With all due respect to the offices of Attorney General of the United States and President of the United States;
Mr. Holder, President Obama, the two of you are a disgrace to this country, and anything short of impeachment and a criminal trial is too good for you.
Executive privilege has been asserted by the Obama administration in response to multiple subpoenas from the Congressional Oversight Committee regarding documents from the program known as Fast and Furious. In case the reader has not been following this story, it is the operation run by the Department of Justice through the ATF that involved selling guns to known straw purchasers (illegal gun buyers) who would then sell or otherwise provide these weapons to the Mexican drug cartels. Another brief summary of the particulars of the operation can be found in this post by Dedicated Tenther. As a bonus, that link contains DT's thoughts on what should happen to those responsible.
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Why Wisconsin Matters
I will try not to echo here what has been said in other parts of the blogosphere regarding Walker's victory in the recall effort yesterday in Wisconsin. I do think that there is much truth in the notion that this election is more important than the Presidential election this November. I have listed before my reasons why a conservative victory in November is critical, especially with regard to upcoming Supreme Court vacancies. In terms of what Joe Public will see and hear and be conscious of, Romney versus Obama will be the story of the year.
However, in terms of a true shockwave to the American political system, Walker's victory likely heralds a sea-change.
However, in terms of a true shockwave to the American political system, Walker's victory likely heralds a sea-change.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Cut The Fat--Why Budget Cuts, Not Higher Taxes, Must Be Used To Balance The Budget
Numbers and figures here.
The money quote (pun intended): Finally, to put everything in perspective, think about what would need to be done to erase the federal deficit this year: After everyone making more than $200,000/year has paid taxes, the IRS would need to take every single penny of disposable income they have left. Such an act would raise approximately $1.53 trillion.
That's right--to save the current nanny-state model, every person making $200K or more a year would have to turn over every cent of that income, to keep us revenue neutral! That's on top of all the taxes already collected on everyone making less than $200K/year. Putting every high-earning individual on welfare in order to support welfare is, well, insane. It makes sense in a pure communist or pure socialist society, though practically speaking those societies do not function.
The money quote (pun intended): Finally, to put everything in perspective, think about what would need to be done to erase the federal deficit this year: After everyone making more than $200,000/year has paid taxes, the IRS would need to take every single penny of disposable income they have left. Such an act would raise approximately $1.53 trillion.
That's right--to save the current nanny-state model, every person making $200K or more a year would have to turn over every cent of that income, to keep us revenue neutral! That's on top of all the taxes already collected on everyone making less than $200K/year. Putting every high-earning individual on welfare in order to support welfare is, well, insane. It makes sense in a pure communist or pure socialist society, though practically speaking those societies do not function.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Crank's First Principle
The Crank's First Principle is thus:
The most important function of government is to provide for the common defense, against threats both foreign and domestic.
Not exactly revolutionary (or would that be reactionary?), but it is profound. And I don't mean profound in the casual, everyday sense of having a particularly keen insight; I mean profound in the less common usage, of being broadly and inclusively significant in that it bears on and ultimately informs nearly all of my beliefs regarding government.
George Bernard Shaw claimed, "Morals are a luxury of the rich." I think Shaw missed the mark slightly--morals are more akin to a luxury of the secure. Riches are one, obvious form of security, but they are in turn only a form of security because we have a civil society, one in which there are rules that set limits on our actions. Ten kajillion dollars in the bank means very little if the manager can clean out the account without a real, existential threat of punishment. Hiring a legion of private bodyguards is no guarantee, even in a society of rules (witness Caligula), but in an environment with no structure, no laws, or even with laws but no means to enforce them, one's security is guaranteed only as long as it takes one of the knuckle-draggers to decide he'd rather give orders than take them.
Without a commitment to providing for defense, any group of people (can it even be called a society without this precondition?) is inevitably doomed to anarchy and violence--if not from dissensions within, than certainly from forces without, because sooner or later someone will want what that group has and will resolve to take it, by any means necessary. This "society" is doomed to fall into a Hobbesian jungle scenario. This is inevitable because of human nature. It is rational to pursue what one wants and needs, and it's hard to convince a man that killing you for your food is wrong when he is starving to death and you have no way to stop him. This is simply a principle of survival, as primitive and as savage as the reptillian brain that still plays a key role in motivations despite uncounted generations for evolution to have effected a change. The suffering of a Ghandi in a hunger strike is considered noble precisely because it is such an abnegation of a root survival instinct that the average person can barely conceive of carrying out such a plan, yet alone following through on it. In a society without laws, would such a display have any meaning? It is much more likely that in the jungle Ghandi would simply be killed if he was perceived to have anything of value, or ignored if he was perceived to have nothing of value. Only laws, and the promise/threat of enforcement of those laws with punishments for transgressions, makes the concept of civil disobedience possible.
