The Big Think

worth the watch.

out-of-the-park essay.

“Dear Dumb Dad”

Ca. 1935

My father, poor misguided gent,

Wasted his life — a life misspent

By working hard and working late

From 6 A.M. till way past eight.

Poor Dad! He’d fume and fret and toil

And burn the blooming midnight oil

For nothing but a little cash

To buy the daily beans and hash.

Poor Dad! He was so mild and meek

He’d work six days in every week

And 14 hours every day

To try to keep the wolf away.

Now father, meaning well, but dumb,

Amassed a rather tidy sum

With which he planned to buy some beers

To brighten his declining years.

Then the NEW DEAL came; simple Dad!

Who worked so hard for all he had

Awoke one morn to find that he

Was now a public enemy.

A louse, a Scrooge, a national cyst!

An economic royalist!

So Dad, industrious but dumb,

Is now the source from which will come

The coin to buy the gasoline

For some poor underdog’s machine.

To bring the more abundant life

To every loafer and his wife.

From Dad will be extracted sums

For radios to ease the hells

Of all the chronic ne’er-do-wells:

For booze, so labor’s little Nell

Can tell the boss to go to hell.

Poor Dad, a faithful, trustful goon,

Was born just 30 years to soon.

A moral lurks along the hall

In all this fancy fol-derol,

And it is this: That any cheat

Who says you ought to work to eat,

Is simply nuts, out of his head–

Sit on your tail or stay in bed,

The government will see, by gad,

That you get yours from chumps like Dad!

Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.

Municipalities have come to rely on confiscated property for revenue. Police and prosecutors use forfeiture proceeds to fund not only general operations but junkets, parties, and swank office equipment. A cottage industry has sprung up to offer law enforcement agencies instruction on how to take and keep property more efficiently.

via Reason magazine

You want a big tent? It’s fiscal conservatism. The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it.

You offer that, you follow through on it, and you get the Republicans, the moderates, and a sizable chunk of disaffected Democrats.

Everything else is beside the point right now. You lose the fiscal conservative fight now and allow the United States to head deeper into Statism, and it’s over. If the government controls healthcare, it will “[redefine] the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists.” You can kiss freedom goodbye in the longterm.

So instead of utterly failing our future generations, leaving them to toil under the yoke of an obscenely powerful government, we should make our stand now. Embrace fiscal conservatism. Leave the rest to federalism.

It’s easy. It’s a no-brainer. It’s even Constitutional. People are sick of the spending, sick of the debt, sick of the bailouts, sick of the handouts, sick of the back room deals, sick of the taxpayer funded bribes, sick of the bureaucrats. They want unyielding, unapologetic fiscal conservatism.

Fiscal conservatism is the big tent.

via Freeman Hunt (great name)

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they’ve all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don’t think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains… but for the better part of a century, they’ve been able to hear the hammers of the State ringing on the metal of those chains, in the forges of taxation and regulation…

The middle class is frustrated because they understand the basic concept of fiscal responsibility, and they know they – and their children – will be expected to pay for these titanic solutions…

The President says “I have every interest in seeing a unified country solving big problems.” The rest of us have an interest in being allowed to pursue our individual solutions to those problems, according to the liberties our Constitution says belong to us as absolutely as our souls. We can see the wreckage of those “unified” solutions strewn through our past, and littering the rest of the world.

Our frustration is born of intelligence and moral strength, not stubborn blindness.

read the whole thing.

Understand that my opposition is not to a black president, or to a democratic president, or anything so shallow or stereotypical. It is also decidedly not based in ignorance of the issues, or a backward, “flyover-country” view of America. My opposition is to a worldview that says “we’re from the government and we’re here to take care of you”. It is a visceral, responsible opposition to a historically, demonstrably, provably irresponsible government (of both parties) that long ago relinquished the moral authority to be trusted with the public purse. It is an opposition built on the simple high-school skill of following a descending line on a graph and saying “we can not afford to do this”. It is a responsible, adult, opposition to a comment I saw recently online that said “even if it bankrupts America, it is our moral obligation to provide every person within our borders with health insurance”. Oh really? Balanced your checkbook lately? What’s the state of your credit report? Even if it bankrupts America? I’ve never heard a rational response to the obvious question: what then?

As in all things, moderation going forward is the key. Neither a wholesale conversion to collectivism nor a total abandonment of the less fortunate will solve our fiscal and societal problems- either extreme will make our problems worse. But we must- must- maintain the fiscal health of our country if we have any hope of staying strong. Or even staying together. America is not an eternal guarantee.

The Supreme Court has conceded many powers to the national government. But allowing it to force individuals to spend their own money to acquire a commodity they don’t want would go beyond its established boundaries.

