Category Archives: Regulation

Update II: Unhealthy & Unconstitutional (The Baucus Edition)

Constitution, Federalism, Healthcare, Law, Regulation, States' Rights

“The power ‘to regulate’ interstate commerce … is the favorite hook on which Congress hangs its hat in order to justify the regulation of anything it wants to control,” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano, in a WSJ op-ed.

“James Madison, who argued that to regulate meant to keep regular, would have shuddered at such circular reasoning. Madison’s understanding was the commonly held one in 1789, since the principle reason for the Constitutional Convention was to establish a central government that would prevent ruinous state-imposed tariffs that favored in-state businesses. It would do so by assuring that commerce between the states was kept ‘regular.'” …

“Applying these principles to President Barack Obama’s health-care proposal, it’s clear that his plan is unconstitutional at its core. The practice of medicine consists of the delivery of intimate services to the human body. In almost all instances, the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across interstate lines. One goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity, as the Framers of the Constitution understood, but to improve one’s health. And the practice of medicine, much like public school safety, has been regulated by states for the past century.”

“The same Congress that wants to tell family farmers what to grow in their backyards has declined ‘to keep regular’ the commercial sale of insurance policies. It has permitted all 50 states to erect the type of barriers that the Commerce Clause was written precisely to tear down. Insurers are barred from selling policies to people in another state.”

“That’s right: Congress refuses to keep commerce regular when the commercial activity is the sale of insurance, but claims it can regulate the removal of a person’s appendix because that constitutes interstate commerce.”

Jonathan Turley—watch him mock the Tenth Amendment—would, no doubt, find Madison’s legal thought ever-so quaint.

Update I: My opinion of Turley’s latter day obsessions were reiterated in “To Bug Or Not To Bug Abu Zubaydah’s Cage”:

Forgotten in the faff over “enhanced interrogation” tactics is the invasion of Iraq. Of this war crime, most Democrats are as guilty as Republicans. The torture fracas is like manna from heaven for both parties and their media lapdogs, who cannot be coaxed out of a coma.
Whether to bug Zubaydah’s cage or not: this is a limited, small, relatively safe distraction that allows complicit journalists, jurists, politicians and pointy heads to skirt the real issue: the need to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Kerry, for invading Iraq.

Turley, moreover, is a stickler for the letter of the law—the positive law—but not necessarily for the higher moral law.

Update II (Sept. 17): The thrust of the healthcare proposal, “unveiled yesterday by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus,” is sufficiently simple to defer to National Review, for once:

“[I]t tries to expand coverage through coercion and hidden taxes instead of through consumer choice and price competition in a free market.

Like the bills that have been approved by committees in the House and Senate, the Baucus plan is built on mandates, expanded governmental control, and taxes. It would require all Americans to sign up for government-approved insurance or face a hefty federal tax penalty — up to $3,800 per family. Employers would be required to offer insurance conforming to government specs or pay a head tax on each of their full-time employees.

There is no breakthrough miracle cure to be found here: Insurance coverage is expanded with tried-and-true, heavy-handed regulation. Americans who don’t play along will be disciplined by the IRS.

To take some of the sting out of the individual mandate, Senator Baucus promises new subsidies to some low-income families. He would limit their portion of the insurance premiums to a percentage of their income. Families with incomes at three to four times the poverty level would pay no more than 13 percent of their incomes toward insurance. But this promise comes with a lot of fine print: Workers with incomes in these ranges who are offered qualified coverage by their employers are ineligible for additional subsidization. They will have no choice but to take what is offered at work — whether they can afford it or not. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), only about 13 million people will be getting subsidized insurance through the exchanges in 2014 even though there are, as of 2008, 127 million Americans under age 65 in households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line. For the vast majority of Americans, therefore, the individual mandate is simply a hidden, onerous, and regressive tax.” …

Read on.

Update III: Cass Sunstein: Most Dangerous Czar By Far

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Law, Natural Law, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Religion, Science, The Courts

And very possibly, a future Supreme-Court justice. Sunstein, bosom buddy and intellectual soul mate to Barack, was confirmed the other day by the Senate. Cusses all around. The tenacious Glenn Beck, who forewarned about Van Jones, has been on the case. But WND’s Ellis Washington makes the clearer case (although he fails to appreciate that America IS already regulated to death):

Cass Sunstein: Regulating America to Death
By Ellis Washington

Animals should be allowed to sue their owners.

~ Cass Sunstein

Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.

As I have written many times, the Obama administration are the masters of misdirection and chaos theory; therefore, while the America people last week were transfixed on the resignation of “Green Czar” Van Jones, another even more dangerous fascist from the academy quietly slipped through the portals of power.

Last Thursday Cass Sunstein, a former colleague and mentor of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57-40 as the new director of regulatory affairs and information, an obscure but powerful agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Here is what the “regulatory czar” does: He regulates laws – past, present and future.