So, enter the need for common defense. The defense must first necessarily protect against outsiders, for if it doesn't they will be free to violate the society and impose their own rule upon it--history is so rife with examples that it would be insulting to name specifics here. Without this security, there can be no faith in the government, and hence no faith in anything else it may do, for it is all as fragile as a sandcastle under the foot of the next beach bully to come along.
Once the outsiders are (theoretically) eliminated as a threat, the protection of the insiders from each other must be the next step. Criminals are, in a very real sense, the outsiders within the society. They coexist with members of the society, to an extent, but also have put themselves above the rules of the society to gain some advantage over those who follow the rules. In more elemental terms, a criminal is someone who takes someone else's desserts for himself, contravening justice, vis-a-vis that everyone should get their own desserts, and neither more nor less. Without means to guarantee justice, or at least a reasonable approximation of justice, the criminals can run amok internally and render all other tasks of the government meaningless, leading inevitably to anarchy and Hobbesian savagery. Only with external threats turned aside and internal justice preserved can other, secondary functions of government hope to succeed.
The most important function of government is to provide for the common defense, against threats both foreign and domestic.
Not exactly revolutionary (or would that be reactionary?), but it is profound. And I don't mean profound in the casual, everyday sense of having a particularly keen insight; I mean profound in the less common usage, of being broadly and inclusively significant in that it bears on and ultimately informs nearly all of my beliefs regarding government.
George Bernard Shaw claimed, "Morals are a luxury of the rich." I think Shaw missed the mark slightly--morals are more akin to a luxury of the secure. Riches are one, obvious form of security, but they are in turn only a form of security because we have a civil society, one in which there are rules that set limits on our actions. Ten kajillion dollars in the bank means very little if the manager can clean out the account without a real, existential threat of punishment. Hiring a legion of private bodyguards is no guarantee, even in a society of rules (witness Caligula), but in an environment with no structure, no laws, or even with laws but no means to enforce them, one's security is guaranteed only as long as it takes one of the knuckle-draggers to decide he'd rather give orders than take them.
Without a commitment to providing for defense, any group of people (can it even be called a society without this precondition?) is inevitably doomed to anarchy and violence--if not from dissensions within, than certainly from forces without, because sooner or later someone will want what that group has and will resolve to take it, by any means necessary. This "society" is doomed to fall into a Hobbesian jungle scenario. This is inevitable because of human nature. It is rational to pursue what one wants and needs, and it's hard to convince a man that killing you for your food is wrong when he is starving to death and you have no way to stop him. This is simply a principle of survival, as primitive and as savage as the reptillian brain that still plays a key role in motivations despite uncounted generations for evolution to have effected a change. The suffering of a Ghandi in a hunger strike is considered noble precisely because it is such an abnegation of a root survival instinct that the average person can barely conceive of carrying out such a plan, yet alone following through on it. In a society without laws, would such a display have any meaning? It is much more likely that in the jungle Ghandi would simply be killed if he was perceived to have anything of value, or ignored if he was perceived to have nothing of value. Only laws, and the promise/threat of enforcement of those laws with punishments for transgressions, makes the concept of civil disobedience possible.
So, enter the need for common defense. The defense must first necessarily protect against outsiders, for if it doesn't they will be free to violate the society and impose their own rule upon it--history is so rife with examples that it would be insulting to name specifics here. Without this security, there can be no faith in the government, and hence no faith in anything else it may do, for it is all as fragile as a sandcastle under the foot of the next beach bully to come along.
Once the outsiders are (theoretically) eliminated as a threat, the protection of the insiders from each other must be the next step. Criminals are, in a very real sense, the outsiders within the society. They coexist with members of the society, to an extent, but also have put themselves above the rules of the society to gain some advantage over those who follow the rules. In more elemental terms, a criminal is someone who takes someone else's desserts for himself, contravening justice, vis-a-vis that everyone should get their own desserts, and neither more nor less. Without means to guarantee justice, or at least a reasonable approximation of justice, the criminals can run amok internally and render all other tasks of the government meaningless, leading inevitably to anarchy and Hobbesian savagery. Only with external threats turned aside and internal justice preserved can other, secondary functions of government hope to succeed.
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