Why don’t we just all work for the government?
Why? Well, off the top of my head, perhaps because it is economically unsustainable?
Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine has assembled three pithy, straightforward answers to the question I've posed in the title of this blog-post.
1. They cost too much. As USA Today recently noted, federal employees make on average almost $8,000 more than their private-sector counterparts. When you add in benefits, the gap spreads to about $30,000. State and local government workers make around the same as private-sector counterparts, but their health and retirement packages mean they make significantly more in the end.
2. We can't fire them. The private sector has shed positions in response to slackening demand and the economic downturn. That sort of adjustment is painful but necessary, as it allows the economy to adjust to changing circumstances and workers and employers to move into new activities. Because it is guaranteed certain amounts of tax revenue and has a non-market mind-set, the public sector is largely insulated from such forces and keeps or even adds workers despite changed conditions. The result? We keep paying for things that we don't use, need, or want.
3. They create a permanent lobby for expanded government and higher taxes. Look at California, where teacher unions have spent over $211 million dollars on elections in the past decade. One result is that 40 percent of California's budget must be spent on education, regardless of the number and needs of students. Over the last 10 years, taxpayer contributions to public-sector pension funds has increased by 2000 percent! Such sort of tax-based gladhanding is just getting started. For the first time in history, the number of public-sector union employees is greater than those in the private sector, so expect to see even more lobbying for the sorts of mandatory raises and permanent job security that most of us can only dream of.
Here's a companion video that Reason.com produced for this topic:
The point here is NOT that public sector workers are "bad" or totally unnecessary. We love and support and probably personally know people in our lives who work for the government in some capacity. But the issue is larger and more important than that. For me, it comes down to this: someone who gets their paycheck from the government vote for the people who can give them a raise, cut their salary, grown their department, or slash it all together. It is a conflict of interest that involves billions of other peoples' tax dollars and the decisions made by leaders of a nation of 300 million people.
It would be like baseball changing their rules so that players were the ones who voted for which umpires would oversee their games each day. Or an even more accurate analogy would be the players being able to vote for who would own their team each season.
Prager on MSNBC
MSNBC's David Shuster invited Dennis Prager on to his morning show to comment on the supposed violent, racist aspects of the Tea Party movement. Prager unleashes his eloquence, thoughtfulness, and wit on two unsuspecting liberals.
The assumption on the part of the Left is that all white conservatives are racist and a danger to society because of how "angry" we get about politics. The Right can't simply disagree on principle with the big-government shenanigans of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate...we must be haters who are dangerous with our guns and blogs.
November can't come soon enough.
Max Baucus Ought To Make You Mad
Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), in a moment of clarity last week, explained what Obamacare and the health care "reform" congress has ill-advisedly passed is really all about.
Thanks for at least being honest with us, Max. Too bad it was after the fact. I think it is safe to say that a litmus test for whether you are a conservative or not is if this video makes your skin crawl. If what Senator Baucus says in this clip is in no conflict with your general worldview about the size and role of government, then you are a liberal. It's really as simple as that.
Read more on the Baucus story from the blokes over at BigGovernment.com here.
Harry Reid: He’s “Very Good”?
Vote wrong once, shame on you. Vote wrong twice, you're probably the Senate Majority Leader of the most corrupt, inept, ham-fisted congress in a generation.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mistakenly called out "no" Thursday when asked for his vote on the health care reconciliation bill, setting the chamber howling with laughter.
Reid voted the wrong way when the clerk called for his vote, realized his error and quickly changed his vote to "yes."
"He did it again," someone said amid laughter.
Reid, who spent months persuading fellow senators to vote "yes" on President Obama's top domestic priority, made the same mistake December 24 when voting on the original health care bill.
Wow.
To make things even better (we just say "worse"), Reid touts the new health care legislation as a "new bill of rights." Hmmm...now where have I heard that type of "2nd Bill of Rights" rhetoric before?
Perfect. But don't worry: President Obama taught Constitutional Law in Chicago (while making sure all adjacent communities were thoroughly organized), so why should we expect him and the current Democrats running things in D.C. to know the first thing about the Constitution?
In Times of Trouble, I Turn to Sowell
The mid-term elections in November will be the most important in a generation. Usually it is the presidential elections every four years that bring out the most voters and garner the most attention, but in 2010 things may well be very different.