Sunstein is a friendly fascist who only “nudges” people to bow to his will. TV host Glenn Beck says of Cass Sunstein that he is “the most powerful invisible man you’ll ever see.”

Are we headed for a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss? Find out in “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America” Judge Richard A. Posner, an intellectual mentor of mine and former colleague with Sunstein and Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, said the following about Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a leading scholar on animal rights with whom Sunstein is often associated:

Since the publication of “Animal Liberation” [1975], Singer has received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. … Richard Posner challenged that Singer failed to see the “radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees.

While Sunstein spent his entire career inventing rights for rats, dogs and pigs that would make the Constitution’s framers spin in their graves, he is even more despicable in casting aspersions against constitutional rights plainly delineated in the Bill of Rights. For example, here is Sunstein views on the Second Amendment right to bear arms:

“My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears.”

In 2008 Sunstein co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “Nudge” discusses how public and private organizations can “help people” to make better choices in their daily lives since apparently Sunstein and his busybody socialist colleagues of the academy think that We the People are too stupid to live our own lives our own way and accept the consequences. Thaler and Sunstein argue that: People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Space will not allow me to adequately detail the utter tyranny and naked assault on our constitutional rights Sunstein plans to launch against American capitalism in his new role as regulatory czar.

Here is a summary of the autocracy Americans can expect from Czar Sunstein: * Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights” even more totalizing and all-consuming than initially proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care and a right to protection against monopolies. * Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it legal standing for suit. * Sunstein has argued that “we should celebrate tax day.” * Rumor has it that Obama is grooming Sunstein as a future Supreme Court justice.

Last week Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said, “[Sunstein] is to the left of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The leitmotiv of Sunstein’s entire legal philosophy and worldview is encapsulated in two very evil and failed philosophies of the past: 1) Social Darwinism [evolution], and 2) Moral Relativism – a theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

In other words, nothing has more intrinsic value than anything else. Sunstein’s ideas on judicial minimalism and behavioral economics belie the fact that for almost 30 years he has assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of Natural Law so venerated by the Constitution’s framers to preserve America’s republic.

To Sunstein ideas like “liberty,” “freedom” and “Natural Law” are irrelevant and counterproductive to his grand, socialist view of law rooted in moral relativism and social Darwinism. That’s how Sunstein can have a scholarship named after his dead dog while concurrently mandating environmental policies that will put tens of thousands of American farmers out of business by fostering ever expanding environmental, land and water regulations that will de facto make farming too cost-prohibitive.

What Mussolini, Stalin and Mao did in the light to harm their citizens and deny them their fundamental human rights, Cass Sunstein, as Obama’s regulatory czar, will do in the night by slowly, irrevocably regulating America to death. Sunstein reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Othello” when the sinister Iago repeatedly whispered his verbal venom into the receptive ear of Othello (Obama), which lead to his demise. Indeed, Sunstein said it best: “There is no liberty without dependency.”

Update I (Sept. 12): I’m not mad about the cheapened Argument From Hitler (in the Comments Section). So far, Barack is continuing the “work” Bush and others before him began. Few Republicans fussed about the breakneck speed at which the Bush Administration concentrated power in the executive, to give but one example. Or the way it expanded the warfare state, to give another. So far, I don’t see a qualitative difference between Bush and Obama; they exist on the same continuum of accreting statism.

Update II: I wonder if crazy Cass would come for me if he read my defense of Michael Vick: In Defense Of Michael Vick I & In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2.

Update III (Sept. 13): To the imperious reader who is unhappy with my disinterest in the futile, immaterial evolution debate: We are not about to go off-topic and veer into evolution. Take it behind the scenes with Myron. As for the “not good enough” complaint: More so than most columnists and writers, I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it. Far more important than the idiotic evolution debate has been my defense of the unique, privileged, preeminent nature of humanity in the universe. The articulation of that philosophical position is far more significant than the idiotic debates about evolution, engaged in by the Godless neocons/Republicans and their adversaries. Now, if the bitching reader were a major donor toward my generally thankless efforts at shedding light where darkness is the rule—then I might indulge him. But, alas, he isn’t.

Addendum: Here’s fodder for another fit over my unorthodox positions: Even more disinterested am I in whether God exists or not. I conduct my life with morality and ethics. Some would say that’s godly enough. Others would demand communal worship. Frankly, I don’t care. It makes no sense to assert or fight over the irrational and the supernatural; that which cannot be proven. I respect believers and defend the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition–this is the sum of my work. That’s all that matters. To me, at least. (At that’s what counts.)

