Posted by Marc Hodak on May 29, 2008 under Collectivist instinct | 
The philosophy behind the Berlin Wall was straight-forward: Your person and your property belong to the state. Couldn’t happen here, right?
Well, Congress has just passed a law that goes half way–you can leave if you want, but we’ll tax everything on your way out, even if you haven’t realized the gain, even if that gain occurred in a foreign bank while you were living and working outside of the U.S., even if you have spent most of your life in another country–perhaps your birthplace–where you are also a citizen, from which you have filed a U.S. tax return because ours is virtually the only country on earth that taxes its citizens no matter where they earn their money.
Now, the only way to escape U.S. taxes is to leave the country and renounce your U.S. citizenship. The U.S. then refers to you, who gifted us with a lifetime of talent, hard-work, and tax payments as a “tax traitor,” bans you from re-entering the U.S., and claims tax on your future income, or all your assets upon death at a 45 percent rate, for the next ten years. What is about to change is that silly “next ten years” loophole. Congress no longer wants to wait; they intend to tax all unrealized gains immediately, and will tax your American children on your gifts at the 45 percent rate whenever you die.
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Posted by Marc Hodak on May 13, 2008 under Collectivist instinct |
Over 100 officials burst into the plant. These were the same officials who had been known, in previous similar raids, to have “used humiliation, opposite-sex searches and long periods of secrecy.” Here is how it went down:
Larson said the agents told workers to stay in place then separated them by asking those with identification to stand to the right and those with other papers, to stand to the left.
“There was plenty of hollering,” Larson said. “You couldn’t go anywhere.”
When asked who was separated, Larson said those standing in the group with other papers were all Hispanic.
In America.
I remember when we didn’t live in a society where hundreds of people could be rounded up and asked for their papers.
Posted by Marc Hodak on January 13, 2008 under Collectivist instinct |
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is working overtime to prevent the opening of in-store health clinics that offer affordable treatments for minor illnesses. You read that right. You can read more here. This is from a Mayor who claims that “Boston is known internationally for our innovations in healthcare…”
I guess as long as the innovations are not done by the market place, which gets us to the nub of this Mayor’s puzzling stance:
“Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”
You see, the city of Boston provides clinics. He simply doesn’t want the competition. How’s that for serving your people?
HT: Coyoteblog
Posted by Marc Hodak on December 29, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
Spain has banned spanking. Spain, of course, is not the first political jurisdiction to suggest that maybe Daddy doesn’t know best.
Now, I have often joked about not beating my kids enough–almost always with my kids in hearing distance–but I personally never saw a reason to actually strike them. I remember being struck by my own dad many times (probably more than he actually did), and not with fond memories, and resisted creating those same memories for my kids. But I would not have surrendered my right to do so. I certainly wouldn’t have handed power to the state to develop the bureaucratic machinery necessary to distinguish, say, a pat on a youngster’s butt, or aggressive handling of a child in need of reminding who is in charge, versus illegal “striking.”
It takes a certain mindset to presume that the government can effectively make these distinctions. One such genius is Sally Lieber. As is typical of the kind of blindly liberal buttinsky that regularly gets elected in California, she proposed a bill to ban spanking, i.e., expanding government’s reach into the family room, without actually having raised any children herself.
“Responsible parents have to give up the privilege to physically discipline their children for the sake of protecting children that aren’t being hit once in a blue moon or in a light way.”
I think the same line of reasoning should apply to severely curtailing state power on account of those who would exercise it irresponsibly.
Posted by Marc Hodak on December 22, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
314. That’s the number of congresscritters who voted to ban the incandescent light bulb.
If you care about reasons why Congress would do such a thing, you can read this. If you think Congress is a bunch of dim bulbs, you can read this (gated). If you want to see why the intended effects are likely to be outweighed by the unintended effects, read this.
If you’re, like me, wondering where Congress gets off even being able to ban the light bulb, read this, and get back to me with an explanation that Washington or Madison might understand.
Posted by Marc Hodak on October 2, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
“We tell the government, ‘Take what you want, just give me and my family the essentials of life — food, shelter and an education,'”
– Egyptian union activist in a recent article about unrest in that country.
Contrast this with:
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Posted by Marc Hodak on September 28, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
While people in advanced countries initiate mass protests over the possibility of a company being able to fire an employee, or equate WalMart’s employment practices with human rights abuses, or call the toe-tapping of a confused Senator a national scandal, it kind of returns some perspective to watch the military leaders of a country like Myanmar draw the blinds on it’s nation and begin a rampage of intimidation and murder against its own people.
The moral equivalence of the latter event with the former is part of the deconstruction of Western civilization, like the notion of economic violence used to describe consenting adults making informed choices for mutual economic gain. Notwithstanding that deconstruction, the West is at least leaving behind the practice of mass violence against its own people, while the junta in Myanmar shows us the most vivid example of coercion, revealing the essence of government.
Of of the few virtues of democracy is that it at least diffuses government power; tyranny of the majority is slightly better than tyranny of a ruling family. So, like Churchill, I’m far from a fan of democracy, but I’m happy when the klieg lights shine upon cynical, arrogant rulers trying to have their way with unarmed civilians, monks no less, simply because they can. The bright lights make them stop and hide their faces, at least for a moment. The Burmese generals are desperately trying to keep that light from shining in their dark corner of the world. But it’s too late. Their legitimacy is gone. All that is left is their brute force, and there aren’t enough guns to stop the rise of a people against a government that has lost the sanction of its victims.
Posted by Marc Hodak on September 27, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
It sounds like a joke:
A rabbi, a Roman Catholic priest and a Baptist minister joined Senate Democrats in making a moral argument for the legislation.
