Internet Scofflaw

An interesting column in the Wall Street Journal discusses how American ethnic groups whose members relied on individual effort to advance themselves (e.g., Germans and Asians) advanced much more quickly than those who relied on politics (e.g., Irish and Blacks). I’d like to see more data points than the author provides, but his thesis is certainly plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: For some reason, the direct link doesn’t seem to work, but this Google link does, for now anyway.

Jake Tapper, the only member of the White House press corps who occasionally asks this administration tough questions, is leaving for an anchor job at CNN. The move comes shortly after he asked President Obama a tough question on his new gun control agenda.

I’d be interested to hear the story behind his departure. It’s arguably a promotion, but the timing is curious and Tapper probably had more influence at his old job than he will at CNN.

I don’t think that professors should be fired for their political views, even for political views as disgusting as those of Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. Still, Loomis is a profoundly poor choice to make into some kind of free-speech martyr, since he was explicitly calling for sanctions against people for their speech. For example:

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don’t want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life.

This was Loomis explaining that he didn’t want LaPierre’s “head on a stick” literally; he only wanted him imprisoned. Okay then.

Loomis has the right to call for the abolition of free speech, but don’t expect me to ride to his defense now that the would-be censor is hypocritically posturing as a free-speech martyr.

(Via Instapundit.)

Here’s something I did not know: During Prohibition, the federal government poisoned alcohol to make illicit drinking more dangerous. Over a thousand people were killed in New York City alone.

This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that drinking liquor was not even illegal. (Prohibition outlawed the production, sale, and transportation of liquor, but not its consumption.) The federal government killed thousands of people who weren’t even committing any crime.

All over Facebook, I’m told:

(Via Instapundit.)

Mike Bloomberg, one of the most odious anti-gun vultures out there, says:

I don’t think there’s anybody that’s defended the Second Amendment as much as I have.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

What’s interesting isn’t that this is a skull-poppingly enormous lie. What’s interesting is that he thinks he has to say it.

I think he’s right. We are winning.

The worst thing about the routine cruelty that so often seems to characterize the British NHS aren’t the outrages. The worst thing is how NHS outrages hardly even seem remarkable any more. In the latest set of outrages:

Alexandra Hospital in Redditch is writing to 38 families after a massive legal action that exposed years of bad practice, ranging from nurses taunting patients to leaving an elderly woman unwashed for 11 weeks. In one of the worst cases, a man had starvation recorded as the cause of his death after being treated at the hospital for two months. . .

The move will serve to intensify debate on why some nurses and doctors are treating patients without compassion, and will add weight to the warning by [Health Secretary] Mr Hunt that patients can experience “coldness, resentment, indifference” and “even contempt” in NHS hospitals. He warned that in the worst institutions, a “normalisation of cruelty” had been fostered. . .

The catalogue of failings uncovered by the mass legal action is one of the worst ever exposed at an NHS hospital. It included:
• A former nurse whose son told how she died after being left unwashed for 11 weeks, and was put on medication so powerful that she could not speak;
• A 35-year-old father-of-four whose family told how he wasted away because staff did not know how to fit a feeding tube;
• A pensioner who was left screaming in pain when his ribs were broken during a botched attempt to hoist him;
• A man who could not feed himself whose daughter described how he was taunted by nurses who took away his food uneaten;
• A great-grandmother left permanently unable to walk after doctors failed to detect a hip fracture.

Particularly worthy of note, I think, is the case where nurses put food out of the patient’s reach and then taunted him.

(Via Power Line.)

Larry Correia’s piece on gun control and gun-free zones is excellent.

The four State Department officials who were selected to take the fall for the Benghazi debacle didn’t resign after all, and will shortly be back on the job. Ambassador Chris Stevens was unavailable for comment.

(Previous post.)

New York City health inspectors have been harrassing post-Sandy relief workers:

Bobby Eustace, an 11-year veteran with the city’s fire department tells FoxNews.com that on Sunday he and his fellow firefighters from Ladder 27 in the Bronx were issued a notice of violation for not maintaining restaurant standards in a tent set up in Breezy Point, Queens, to feed victims and first responders. . .

Eustace says that the Health Department worker then checked off a list of violations at the relief tent, including not having an HVAC system and fire extinguisher. “He told us that he might come back to see if we fixed the violations. . .”

(Via Instapundit.)