Thomas Sowell of Stanford University's Hoover Institution writes this in his latest column:
Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for Congressional Democrats and for the President himself. But that is far from certain.
True, President Obama's approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the President will not be on the ballot until 2012.
They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats' control of Congress. As an old song said, "It ain't necessarily so."
He continues:
The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other "historic" changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
What will it matter if Obama's current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.
When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats' control of Congress as well.
But all is not lost. I know it might feel that way right now, in the depressing shadow of this monstrosity of a bill...but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It will take hard work. It will require equipping yourself with knowledge. It means dragging friends and relatives to town hall meetings (and perhaps even Tea Party rallies) this summer and fall.
The upcoming elections in November are critically important. Sowell closes his piece with this:
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don't usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
Let's, as Senator Jim DeMint put it, make health care overhaul Obama's "Waterloo".
The Spirit of Mr. Smith
Jimmy Stewart was the Tom Hanks of his time, minus the liberal nonsense Hanks insists on spewing now and again. He was an all-American actor, and more importantly, a war hero in WWII who appealed personally to President Roosevelt to let him fly combat missions in the European theater.
One of his finest roles came as the passionate, naive, young senator in Mr Smith Goes To Washington. Someone has put together a powerful montage of clips from that film that serve as a reminder of what "we the people" can do when we've had enough of the corruption and back-room dealings this current congress has so blatantly flaunted since August.
The fight over health care is not over. From The Heritage Fondation today:
In 1774, in response to the first Tea Party, the British Parliament issued a series of acts designed to control the colonists, stop their protests and restrict their liberty. The Americans called these “The Intolerable Acts.”
Obamacare is today’s Intolerable Act. In poll after poll, in town hall meetings, in popular protests and in special elections, ordinary Americans have declared their firm opposition to this scheme, only to be derisively dismissed.
This imposition of legislation is intolerable for two reasons:
- Process: The outrageous way in which this massive restructuring of one six of the economy has been pushed through.
- Substance: Huge obligation shifted to future generations, a huge lurch toward European-style welfare states.
The Heritage Foundation will have a full answer to Congress’ action tomorrow and in the days and weeks and months to come. We will do all within our power to recommend, and make the intellectual case for, the repeal of these acts. We will help marshal the full resources of the conservative movement for this cause. You can join the fight to keep America the Land of the Free today
Fortunately, there are no permanent victories or defeats in Washington. For millions of Americans and for Heritage, Round One of this fight is over. Tomorrow morning, we are answering the bell.
Battered Citizen Syndrome
By: R.J. Moeller
My father has been a pastor and marriage counselor for nearly three decades and through the years has heard countless stories that go something like this:
Woman marries (or shacks up with) Man. Things are great for a while. Eventually Woman comes to learn that Man has a proclivity to abuse those closest to him. Whether we’re talking physically, verbally, emotionally – it’s all abuse. Woman’s friends and relatives tell her to split for her safety and/or sanity. Instead, Woman lashes out at concerned friends and relatives and insists on staying in abusive relationship. Woman fears being alone, fears being financially independent, and fears the abuse is deserved.
We all know people trapped in varying degrees of unhealthy relationships that refuse to acknowledge that the jig is up and a change is needed. There are always excuses that someone trapped in scenarios such as this can make to justify staying in it longer than they should. Some of those excuses are legitimate, and some – not so much.
But the guy can be really nice…He pays for everything…Where would I find a job to support myself?...He wasn’t always like this…I can be too demanding and unappreciative of what he does for me…Other couples have problems like this too…I can make this work…We just need a fresh start.
Human beings are able to convince themselves of anything.
When you are dating someone who turns out to be abusive, you can walk away. But after certain points in a relationship, namely marriage and having children, the ability to leave, the simplicity of just cutting all ties, becomes understandably (and appropriately) more complicated. Divorce and custody battles are the familial revolutions a spouse escaping abuse must be willing to pursue if they (and their kids) are to have any chance at real freedom, peace, and prosperity.
But divorce and custody battles are the last option anyone wants to pursue. Those things may in fact be necessary, but they are not desirable. They are devastating and painful, and require a great deal of courage and emotional fortitude. They are points of “No Return.”
If such traumatic events could have been avoided, anyone who has lived through them would have done anything to do so.
America: we have that chance right now.
The relationship between the citizen and the type of government envisioned by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid is an abusive one. It is an unhealthy one. It is a disastrous one. It is soul-destroying and economy-crippling.
