsyn uttered many years ago: The U.N. is not the united nations but the united governments or regimes. And that body at large is no better than the governments or regimes that compose it. And, though the world has gone far in democratization, there are still many regimes that are as savage as can be imagined. And they sit on such panels as human- and women’s-rights commissions. You know? Understandable — but still, as I said, hard to swallow.

We need to set up something else, with some minimum entry requirements.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Entrepreneur

43 Comments

…and the minimum wage.

It’s a shame that we have economic ignorami running the country. What’s particularly stupid about a federal minimum wage is that it’s one-size-fits-all in a country with a wide disparity of living costs. And the degree to which it keeps the young and unskilled from reaching even the first rung of the career ladder is criminal, and a major reason that unemployment is so high among young people in the inner city. But they keep voting these morons in.

Social Commentary, Technology and Society

A Facebook Problem

9 Comments

Jonah has one:

Is it bad form to “un-friend” folks I don’t know personally and send them to the fan page? It seems awfully rude. But I have actual longtime 3-Dimensional friends who can’t “friend” me because I hit the limit.

I don’t have that problem, not just because I’m not as popular and well-known (and debonair) as Jonah, but because I take Facebook friending almost (but not quite) as seriously as meatspace friending. I don’t Facebook friend people that I don’t know and have not interacted with (at least on line, if not in flesh and blood)– to do so would seem to make the term “friend” meaningless. The only exceptions are if we have a high number of mutual friends, or if someone takes the trouble to write a note with the friend request explaining who they are and why they want to be friends, which doesn’t happen very much (about three times, in my experience).

That said, it wouldn’t have to be rude if you explained why. I would think that most would understand. It might be nice to have a script that would be autogenerated when you did it to provide the explanation. It would be a pain to have to cut and paste it for each unfriending. And never having unfriended someone, I’m not even sure that such an explanation is an option, short of actually sending them a Facebook message, which would be a royal PITA. I don’t think you’re automatically alerted if you’re unfriended (it’s happened to me once, and I didn’t receive any notice of it — I just noticed one day that they were no longer my Facebook friend, or rather, I wasn’t theirs). So I guess if you unfriend a lot of people, some of them will notice, and some of those will ask for an explanation. I guess something else to do would be to put up a notice on your wall warning the general Facebook friendom that some of them were about to become unfriended, with an explanation why and a request not to take it personally.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!