Tag: barack obama

Categories
ideological culture

Thinly Veiled

Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan famously elicited from the president a bizarre accusation about “social Darwinism.” Now Georgetown University’s faculty and priests warn that his “spending blueprint would hurt society’s most vulnerable.”

Ryan undoubtedly laughed off the Darwinism charge, but Georgetown U. is Catholic, and so is Ryan, making his response especially interesting:

“I suppose that there are some Catholics who for a long time thought they had a monopoly of sorts, not exactly on heaven, but on the social teaching of our Church,” Mr Ryan said, adding: “There can be differences among faithful Catholics on this.”

He also argued that a “preferential option for the poor,” a tenet of Catholic teaching, means that people should not become “dependent on the government so they stay stuck at their station in life.”

The latter point is especially telling, for upward social mobility is surely a prime goal of all who are truly concerned about improving the lot of the less well-off.Herbert Spencer at age 78

Interestingly, social mobility and improvement via voluntary co-operation were also major concerns of the two 19th century liberals who have since been labelled the Social Darwinists Nos. 1 and 2: Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. But then, careless charges regarding “social Darwinism” have never had much intellectual substance, and are, almost certainly, irrelevant to Ryan’s actually quite modest plan, which spends 50 percent more than Clinton’s 2000 budget. This fact led Reason’s Nick Gillespie to quip, “If that’s what passes for ‘thinly veiled social Darwinism’ . . . the English language is as broke as the federal treasury.”

I think that’s pretty clear, at this point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary U.S. Constitution

Liar in Chief

When you hear the word “unprecedented,” reach for your . . . dictionary.

As I’ve noted before, the word no longer sports its traditional meaning.

On Monday, President Barack Obama commented on the possibility that the Supreme Court would strike down the 111th Congress’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by saying that such a move would constitute “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Yesterday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Justice Department to clarify the president’s statement. By Thursday.

Does the president — who happens to have taught constitutional law — really think the courts do not have the power to review and disqualify law on the basis of constitutionality?

As reported on CBS News’s Crossroads site, “Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented — since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional.”

I’d like to take a moment and thank the president . . . for help making the Constitution a live topic of conversation these days. But there’s something worrisome here. The president knows better. This is even worse than, say, Newt Gingrich totally messing up his comments on “activist judges,” making hash of law and interpretation. This is a president with a Harvard-established reputation on the subject saying something patently untrue.

He could only have been “fibbing.” And hoping to get away with it . . . apparently on the supposition that Americans are so miseducated we wouldn’t even notice.

We noticed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Agreeing with a Communist

There’s not much I have in common with Van Jones, the Yale-educated lawyer, community organizer, former advisor to President Barack Obama, author of a new book, Rebuilding the Dream, and self-proclaimed communist. But that doesn’t make him wrong on everything.

Yesterday, as I was fixing lunch and experimenting with political hormesis by watching “Now with Alex Wagner” on MSNBC, I caught a discussion about leftwing frustration with the president.Van Jones

“We thought we had a movement that was for the people,” Jones said about electing Obama.

“We have the wrong theory of the presidency,” Jones explained. “LBJ did not lead the civil rights movement. . . . You have to have two kinds of leadership, not just one, if you want to change the country. You got to have a head of state who’s willing to be moved, but you have to have a movement willing to do the moving.”

Rolling Stone magazine writer Tim Dickinson told the story of President Franklin Roosevelt, who responded to organized labor’s complaints, by saying, “Make me do it.” Dickinson explained, “He meant: ‘I need you guys to go out and create the conditions that force the government to act.’”

Van Jones has a frightening agenda, but on political strategy, he’s correct.

Remember when conservative activists, led by the late Paul Weyrich, stood up to block Bush from nominating Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court, giving us Justice Samuel Alito, instead?

Those of us fighting for freedom at the grassroots cannot rely on those we elect to do the right thing. We have to make them do it.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Central Planning, Clarified

Last Friday, the President of the United States signed an Executive Order on “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” and it’s gotten no small amount of attention. It seems to commandeer the entire economy — pretty much anything the government needs — in cases of a presidentially (not congressionally) declared “emergency.”

The powers are vast.

The checks and balances, vague.

The whole thing is matter-of-fact, sporting that business-as-usual style we’ve come to know and . . . view suspiciously. A few clauses at the end of the document build up to a sort of finale of weirdness with this clarification: “This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.” It may be about “national security,” but the government has certainly protected itself. Against us.

Reasons for angst? Yes.

But the angst should not be conceived as new.

Economic historian Robert Higgs, writing for The Independent Institute, notes our long history of what he calls “fascist central planning.” Citing his own milestone work Crisis and Leviathan, he fingers warfare as the major rationale behind the centralization of power and industry. Under the Defense Production Act of the Truman Era, “the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”

It’s breathtaking. It’s sweeping. It’s almost ancient.

And it shows how important actual peace is to our freedoms, our property rights, our very lives.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Speech Results

You often hear people who support campaign finance laws say that the First Amendment isn’t about money, “just speech.” These folks despise the Citizens United decision that forbade, under the First Amendment, regulation of groups of people (“corporations,” profit or non-profit) pooling money to advertise and promote ideas and arguments and slogans and such.

Though many are First Amendment extremists on other matters, desiring no government interference of protests or movies or the Internet, when it comes to politics they fear “Big Money.” So they want to censor speech that some groups would push near elections.

It turns out, of course, that the effects of the Citizens United decision have been mostly beneficial, as Tim Cavanaugh points out in Reason. As a result of that infamous decision, local political races have been “shaken up”; the decision “guaranteed ‘big laughs’” in many humorous political commercials that were all-too-rare before; interest groups have been freed of the old yoke of the major parties; the GOP presidential nomination process has been made far more competitive; and even President Obama, the Citizens United critic-in-chief, has raised millions under the auspices of the organizations the decision allowed to operate — so he apparently likes it, too.

The blessings of “more speech” are pretty obvious — if one looks for them. But for those with a prohibitionist mindset, who fear a wide open public discussion, they’ll no doubt hate actual free speech. As protected by the Citizens United decision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Blame Policy

Petroleum-based fuels are going up in price, so naturally people start looking for someone to blame. Call up the Usual Suspects:

  1. Speculators. These futures market folks never get credit for lowering the prices of gas, but they can always be counted on to serve as easy “bad guy” targets when prices go up. Same this time. You’ve heard the rumors, the rancor. (It’s nuts.)
  2. President Obama. You know, for not allowing drilling and pipelines and such. Go to a meeting of conservatives and you’ll hear someone yell out “Drill, baby, drill!” Now, I’m all for drilling, and it’s stupid to clamp down on future supplies of oil — indeed, investors in the futures market for oil see these political and bureaucratic restrictions on exploration and mining and refining, etc., and no doubt bid up the price of oil — but really, don’t blame just Obama, blame, also,
  3. Romney and Santorum and Gingrich. All these presidential candidates have engaged in hysterical, belligerent rhetoric about Iran, threatening warfare in the Persian Gulf region. War is bad for supply lines. Compromising supply lines means compromised supplies. Which means less oil. Which means rising prices.

So of course futures traders will bid up those prices — they would lose money if they didn’t — and in so doing they make the likely future conditions palpable to contemporary decision makers.

That’s their economic function. Don’t blame the messenger.

So, if you think the U.S. should bomb Iran to prevent that country from bombing the U.S. in a few years (after which the U.S. could easily make the populous nation, full of innocents, a sea of irradiated glass), don’t gripe.

One consequence will be (must be) rising prices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.