Just like the abusive dating or marriage relationship, the relationship between the citizen and his or her government in a nation that controls everything from education to health care usually starts off on an attractive, positive note. Workers are wooed with promises of better, more secure jobs. Parents are seduced with federally-funded pre-K through graduate school education for their children. Everyone gets cheaper, higher quality health care and costs (magically) will not rise.
Ulysses never knew such deceptively-alluring siren calls.
Who wouldn’t love to hear that their job is etched in federally-mandated stone? What student isn’t looking to pass the buck on the staggering debt that accrues after obtaining the higher education near-necessary to “succeed” in this cut-throat world we live in? How could someone in good conscience turn down health care that is both superior in quality and cheaper in cost?
The honeymoon a citizenry shares with socially engineered collectivism is oh so sweet.
But after all of the courting with pie-in-the-sky pledges has ended, and the emotional buzz of initial infatuation has subsided, what always ends up happening is this: the citizenry quickly realizes their federal lover not only snores loud at night and leaves wet towels in a mold-inducing ball on the bathroom floor, but that Big Brother intends to perpetually bloat in size and scope into nearly every aspect of their lives. All of this is of course done in the name of “progress”, “compassion”, and my personal favorite, “social justice”. (Does “social” honesty, or “social” humility, exist as well?)
The road to emotional serfdom for an abused spouse who cannot (or will not) sever ties is traveled one denial at a time. The same is true of the citizen in a once-freer nation who begins to witness the decay of personal liberties and the erosive power of systematic corruption among the ranks of their elected leaders and refuses to recognize the encroaching enslavement for what it is. There is always someone else to blame or something else to excuse away the actions of people in power who promised us the world, but ended up taking our souls.
They don’t really mean to takeover 1/6 of the U.S. economy via health care “reform”…All politicians conduct flagrantly unethical buy-offs of other members of congress to enact massive, transformational pieces of legislation…We deserve welfare because of what white people in the South did decades and centuries ago…I won’t be able to feed my kids breakfast without free government meals at school…The reason public schools are so bad is because greedy Republicans won’t let the kindhearted Democrats spend more of those rich peoples’ money on them…Trans-fats are bad for you anyway…Guns kill people; people don’t…George W. Bush was such a dummy and didn’t care about minorities…Barack Obama seems like such a nice man, and he promised me he’d pay for my cell phone bills if I voted for him.
When they turn out to be unhealthy to be around, or a threat to the vitality and freedom of your society and government, we don’t like to admit that the people we picked to be our significant others (or elected representatives) are in fact cruel and dangerous (or at the very least, wildly incompetent). We’d rather suffer in silence or blame others than accept the fact that we were either swindled by someone who misrepresented themselves or were too smitten (or lazy) to notice (and investigate) the warning signs.
Nowhere is this unwillingness to appreciate how much harm your bedfellows have caused you clearer than in the half-century long relationship between the black community and liberal Democrat politicians, especially in urban areas like Chicago, New Orleans and Detroit.
It doesn’t matter that liberal Democrats have dominated the political power structure in a city like New Orleans for 50 to 60 years as jobs fled from higher taxes, more of the people they claimed to be helping ended up on the government dole, and corruption reached mafia-like levels. It doesn’t matter that hard work, self-sacrifice, and personal responsibility are the characteristics that typify not only inner-city black kids who achieve success in life, but white kids from the suburbs as well.
What does matter is that liberal Democrats from Berkley to Boston feel good about themselves for promoting bigger and bigger government budgets and programs. What matters is that race be injected in to every single solitary socio-political discussion to intimidate whites and keep blacks voting “D” every two and four years.
God help the black student or teacher at a public school or university who publicly espouses conservative or libertarian beliefs. Like any scorned lover who hears in their significant other’s voice that he or she is beginning to figure out they don’t have to take the abuse anymore, committed big-government liberals launch cruel and unparalleled personal attacks on any member of a minority group that dares to question the conventional Leftist wisdom.
But I’m no heartless jerk. I completely understand why so many people who currently depend on government assistance continue to vote the way they do. But that doesn’t make it right, or even desirable, for those people stuck in an abusive citizen-government relationship to keep putting off confronting the reality that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I fully appreciate that there are actually more white people on Food Stamps than blacks or Latinos, so unhealthy dependency on Big Brother is not merely a race-based phenomenon. It’s a collectivist, socialist, Leftist, modern American liberal Democrat phenomenon. It’s a European phenomenon.
