Rid Us of Regulation

Constitution, Economy, Labor, Regulation

When BHO or any other politician utters trite promises about creating jobs for the little people, we, their Lilliputian subjects, should be able to pipe-up about the regulatory barriers to entering the workforce erected by the very same people.

• A license to speak to tourists without which you go to jail for 90 days
• A test to “practice” flower-arranging
• $30,000 mandatory outlay for an embalming room, if you want to open a funeral parlor

“How are these laws able to get enacted?” asks RT? “Lobbyists and special interest groups infiltrate politics on the federal and local level. They urge lawmakers to pass regulations that benefit them, and keep the competition out. The result: an America growing increasingly regulated. According to the Institute of Justice, in the 1950’s 1 in 20 occupations required a government permit. Today it’s one in three. And all this red tape is costing taxpayers billions.”

Lewd licensure is not a function of BHO’s administration alone, although he has increased the number of billions transferred from the private economy to the blood-sucking bureaucracy.

I would, however, counter that the culprits here are not the lobbyists, who have not taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and work to benefit not factions, but all folks. Politicians have the power to refuse to enact these laws. However, as always, it seems that, psychologically, it is easier for news agencies and the people to blame corporations, Wall Street and K Street, instead of the bums who capitulate to these special interests.

California’s Killer Eugenics Program Inspired The Nazis

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Ethics, Fascism, History, Individual Rights, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

Left-liberalism is illiberal. It doesn’t respect individual liberties, preferring that a custodial managerial class get to delimit and limit individual rights in the interests of the so-called greater good. Much like fascism, the essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that ought to be implemented by an all-powerful state. (Voltaire, a rather cleverer Frenchman, said that Rousseau is to the philosopher as the ape is to man.)

It thus comes as no surprise to discover that California ran so robust a program of forced sterilization in the 1930s and beyond—that the Nazi Party reached out for the state’s advice (and literature, in particular a book titled, “Sterilization and Human Betterment”). Both California’s Courts and the president of Stanford University supported the practice.

Also telling is the fact that, as CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen documents below,, California has yet to make restitution to the victims. On the other hand, a historically red state like North Carolina has compensated its far fewer victims.

UPDATED: Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam

Feminism, Gender, Liberty, Ron Paul, Socialism, Welfare

The following is excerpted from my new column, “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam”:

… As sincere as she is in her conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” are the responsibility of other taxpayers, Sandra Fluke is no statistical fluke.

Sisters love the state.

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, dates the statism of American women to the 1980s, a function of “Ronald Reagan’s assertive foreign policy,” but also of the female affinity for bigger government. Kohut confirms that, “Then, as now, women [have] tended to favor a larger role for government programs than do men.”

John Derbyshire traces remarks about the ladies’ lack of proclivity for liberty to 391 B.C.

“That was the year Aristophanes staged his play ‘The Assemblywomen,’” Derbyshire documents in “We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.” “In the play, the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.”

George Orwell, whose insights into these matters were very deep, also noticed this. He has Winston Smith, the protagonist of ‘1984,’ observe: ‘It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy’ (p. 88).

Having lived in communist China “in the years just after Mao,” Derbyshire seconds Orwell. “If you wanted to hear … utterly unreflective parroting of the Party line, a woman was always your best bet.”

Libertarians like to imagine that their constituency is differently derived than that of the Republicans. However, the fantasy that women flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy. I’ve attended those libertarian gatherings in which, after “subtracting the dragged-along wives and girlfriends from these events, the normal male-female ratio of the remainder is around ten to one” (p. 86).

Granted, among the fair sex, Rep. Ron Paul fares better than his Republican rivals—no doubt because of his trenchant opposition to the Warfare State. But Obama beats Paul handily. “Against Mr. Paul,” notes the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Obama …wins among women by 18 points and loses among men by four points.” …

The underlying truth of this very public tiff remains this: On the whole, extending the franchise to females was in furtherance of egalitarianism, not freedom. …

The complete column is “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam.”

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UPDATE (March 9): Myron is being cynical with his Archy Bunker comment, but is there any wonder millions of ordinary American men, who did the right thing for decades, and went to work to support their families, are no longer doing this? That white America is unraveling? They’ve been piled on as Myron has done in jest (I hope) repeatedly, called cavemen and primitives and worse by The enlightened Class, only to be replaced in the affections of their families with the state.

UPDATED: ‘Three Blind (NEOCONSERVATIVE) Mice’

Classical Liberalism, John McCain, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

“They have been called everything from the three amigos, the three blind mice and the ‘axis of error’,” RT editorializes. They are “Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham,” who “are just about as close as anyone in the US Senate. They travel together, make joint media appearances and seem to sing the same song in their appeals to the American people. That song often revolves around the need for more war.”

And they’re gunning for Iran and Syria.

The origin of the words to the Three blind mice rhyme are based in English history. The ‘three blind mice’ were three noblemen who adhered to the Protestant faith who were convicted of plotting against the Queen – she did not have them dismembered and blinded as inferred in Three blind mice – but she did have them burnt at the stake!(Here)

The moniker doesn’t work for McMussolini and the other two for many reasons, one of which is that the modern-day ignoble trio will come to no harm for their treason.

UPDATE (March the Eighth): How opportune. In his New American column, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., has a fabulous primer on the strongmen of neoconservative thinking. Pay attention, in particular, to Jack’s meticulous habit of mind in tracing the sin of abstraction in the thinking examined, whereby “reason and morality are dislodged from the flow of history.”

Kerwick concludes:

“… For neoconservatives, reason consists of universal, abstract moral principles in accordance with which societies everywhere must be organized. For conservatives, in glaring contrast, reason and morality are embodied in culturally and historically-specific traditions.”

READ “An Honest Assessment of Neoconservatism.”