The legislation in question is SCHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
While most people who aren’t Democrats or Republicans would say the two parties are barely distinguishable, I would say that when it comes to spending, nearly all Democrats are focused on the worthiness of the end, while many Republicans are concerned about the process.
Typical Democrat take:
“In St. Luke’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus instructed his disciples to ‘let the little children come unto me, and do not hinder them,’” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We urge Congress and the president to support our bipartisan legislation and let little children have health care.”
This looks like generosity, but it’s generosity with other people’s money. (It’s also a lie, since most of the recipients of this new bill already have health care. Isn’t lying immoral?) Typical Republican take:
Senator John Ensign of Nevada, chairman of the campaign committee for Senate Republicans, denounced the bill as “a step toward the Democrats’ ultimate goal of a single-payer, government-run health care system.”
This looks like a concern about process, but it’s easy to interpret as lack of compassion. So there is always a Republican who will play to the Democrats’ gallery:
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, responded [to Ensign]: “That’s a nice, sweet, cute little argument, but it does not solve the problem of how you help these kids. I am not about to allow these children to go without health care.”
which is where the Republicrat charge arises. Helping the children is great populism, but it’s nearly always tied to a disingenuous policy when you get into the details.
The easiest way to get enough people to agree to pay for a disingenuous policy is to promise enough people that the money won’t be spent too far from home:
The bill would increase the federal money available to every state next year.
So, a rabbi, a priest, and a minister agree that forcible redistribution of money for a dubious purpose in what will no doubt be the least efficient way possible is the moral thing to do. What a joke.
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 13, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
CNN reports that U.S. life expectancy lags behind other countries’. This sounds like an article about a scientific health study, but it isn’t. When one starts to read it, one quickly sees that this is a puff piece devoted to a particular policy perspective riding a thin surface of statistics.
The article starts with this paragon of objectivity:
“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation sounds like a research organization. They claim to aspire to that image. From their web-site:
“The Institute will focus its competencies to pursue research, education, and evaluation across different topical areas.”
“The Institute strives to be the lighthouse standard for high-quality information on health that is valid, comparable, comprehensible, and freely available in the public domain.”
Yet their web site does not provide a single study, not even the Census Bureau study (poorly) cited in the CNN article in which Dr. Murray is extensively quoted. The Institute describes its areas of work, yet provides not one example of said work. The Institute “stands by the principle that information should be freely available to all who wish to use it,” but provides no information at all. This doesn’t look like a research foundation with much of a track record, but it’s apparently good enough for CNN.
Given the way Dr. Murray is spouting off about policy, I doubt that his institute will contribute anything useful to the discourse on health care. For example, the highest life expectancies are to be found in places like Japan, Singapore, and the tiny countries of Andorra and San Marino. For anyone with a decent grasp of geography and demographics, these countries stand out as having relatively homogenous populations. Is it possible that demographic differences in diverse countries might have a material impact on aggregate results? A credible researcher would ask and answer that question before you could even raise it–certainly before speculating about policy differences at the root of aggregate results.
So, let’s do what Dr. Murray wouldn’t, and tease out a couple of facts. First, the article notes that blacks live shorter lives than whites*. The average U.S. longevity is, according to this article, 77.9 years, and the longevity of blacks is 73.3 years. From other sources, one would know that similar disparities exists between Hispanics and Native Americans, making up 15 percent of the population, versus the average American. Taking apart just these demographic pieces, what remains is an average longevity for mostly Asians and Whites that would easily place the U.S. in league with Japan and most of Western Europe.
So, I would like to see a report on how Americans fare by demographic type versus their cousins in ancestral lands. We know, for instance, that African Americans live far longer than Africans in Africa, even those nations not ravaged by AIDS. Mexican Americans almost certainly live longer than Mexicans in Mexico. Do French Americans live longer than the French in France? I”m not sure, but several of my French relatives in need of specialized care have come to the U.S. for treatments. That’s at once telling, and a potential source of muddying the comparison. How about Japanese-Americans or German-Americans versus their native counterparts? Is it possible that the American cousins of Asians and Europeans actually live longer? If so, would all the people clamoring for socialized medicine in the U.S. begin clamoring for market-based health care in the rest of the World? None of us may live long enough to see that.
* see parenthetical comments below the fold
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Posted by Marc Hodak on August 12, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
On my way home from a little camping trip with my sons, we stopped for gas. At the cashier’s window was a sign, no doubt created by the good State of New York, warning that buying cigarettes for minors could get you into trouble. The tag line was:
Its not just wrong, it’s illegal
This bothered me. I would be fine with either half of this message, i.e., that buying cigarettes for minors would subject one to either a moral or a legal sanctions. I don’t have a problem with laws against selling cigarettes to minors, as long as they’re enforced in a reasonable fashion. (Unlike New York, which is a little crazy when it comes to trying to enforce such bans.)
What struck me about this sign was the implied hierarchy of authority. It appears to say that ‘illegal’ should outweigh ‘immoral.’ Try this in the context of a more extreme message: Killing someone is not just wrong; hey buddy, it could get you jail time!
Maybe it’s because I believe that we should only have laws against activities that everyone unequivocally finds morally wrong that I feel that law should be the afterthought to moral repulse. To have enforcement rely with more weight on illegality than immorality says, to me, either:
A) Those of us subject to the laws but not making them are morally stunted compared to those making the laws (the “moral superiority” theory of law making)
B) Those making the law don’t really believe or care so much about its moral weight (the “power trip” theory of law making)
A corollary to the second theory is (C) that the immorality of the law is inherently unclear to the broad citizenry, which for me raises the question if there should be a law about such a thing. (I don’t believe this would apply to a ban on cigarettes sold to minors.)
Which theory do you think best explains such a sign? (Or, feel free to suggest another.)