“Never in the history of the United States has the federal government ever required someone to engage in an economic activity with a private party,” Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett has said. If the Supreme Court goes along, he said, “there’s pretty much nothing Congress can’t do.”

full story

Interesting visualization of the accruing national debt.

Whether you agree with the current occupant’s politics or not, most people would admit that there surely there must be some limit to rational government spending?

One woman’s experience with the type of Nationalized Health Care system in Japan that’s working its way through Congress right now.

Looking at the millions of Americans it leaves uninsured, and the millions it leaves with worse treatment and reduced access, and the millions it makes pay significantly more for their current health care, one can only marvel at Harry Reid’s genius: government health care turns out to be all government and no health care. Adding up the zillions of new taxes and bureaucracies and regulations it imposes on the citizenry, one might almost think that was the only point of the exercise.

That’s why I believe America’s belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one’s philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you’re a cabinet minister or a bigtime hockey player, you’ll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it’s up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs, and arbitrary shakedowns.

That’s why Nebraska’s grotesque zombie senator Ben Nelson is the perfect poster boy for the new arrangements, and not just another so-called Blue Dog Democrat spayed into compliance by a massive cash injection. There is no reason on earth why Nebraska should be the only state in this Union to have every dime of its increased Medicare tab picked up by the 49 others. So either that privilege will be extended to all, or to favored others, or its asymmetry will be balanced by other precisely targeted lollipops hither and yon. Whatever happens, it’s a dagger at the heart of American federalism, just as the bill’s magisterial proclamation that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can only be abolished by a two-thirds vote of the Senate strikes at one of the most basic principles of a free society — that no parliament can bind its successors.

read the whole thing.

A reckless healthcare bill that nobody believes in. And it’s not just one side of the political spectrum either. When high-profile liberal news anchors dare you to put them in jail when they disobey your brain-dead legislation, and when 55% of the public strongly disapprove of your particular solution, it’s time to step back and rethink things.

This bill is a disaster. The Right says it. The Left says it. Various independent, partisan, and non-partisan research groups that have studied the bill say it. And the American people are practically screaming it. But our so-called “leadership” in D.C. doesn’t hear.

Do we need healthcare reform? Yes. Emphatically. Absolutely. Should we achieve it by signing a 2100 page bill that hasn’t been read by the signatories, on the eve of Christmas, crammed through in just a few days, along the most stark partisan lines? Emphatically no. Go back to the drawing board. Act like adults. Take your time with the 1/6th of the economy you’re messing with. Pass something that you understand and that makes sense.

Don’t play politics with our health.

Economic collapse? Blame the Christians.

A non-partisan, unbiased news media simply doesn’t exist anymore. All that remains of this once somewhat respectable profession are two kinds of media: those who lie about their agenda and those who don’t…Whether it’s Glenn Beck, Arianna Huffington, National Review or MSNBC, tell me your biases upfront and we can at least start a dialogue from an honest foundation. On the other hand, the Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, Time, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and the like, have spent years making jerks out of us – lying to our faces. We knew this, there just wasn’t any alternative. But now that there is, their time is just about up.

link

It’s not the fact that they’re biased (well, maybe not so much), but the fact that they keep insisting that they’re not that drives their audience away.

“What destroys individuals, ruins families, and fells nations is debt—or rather the inability to service debt, and the cultural ramifications that follow. When farming, I used to see the futility in haggling over diesel prices, trying to buy fertilizer in bulk, or using used vineyard wire—when each day we were paying hundreds in dollars in interest on a “cut-rate” 14% crop loan…

Once the conservative Bush people started talking about trillions in debt in terms of percentages of GDP rather than of real money, I feared we were done for: if a so-called conservative is doing this, I thought, what will the liberal Congress do when it gets back in power?”

via

Our nation is up to its eyeballs in debt, and its being run by people (on both sides) who have seemingly never had to deal with not having enough. Gas and food prices double? When you’re a multimillionaire congressperson, going from $2000 a year in fuel prices to $4000 is a drop in the bucket. For the average family, though, it can be the difference between eating well and not eating at all. For business owners, the prospect of higher interest rates means less borrowing to expand operations (assuming a growing customer base), or worst of all: not hiring an additional body. Then the cycle intensifies because jobs go unfilled or uncreated.

We’re planning on 10-15% interest rates over the next five to ten years (part of the reason the new truck was purchased now at only 3.6% interest). We also plan on keeping zero debt outside of our mortgage (which is locked in at a reasonable rate anyway). We’ll still get stung by higher retail prices, but at least we won’t suffer from 1970’s style interest rates that suck away money we could use for necessities.

I’m not a financial planner, but the advice to carry no consumer debt and save as much as possible is good in any market.