Category Archives: Socialism

Happy Meal Time for US Students

Debt, Democracy, Economy, Education, Elections, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

“Happy Meal Time for US Students” is my new column. Here is an excerpt:

“Barack Obama has promised America’s miseducated Millenials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting. Campaigning in Iowa, the president vowed to keep college affordable, because, like every other welfare and warfare program, it “is at the heart of who we are.”

Interest rates for Federal Stafford Loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, on July 1. You just know how bad things are when a socialized financial market like student loans attempts to correct itself. Nevertheless, if the glut of miseducation is to be curbed, higher interest rates are healthy.

Why the president’s promise? The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, smuggled into the Constitution by statute, artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

It’s Happy Meal time for the nation’s students….”

Read the complete column, “Happy Meal Time for US Students.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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Assange Makes Lamestream Run for Cover

libertarianism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Russia, Socialism, The State

It is no contest: RT leads the way with gritty broadcasting. RT does what a broadcaster should do; challenge the powers that be and probe every aspect of the story. Yes, the angle pursued is more often left-libertarian than paleo, but RT is also less statist than American mainstream media. (And they happen to feature my own paleolibertarian column, which takes courage too.)

As the talented Gayane Chichakyan has noted, Julian Assange’s new RT program is making the American mainstream nuttier than normal. Chichakyan has editorialized about mainstream’s protest against letting Assange loose on air—Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Ed Schultz (who recommended death to Assange); all were apoplectic. (On The Other Channels, we’re accustomed to the wilderness of women reporters—Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, Tamron Toots Hall, etc.)

Gayane hinted that the malfunctioning media’s objection to more of a variety in opinion seems to have at its goal the further closing of the already atherosclerotic American mind.

In any event, Assange is sure shaking things up, starting with an interview with Hezbollah leader Sayyid Nasrallah.

Next Assange refereed repartee between David Horowitz, whom he described as “a radical right-wing Zionist,” and “Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian sociologist, philosopher and former anti-communist dissident, who turned communist.” (Yes, “Saying ‘I’m a Socialist’ = Saying ‘I’m a Massive idiot.'”)

I was disappointed that Mr. Horowitz was described as of the “radical right wing.” He himself would cop to neoconservatism.

Step Closer to Nationalizing Natural Gas

Barack Obama, Constitution, Energy, Ethics, Government, Regulation, Socialism

As America, led by the mindless media, fusses and frets over the parasites and the prostitutes—the poor women have been stiffed by the worms, as in not always paid for services rendered—news comes, via the SPPI Blog (hat tip to Roger Chaillet), that BHO has surreptitiously issued a Presidential Executive Order:

The Supporting Safe and Responsible Development of Unconventional Domestic Natural Gas Resources Executive Order seeks to create what amounts to a Presidential super committee that will oversee the regulation and development of the ‘unconventional’ natural gas industry for the purpose of ensuring a long-term natural gas supply for the United States, as well as to do so in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.

Expect energy costs to go up some more, although the last is the least of our problems.

The Powers Of Obama’s ‘Politburo of Proctologists’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Not even the US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli can muster a spirited defense of ObamaCare. Said Verrilli, almost apologetically, on Tuesday before the Supreme Court: “Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, but this is something about which the people of the United States can deliberate and they can vote, and if they think it needs to be changed, they can change it.” [Oh really?]

Our state’s Attorney General Rob McKenna sees this as the most important case of our lifetime on Federal power under the Commerce clause. The Supreme Court was treating it very seriously, as have all the courts so far, in ruling on the individual mandate. The power to order individuals into private contract, says McKenna, is made up. It’s not as if it had been lying around undiscovered.

It’s a shame that McKenna seems to both support and anticipate ‘severability”—an outcome whereby the individual mandate is severed from the rest of the law, which is upheld.

To the fatuous point of the health-care market being unique, and thus requiring special treatment by the state, McKenna counters that uniqueness is not a constitutional principle.

The issue here is not healthcare policy but Federal power, he says, intimating that Obama’s “politburo of proctologists” cannot “create commerce in order to regulate it.” This is a first, claims McKenna.

As was pointed out in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” the number of uninsured, by choice or not by choice, is grossly exaggerated.

“The key legal thinker in developing the case against the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate” is Facebook Friend Randy Barnett. Randy is “the originator of the activity/inactivity distinction” being used in the arguments against Obamacare.

Here is Randy’s interview on Ezra Klein’s WaPo’s blog.

Especially pertinent, in the Klein interview, is Randy’s distinction between “the government’s power to tax in order to pay for Medicare, which is a single-payer insurance program that [you’ll] get when over 65,” and the same entity’s constitutional authority to compel the individual to “self-insure on the private market before [he’s] 65.”

RB: “There are several answers, but I’ll limit myself to two. First, there’s the text of the Constitution itself. The text of the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to levy taxes on people and on income. We can’t dispute that. It does not give Congress the power under its commerce power, at least not expressly, to make them do business with private companies.
The second point I would make is that the duty to pay taxes is part of your duty to support the government in return for the protections the government gives you. What the government is claiming here is this power — and this ought to disturb people on the left — to make people do business with private companies when Congress thinks it’s convenient.”

It’s safe to say that even libertarians like Randy who might uphold the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses as constitutional, have to agree that Thomas Jefferson would probably be appalled with it all.