Examples of the negative effects of injurious relationships between a citizen and their over-controlling government abound. People living in socialist and socialist-like countries give less of their time and money to charity because their taxes are so high and the assume the government will take care of those in need. The number one predictor of adult poverty is having been born into a single-parent home, a situation exponentially more common for someone with parents who are financially-dependent on the government themselves. Patients under socialized medicine in countries like Canada wait longer for inferior health care, and you are nearly 20% more likely to die from cancer north of the border than in the United States.
The reason the health care debate that has been raging for the better part of a year is so incredibly important is simple: socialized medicine, the only logical conclusion of the current “reforms” being promulgated by the White House and leadership in Congress, is a threshold that once crossed can never be reversed. It forever and unalterably changes the relationship between the free American citizen and his or her government. It is an entitlement that, short of another depression, will never be repealed.
Panels and commissions comprised of life-long bureaucrats in Washington D.C. oversee the most intimate, personal information in your life. The salaries and placement of doctors are set by “experts” thousands of miles away. Surgeries and procedures are ranked in order of importance, and should you find yourself stuck with an unpopular ailment, you wait because they tell you to wait. Rich people still get the best doctors, as they always will (a reality people need to grow up and accept), but the median quality of care diminishes as the costs (largely due to inefficiency and rampant corruption) continue to skyrocket. Companies who have been inventing the life-saving medicines we all enjoy are punished for their “greedy” profits, and therefore have less incentive to take the risks they do. No longer is the government a safety net and umpire; Uncle Sam becomes both umpire and entire 9-man roster on the field.
And worst of all: health care and medical issues become politicized. People on welfare vote for politicians that promise more welfare. This isn’t rocket science, folks. Every politician, out of necessity, will be forced to promise more and more free lunches that they don’t know how to make and don’t have the ingredients to prepare. As the great Alexis de Tocqueville put it nearly 200 years ago: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
For Obamacare to work, we would have to trust ourselves to be monastically prudent in what we demand of the government agencies running health care, and trust our elected leaders to be more cost-effective, efficient, and honorable than any governing body has in human history.
As of the writing of this column, we’re still just courting the idea of handing over so much control of our lives to the federal government. No legislative vows have been exchanged. We still have time to walk away, and walk towards real solutions to the rising costs of health care.
I know how hard it can be to discern where an idea (or relationship) will lead you (or your country) 5, 10, or 50 years from now; but please believe me when I say that by calling and emailing your congressmen and senators to voice your opposition to the Obama health care debacle, you will be avoiding the economic and political abuse and suffering that will most certainly follow its passage.
Act now, act boldly, and find the candidates in 2010 who are serious about upholding the Constitution, who preach and practice fiscal responsibility, and who are gutsy enough to tell their Party’s leaders “No!” when presented with bribes, kick-backs, and sweetheart deals in exchange for their vote.
You don’t deserve a government that mistreats you and your hard-earned tax dollars…unless you allow it to keep perpetrating the same harms on you and your neighbors. You can help end the madness.
Do it now, because believe when I say that you’re not going to like what it will take to beat back a suffocating government further down the road.
Moeller Does Miami
I am very excited to be in Miami, FL this week for a conference hosted by the conservative think-tank The Acton Institute. I will be here until Sunday morning, so for the next four days blog-posts here at AVITW will be limited to what time I have in between sessions on the topic of: "Property Rights, Economic Growth, and the Environment".
Doesn't sound like anything I'd be interested in, right?
The Acton Institute hosts conferences like this three times a year, all across the nation. Here's how Acton describes their vision for these events:
The Liberty and Markets program offers a deeper look into the core issues at the intersection of truth, liberty, and economics for alumni of Acton’s Towards a Free and Virtuous Society and Acton University programs.
Utilizing a format of three lectures and six Socratic discussion sessions, each conference provides an environment of intense dialogue and exploration. To insure active engagement with both the ideas and faculty, participation is capped at 18 attendees per event.
The program is intellectually demanding; participants are required to do advanced reading (approximately 250 pages) and must be prepared to offer comments and defend their views throughout the weekend.
I'll be reporting to you all about the event next week.
Until then, watch this example of the quality of work that Acton does:
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