When questioned, the NYC Department of Health said that its inspectors were only supposed to give advice, not issue violations. Of course, that’s exactly what they would say. (It might even be true, but government must be judged on its actions, not its reportedly good intentions.) Moreover, even if we accept that the inspectors were only supposed to give advice and the department somehow failed to communicate that simple fact to the inspectors, the fact remains that the department sent out health inspectors to interfere with relief workers, however rigid that interference was supposed to be.

The key fact I want to note is that this doesn’t somehow happen automatically. Someone thought it was a good idea to send health inspectors to interfere with relief workers and ordered that it be done.

This incident is depressingly typical. During the Gulf oil spill in 2010, the Coast Guard shut down an oil skimming operation because they did not have the required number of life jackets and fire extinguishers on board. Again, someone decided to do this. Indeed, the entire oil spill debacle was greatly exacerbated by the Obama administration’s punctilious enforcement of counter-productive rules.

This brings me to my central point. The people currently running our government will issue waivers as they see fit, mostly to advance their own political agenda (more on the pernicious effects of this in a future post), but no one can expect a waiver from their overbearing state simply because such a waiver ought to be issued!

Put another way, they issue waivers to serve their interests, not ours. You only want to serve people made homeless by a hurricane? Tough. You only want to clean oil from the Gulf of Mexico? Too bad.

So when the EPA writes milk-storage rules so broad that they cover spilled milk, and they say not to worry, they would never enforce it that way? Don’t you believe them. Someone is itching to enforce that rule.

Which brings me to Obamacare. The Obama administration has issued countless Obamacare waivers to mitigate the disastrous effects of their legislation. Why? Because they didn’t want it to be seen as (even more of) a disaster in advance of the election. But the election is now behind us. Do not expect those waivers to be renewed.

These people are itching to enforce those rules. If some people lose their jobs, what do they care? This administration made it very clear in 2009 and 2010 that nationalizing health care was more important to them than employment. If lots of people lose their health insurance, what do they care? They don’t want you to have private health insurance anyway.

These people send health inspectors to keep disaster victims from being fed; you think they care about your job, or your health insurance? Think again.

One can debate whether disaster relief (such as in the wake of Hurricane Sandy) is an appropriate use of federal money. But if we’re going to do it, it ought really to be disaster relief. For Congress to take a steaming pile of pork-barrel spending and call it hurricane relief is simply disgusting.

I demurred when White House press flack Jay Carney reportedly linked the Newtown massacre to the need for tax hikes. It may well have been his intent, but his remark was sufficiently oblique as to be deniable.

On the other hand, President Obama’s statement today was really quite explicit:

If this past week has done anything it should give us some perspective. I-I-I-If there’s one thing we should have, after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important. And I would like to think that members of that caucus would say to themselves “You know what, I disagree with the president on some things. . . But right now, what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit reduction deal in place, [etc.], allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again, [etc.], and if we could just pull back from the immediate political battles, if ya peel off the partisan war paint, then we should be able to get something done.”

I think, I think the Speaker would like to get that done. But an environment needs to be created not just among House Republicans but among Senate Republicans that says the campaign is over and let’s see if we can do what’s right for the country, at least for the next month!

There you have it: Because of Newtown, Republicans need to stop fighting Obama’s agenda. The man has no decency whatsoever.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

A note to gullible West Virginia voters: this is what happens when you elect a supposedly pro-gun Democrat.

UPDATE: Manchin is walking this back now. He has evidently heard from his constituents.

Here is a phrase we’re going to start seeing a lot of:

The hospital informed us that this is a fairly new operation perfected over just the last five years. However: this surgery will “cease to be available in two years for insurance patients due to ObamaCare.”

The Washington Post reports that the White House is following a plan to avoid negotiating over the “fiscal cliff”:

Two senior White House officials said that David Plouffe, Obama’s top political adviser, crafted a plan to keep the president from getting sucked into a long, public negotiation like the one that unfolded over the debt ceiling. They said that Obama’s lowest moments in his first term came in a six-month stretch of 2011 when he acted as negotiator-in-chief on the annual federal spending bills and the effort to lift the Treasury’s borrowing authority, becoming part of the image a dysfunctional Washington.

“The last thing we want is another month of images of the two of them negotiating,” one senior official said. The White House is determined that Obama “not be drawn to that level.”

This president never learned to cut deals (he never had any occasion to learn) but he knows how to campaign, so they decided to do that instead.

(Via Power Line.)