Dipstick Depression

Barack Obama, Communism, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Free Markets, Regulation, Socialism

Following the deductive genius of Austrian economics, many of us have been warning that Obama’s policies are plunging the country into a depression. The best book on the topic, of course, is America’s Great Depression By Murray N. Rothbard. Now, in a study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute contend that Obama’s “policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century.”

According to the British Telegraph, “There are ‘troubling similarities’ between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.”

“… the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

“The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the US recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s. The authors say: ‘[Franklin D Roosevelt’s] interventionist policies and draconian tax increases delayed full economic recovery by several years by exacerbating a climate of pessimistic expectations that drove down private capital formation and household consumption to unprecedented lows.'”

The researchers err in their support for “the Federal Reserve’s moves to slash interest rates to just above zero and embark on quantitative easing, pumping cash directly into the system.” That goes against the grain of what the authors have contended.

Truly scary, but nothing that Austrians have not been bracing for, is the warning “that greater intervention could set the US back further. It is also not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron.”

“The paper … recommends that the US return to a more laissez-faire economic system rather than intervening further in activity.” Dah!

Said James Buchanan: “We have learned some things from comparable experiences of the 1930s’ Great Depression, perhaps enough to reduce the severity of the current contraction. But we have made no progress toward putting limits on political leaders, who act out their natural proclivities without any basic understanding of what makes capitalism work.”

Read “Voodoo Child Talks Up A Storm,” and “The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave.”

Update III: Who's Hiring? (Switzerland)

Affirmative Action, Canada, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Government, Healthcare, Inflation, Labor, Regulation

GOVERNMENT IS. “The government will have to hire some 600,000 people during the four years of President Obama’s term. That would bump up the current workforce by a third,” reports MSNBC.

The New York Times informs that, “While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs, according to a report issued Thursday by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.”

It then adds a stupendously silly afterthought:

“Government jobs are always more stable than private sector jobs during downturns, but their ability to weather the current deep recession startled Donald J. Boyd, the senior fellow at the institute who wrote the report.”

[SNIP]

Government jobs come into being by political fiat, not by market forces or necessity. Political will is what sustains them; it is state force that accounts for their stability and longevity. This is why these jobs, so to speak, “write” their own conditions of employment.

Government jobs have another signal characteristic:

“Government job creation schemes are predicated on government taxing, borrowing or inflating the money supply—activities that reduce capital available to the private sector. Such programs are politically popular because they are visible. However, for every job ‘created’ by government, an unidentifiable job will be destroyed in the private sector.”

It’s a zero-sum game: The parasite is sucking the lifeblood of the host. The larger he gets, the weaker the host grows.

The growth of government, of course, means that many more leaches will be implementing onerous rules and regulations that make it even harder for the struggling private economy to recover.

Still, the Times is perplexed at “the disparity between the public and private sector job market.”

Update I: “CANADA’S private sector added 49,200 workers in August, the first time they have hired more than fired since September,” reports the AP.

Of greater interest is the fact that, “while the U.S. has seen 81 banks fail in 2009 alone, Canada has not experienced the failure of any major financial institution. There has been no crippling mortgage meltdown or banking crisis north of the border, where the financial sector is dominated by five large banks.”

Update II (Sept. 5): MILTON FRIEDMAN (Via Roy B.) on the fallacy of government as an agent of wealth creation and on needing production—goods and services—not spending:

Update III (Sept. Eighth): SWITZERLAND HAS “knocked the United States off the position as the world’s most competitive economy” (via Reuters & Drudge).

The U.S. as the world’s largest economy lost last year’s strong lead, slipping to number two for the first time since the introduction of the index in its current form in 2004.

The study also factors in a survey among business leaders, assessing for example the government’s efficiency or the flexibility of the labor market. …

The WEF applauded Switzerland for its capacity to innovate, sophisticated business culture, effective public services, excellent infrastructure and well-functioning goods markets.

If to go by the report, the depression is some kind of swine flu, which randomly infects some, but not other, banks. However, American banks were leveraged like no other financial institutions in the world. (I’m not including Zimbabwe’s banks, although maybe I should, given how close the US is to Tanzania with respect to the soundness of its banks: “In the assessment of banks’ soundness, the Alpine country still ranked 44th. U.S. banks fell to 108 — right behind Tanzania — and British banks to 126 in the ranking, now topped by Canada’s banks.”)

US banks were also uniquely subject to state-mandated affirmative-action lending: a “State-mandated spoils system for minorities.”

Wait until the insurance industry collapses because of an Obama decree against “discrimination” based on health status. This is the very definition of insurance. Remove the costs of risk taking and you remove the incentives to avoid risks. Doesn’t Dipstick associate this incentive structure with his oft-repeated objective: inculcating healthy habits in the population? Moreover, unless the industry can charge premiums based on risk, it becomes a non-profit. Remove profit from the insurance equation, and the industry will be on its way to croaking.