More concretely, you don’t get white supremacy if you believe that every human being has a soul fashioned in God’s image. Neither do you get far-left racial and ethnic identitarianism. Both are symptoms of a metaphysical deficit. It’s very easy to start dividing people up into tribal categories; after all, humans vary massively in just about every imaginable quality. It’s really something of a miracle that we ever came up with a notion of common humanity at all! We have the Judeo-Christian heritage to thank for this in the West. This is something secular people ought to consider before making glib criticisms of traditional religion.
Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter believes that the United States would benefit if the debate about what laws ought to be passed acknowledged the violence inherent in enforcing them.
Washington may desire to dominate our lives, but that desire can and should be resisted.
Trump, with his airplanes and helicopters, probably would inconvenience the general public a good deal less with whatever commute he comes up with than does Joe Biden’s risible regular-guy act on Amtrak. When Regular Guy Joe takes the train from Wilmington to Washington, they clear out half a car for his use — Biden himself sits stock still, looking frail and terrified — while teams of Secret Service agents are dispatched to each and every stop along the way to swarm the vice-presidential car and prevent any incursions from the plebs. At the end of the journey, the Amtrak riders are kept on the train — at gunpoint — until Regular Guy Joe has cleared the platform, which can take a while. Do they have places to be and schedules to keep? Of course they do, but the Cult of the Imperial Presidency extends to the Semi-Divine Vice Presidency and its odd, pseudo-democratic rituals.
Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government.
. . .
It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now.
On a visit towards the end of last year, I expected to be unimpressed by Cuban living standards and economic infrastructure. Even so, the extent of the poverty, backwardness and decay came as a shock….
A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard against tyranny, because voters can be counted upon to elect democrats (lowercase “d”) not tyrants. His argument defies logic and 20th-century history. It reveals an ignorance of the tyranny of the majority, which believes it can write any law, regulate any behavior, alter any procedure and tax any event so long as it can get away with it.
History has shown that the majority will not permit any higher law or logic or value — like fidelity to the natural law, a belief in the primacy of the individual or an acceptance of the supremacy of the Constitution — that prevents it from doing as it wishes.
Under Obama’s watch, the majority has, by active vote or refusal to interfere, killed hundreds of innocents — including three Americans — by drone, permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, bombed Libya into tribal lawlessness without a declaration of war so that a mob there killed our ambassador with impunity, attempted to force the Roman Catholic Church to purchase insurance policies that cover artificial birth control, euthanasia and abortion, ordered your doctor to ask you whether you own guns, used the IRS to intimidate outspoken conservatives, seized the telephone records of newspaper reporters without lawful authority and in violation of court rules, and obtained a search warrant against one of my Fox colleagues by misrepresenting his true status to a federal judge.
The War on Drugs is going so well, the DoJ is run like the morally and ethically and legally upright institution we always hoped for, and we finally have the most transparent government in the history of the universe. Hallelujah!
Yes, we finally have angels running the federal government! Free at last! Free at last! Thank G-d Almighty, we’re free at last!
The “Leave Me Alone Party” (LMAP) is for people who want to leave other people alone and who want others to leave them alone, to live their lives without nannying, interference, and coercion. (Some crude individuals call LMAP the Leave Me The Fuck Alone Party (LMTFAP). Not us, however.)
“Please stay far away from me.”
LMAP and the “None Of Your Business Party” share many issues in common.
If you are a modern “Progressive” and cannot abide the notion of conservatives, Christian or otherwise, having a say in who you sleep with and who you may marry, when and why you may get an abortion, what sorts of scientific research and artistic projects should be funded, what school curricula should and shouldn’t include, or when and why Uncle Sam goes on world-policing ventures, then why do you wish to expand the scope of government authority? Doing so in a society with a wide franchise, such as the U.S., inevitably invites those rubes to intrude their antediluvian superstitions and dogmas onto you and onto all that you hold dear and sacred.
If you are a modern conservative, Christian or otherwise, and cannot abide the notion of “Progressives” having a say in how you school your children, what your tax rates are, what size Big Gulps you may buy, or whether or not you may fill in ditches and water puddles on your land, then why do you tolerate – or even applaud – activities such as government’s “war on drugs,” Uncle Sam’s interventionist foreign policies, strict immigration restrictions, and tariffs on imports? Doing so – by creating a large and discretionary state – only encourages those obnoxious know-it-alls to use government against you and against all that you hold dear and sacred.
Members of LMAP are not interested in philosopher kings, intellectuals, moral superiors, their “betters,” journalists, celebrities, bureaucrats, politicians, fascists from the right or left, or any other moral preeners or pretenders to the throne of G-d telling them how to live their lives.
There is no, ‘Trust us, changes are coming’ clause in the Constitution. To the contrary, the Bill of Rights itself, and the First Amendment in particular, reflect a degree of skepticism towards governmental self-restraint and self-correction.
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York et al. v. Sebelius, 12 CIV. 2542 (BMC) (Judge Brian Cogan, EDNY) (December 5, 2012) (PDF on scribd)
And along the same line:
Here is a familiar cycle:
Step 1: Congress imposes a tax, often a steep one.
Step 2: Convinced that it is well-suited to pick winners and losers, Congress then allows certain people or firms to get out of some or all of the tax by engaging in certain activity: having a child, taking out a mortgage, caulking windows, buying certain capital equipment, manufacturing things rather than selling valuable services, etc.
Step 3: Firms and individual do what Congress intended and avail themselves of these privileges, lowering their tax bill.
Step 4: Members of Congress pronounce themselves shocked—absolutely shocked—that some firms and individuals unpatriotically pay little or no tax.
A few years ago, the story was General Electric. Now it is Google.
One of the reasons blue programs jump the shark is that over time more and more special interests lobby politicians to get special features added. The small add-ons and tweaks make programs more expensive and complicated to administer—and much, much harder to reform. This process begins when the laws are written; the lobbyists are there to tuck special little surprises between the pages of the bill. It continues as the regulations necessary to implement the new laws are written; once again, lobbyists are on hand to mold the regs to their liking. And it persists year after year after year, as lobbyists look for ways to amend the existing laws or add new requirements by inserting language into other bills.