One predictable consequence of putting the government in charge of health care is everyone wants to wet their beak. And so marginal medical industries (e.g., chiropractors, acupuncturists) are lobbying to have their services included in the mandatory slate of services, and they are meeting with some success.

Remember, Obamacare was supposed to make health coverage cheaper. . .

Since exit polls suggest that Hurricane Sandy may well have given Barack Obama his narrow victory in the 2012 election, it is worth noting that the federal recovery effort — despite what was reported at the time — was a complete disaster.

One can debate the impact of the Laffer curve at the national level. A lot of entrepreneurs are reluctant to leave the country, so — at the national level — the impact of high taxes and a hostile business environment may be less than you otherwise might expect. But entrepreneurs are much more willing to change states or municipalities, so that impact is much greater at the local level.

The resulting migration statistics are very embarrassing for the progressives. Not too long ago, the Economist ran its cover story about how business is leaving California for Texas in droves.

So when the IRS announced that it will no longer report statistics on taxpayer migration, it’s not hard to guess why.

This story of how Michigan’s labor unions were hoisted by their own petard simply warms the heart. Jillian Kay Melchior tells the story at the Corner:

It seems that some Michigan Republicans — controlling the legislature and the governorship — wanted to make Michigan a right-to-work state. But Governor Rick Snyder, again a Republican, was against it. Not that he was against it in principle, but he felt that it was a divisive issue and it wasn’t the time for that debate. However, the labor unions felt differently; they introduced a ballot measure that would have prohibited right-to-work (and also given themselves various other goodies). This forced Republicans to take up the debate they had not planned to have. And the labor unions lost at the polls.

Having won the argument at the polls, Republicans has no reason not to go ahead with right-to-work legislation. Michigan’s unions now face the catastrophe (for them) of worker freedom, and it is entirely of their own making. It’s a heart-warming holiday story.

Anyway, the unions were left screaming about how right-to-work gave non-members workers the ability to freeload on the bargaining conducted by the union. In fact, just 11% of union dues go to contract bargaining (the majority goes to union administration). But numbers aside, the whole argument is a lie.

The truth is, unions are permitted to exclude non-members from the contracts they negotiate. However, the unions don’t want to do that. The unions want everyone on their contract so they can control seniority and whatnot. If they allowed workers to stay off the contract, those workers disadvantaged by the union’s rules would opt out of the union.

If the unions’ concern over freeloading were genuine, they would keep non-members out of the contract, but not a single union will do that, because they want to maintain control over everyone. Right-to-work says the union can choose to control all the workers (lamentably, Federal law gives them that power), but at least disadvantaged workers won’t be forced to sanction that control, or pay for it. (UPDATE: And if you ignore both of those points, there’s still this one.)

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, in the end, labor unions are always about brute force. Basic economics shows that (absent a monopsony situation, which are very rare today) there are always replacement workers to be had. For unions to exercise monopoly power, they need to exclude those replacement workers somehow. Scandalously, labor law helps them to do that, to a large degree, but not in the case of strikes, which are labor’s main bargaining chip. Unions then fall back on force to exclude replacement workers.

Since labor unions are ultimately all about force, we shouldn’t be surprised that their response to right-to-work has been violence, and the threat of more violence.

UPDATE: Rep. Douglas Geiss’s threat (“there will be blood”) went out over the Michigan House Democrats’ official Twitter account.

Barack Obama on December 4, 2012:

When you look at how much revenue you can actually raise by closing loopholes and deductions, it’s probably in the range of $300 billion to $400 billion. That’s not enough to come up with a balanced plan that actually reduces the deficit and puts us on the path of long-term stability.

Barack Obama on July 22, 2011:

What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes — tax rates — but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax-reform process that could have lowered rates generally while broadening the base.

For some reason, no one other than ABC’s Jake Tapper wants to call him on this.

UPDATE: Obama is being disingenuous in another way, completely apart from this. He says that we need to raise taxes, because closing loopholes won’t generate enough revenue. Whether or not that’s true, he’s not being honest about his goals:

Obama wants higher taxes in their own right, regardless of their revenue implications. He has specifically said that taxes should be higher, even if the higher taxes actually reduce revenue! And he has made clear that revenue is not the purpose for hiking taxes. Yes, that is completely insane, but that’s Barack Obama’s agenda.

According to post-election polls, Americans (and even Obama voters) want to see the Federal government address the budget deficit with spending cuts, not tax hikes. Also, Americans still hate Obamacare.

Which kind of makes you wonder what the voters were thinking. . .

Short of criminalizing hard work, could you come up with a more effective policy to suppress the work ethic among the middle class than this?

Unless you make nearly $70k per year, you’re better off (financially speaking) earning just $29k. And right around $70k is the move to the next higher tax bracket.

More horrifying stories of government-run health care from the British NHS, where sick children are being put to death to save money:

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers.

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

We’re told, over and over again, that these are isolated incidents. With the sheer volume of these incidents, it is clear the NHS has (or, more properly, is) a systemic problem. In each “isolated incident”, the medical staff (I won’t call them doctors) are responding to the incentives they are given. Perhaps they weren’t supposed to respond by killing or abusing their patients, but that’s what keeps happening.

And that’s what’s going to happen here, too. The difference is, here, under Obamacare, the thin veneer of private control will make it easier for the advocates of nationalized health care to blame someone else.

(Via International Liberty.)

Three things that happened the day after the election:

1. FEMA shut down relief centers on Staten Island.
2. A court sentenced Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to one year in prison for probation violations no one would have cared about if he hasn’t made an anti-Mohammed video.
3. The US mission to the UN helped advance a gun-control treaty.

Barack Obama, 2004:

Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

Any hope that Obama might approach his second term non-hypocritically has already been dispelled by his position on the “fiscal cliff”. And any such hope was foolishness anyway: after what he did in his first term, which would he be any less aggressive in his second, when he has “more flexibility”?

But what should be the Republican response? Many Republicans say that tax hikes will hurt the economy. On the contrary, I tend to think that overspending is more dangerous than overtaxation, in part because of Ricardian Equivalence, and in part because we are rapidly reaching insolvency. If we could strike a deal in which we can fix the spending problem at the cost of some tax hikes, we should take it. But such a deal is not likely to be on the table. Instead, what will be on the table is the usual bargain: tax hikes now in exchange for future spending cuts that will never actually happen. I’ve read that (can’t find the link now) while such deals typically promise a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes, on average they actually deliver a minus-2-to-1 ratio.

If fixing the problem isn’t on the table, should Republicans focus on holding the line on taxes? I don’t think so. On the contrary, two factors suggest that we should give President Obama the tax hikes on the (so-called) rich that he says he wants.

The first consideration is the sequester, which will bring dangerous cuts to defense spending. At the third presidential debate, Obama pledged that the sequester “will not happen”. But that was a lie: the very next day he was touting the sequester in an off-the-record interview, and now the administration proclaims openly that they are happy to go ahead with it if they don’t get the tax hikes they want.

The idea behind the sequester, as I understand it, was to include big cuts to defense and domestic spending, to give both sides an incentive to come to a different agreement. But that supposed more honesty from the Democratic side than actually exists. While they love to attack Republicans over any proposed cuts to domestic spending (killing Big Bird and whatnot), they are perfectly willing to see cuts to discretionary spending if such cuts advance their higher priorities, as this whole fight illustrates. Moreover, since the White House proposed the sequester (Obama’s lies to the contrary notwithstanding), one ought to expect that it serves their purposes. Republicans were foolish to agree to it.

The second consideration is broader. Our economy is screwed: Obamacare is kicking in. The EPA is regulating CO2. Dodd-Frank puts the government in control of the financial industry. And entitlement spending is quickly driving the Federal government to insolvency. (The EPA’s action is illegal, and most of the Dodd-Frank apparatus can’t legally operate until the Senate confirms the new bureau’s director, but I wouldn’t count on the courts to enforce the law.) If fixing the problem is off-the-table, it is imperative that we make sure that blame for the upcoming disaster is assigned correctly.

What Democrats are demanding — tax hikes for the “rich” — are reversible, and ultimately not within Republicans’ power to prevent anyway. Republicans can try to moderate them, but that won’t save the economy (as above, spending is the main problem), and doing so will give Democrats and their compliant media allies a way to blame the upcoming disaster on Republicans. What is essential is when the economy tanks, America knows who is at fault.

This is not to say that we should give Democrats anything they want. We should not allow them to nationalize any more industries or create any new entitlements, and we should vigorously fight Dodd-Frank and the EPA in the courts. Generally, we should not grant them anything irreversible. But tax rates are different; excessive taxes can be scaled back, and have been many times.

UPDATE: Were the Republicans to take this advice, here’s a way they should considering doing it.