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:
Rep. Paul Ryan: A Voice of Reason in a Congress Gone Mad
Paul Ryan is a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and one of the sharpest tools in the GOP shed. In today's Washington Post, in a piece that can only be described as "systematic" and "brilliant", Rep. Ryan presents the problems with the current health care "reform" bill being proposed by the Obama-Pelos-Reid triumvirate of incompetence and corruption, and lays out the very real legislative alternatives he (and many others) have been promoting for months.
An excerpt:
Through any analytical lens, the legislation will not address the central problem of skyrocketing health-care costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that families' premiums could rise 10 to 13 percent; private-sector actuarial estimates top these already high numbers. The higher costs are driven by federalizing the regulation of insurance, narrowing consumers' options and reducing competition among providers. The health-care market would be dominated by government programs and the largest insurance companies, operating as de facto government utilities.
Rather than tackle the drivers of health inflation, the legislation chases the ever-increasing premiums with huge new subsidies. Already, Washington has no idea how to pay for the unfunded promises in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- and creating this new entitlement would accelerate our path to fiscal ruin. When you strip away the double-counting, expose the hidden costs that must be funded and look at the price tag when the legislation is fully implemented, the claims of deficit reduction are as hollow as claims of cost containment.
This legislation includes a range of job-killing tax hikes and controls on all Americans -- to fund this new entitlement and to penalize employers and individuals who don't play by Washington's new rules. The CBO said last July that "requiring employers to offer health insurance, or pay a fee if they do not, is likely to reduce employment." The mix of mandates and higher costs will drive Americans into government exchanges, with an ever-enlarging number reliant upon taxpayer subsidies for their care. The architecture is designed to give the government greater control over what kind of insurance is available, how much health care is enough and which treatments are worth paying for.
Ryan closes out the column with this:
If this debate had actually been about health care, we could have worked together to get a grip on costs, make quality care more accessible, address exclusions for preexisting conditions and realign the incentives of insurance companies with those of patients and doctors. Yet this process -- including its embarrassing conclusion -- demonstrates that the debate has never been about health-care policy but, instead, paternalistic ideology.
Should the Democrats' health-care train wreck make it to the president's desk, it will be a pyrrhic victory, and its devastating consequences will take their toll on our health-care system, our budget and our economy.
Read the entire Post piece here, and PLEASE send it along to those who are on the fence in regards to their support for Obamacare.
Here's Rep. Ryan at the president's umpteenth summit last month, handling his health care business like a pro:
Tribune Editorial Page: Keep The Best Teachers
The Chicago Tribune is anything but a bastion of conservative opinions, but today's opinion from the editorial page is something all Americans ought to be able to get behind.
Last fall, Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 229 teachers. Here's what was unusual about that: She chose who would stay and who would go based on the competence of the teachers.
That's a radical departure for public education. Most schools across the country make personnel decisions largely or entirely based on seniority. Last in, first out. Illinois law requires that teacher layoffs be based on seniority unless a school district and its local union negotiate different rules. Result: seniority is the deciding factor everywhere, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. So law and custom protect older teachers — whether they're good teachers or bad teachers.
What a shock to learn that the Peoples' Republic of Illinois has such a backwards, ineffective system for hiring and firing teachers!
Many cash-strapped Illinois school districts face the prospect of layoffs in the coming months. Unless outdated rules are scrapped, the schools will have to fire some of their best teachers because they happen to be younger teachers.
They also will have to fire more teachers. Younger teachers have lower salaries, so when schools operate strictly on seniority, they have to let more teachers go to achieve a certain dollar savings.
Yes, there is value in experience. But the National Council on Teacher Quality reports that "teachers in their third year of teaching are generally about as effective as long-tenured teachers."
Seniority can be considered, but along with such factors as competence, drive, classroom performance and willingness to learn new skills. Younger teachers, for instance, may be more computer-savvy and thus more capable of teaching the tech skills children need to succeed.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that almost everyone has a teacher who impacted their life in a positive way. We want to honor teachers, and we want the best possible teachers in our school systems. But tax dollars aren't charity to be doled out based on a general feeling of good will towards people who enter the teaching profession. People must earn those dollars, same as any other job.
And it is the constitutional duty of those running these bloated bureacracies at the state and federal level to do everything in their power to see that the best possible people are hired in the most efficient way.
All governments have to find ways to lure and keep the best and brightest in their work force. Where is that more important than in the classroom?
School vouchers, anyone? Real change requires real change. Enough talk. If we're serious about education, then let's put our votes where our mouths are and let our elected officials know that changes like the ones the Tribune is talking about matter to us.
Obamacare Is A Loser
You simply cannot explain the scope and breadth of the Obamacare debacle in one column...unless your last name is Krauthammer.
As an aspiring writer and commentator, I spend a great deal of time reading the books and articles and speeches of the people I feel effectively communicate the ideas I believe in better than anyone else.
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and Fox News Channel is one of those people.
Every night of the week, at roughly 6:40 p.m. (Eastern Time), Dr. Krauthammer is a member of the "All-Star Panel" on Special Report With Brett Baier. (You should be watching or DVR-ing this every day). And each Friday, his nationally syndicated column is read in newspapers all across the country.
Today he treated his reading audience to this gem on the current state of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care plan:
After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.
The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.
Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.
The Health Care Summit last week was a dog-and-pony show, meant to portray the Republicans as obstructionists and big old meanies. But the president was confronted by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and the fact-based disagreements conservatives have with Obama's brand of "reform." Republicans DO have ideas, and many key members of the GOP on the state and national level have been promoting them all year.
Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.
Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.
Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
And now, in what can only be described as the most brilliant summation of the American peoples' opposition to Obamacare, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer in its rarest of forms:
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.
However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.
Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.
Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
That's it, folks. Everything the Left promises sounds nice on an individual level, which is how they present their collectivist policies. The problem is, of course, that all of their policies are implemented on a national level and cannot possibly succeed. This is the heart of the debate between Right and Left: can the few rule, and provide for, the many? Can "experts" in Washington "control" the expenses and costs of 300 million-plus liberty-loving Americans?
The good intentions of liberals are heart-warming and bone-chilling, all at the same time.
Chuck closes out his devastatingly informative column with the following:
The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.
Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.
Walter says Bill isn’t your biggest problem
There is a real, palpable disdain for the "rich" in this country. I think that disdain is to our own detriment.
So does economist Walter E. Williams. As he points out in his latest column, the "rich", like Bill Gates, is not the person to fear or direct your ire at. Politicians, even small-time local ones, have much more control over your life.
Bill Gates is the world's richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels.
...
Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It's a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.
Can't say it better than that. Read the rest of the piece here.
Dr. Williams is an equal-opportunity mis-truster of politicians:
Responsibility is for losers
Greece is bankrupt and counting on Germany to bail them out. Sound familiar? The United States is moving closer to European-style socialism with every government annexation of power. THIS is why something like the health care debate matters.
Mark Steyn, writing for National Review Online, breaks down the broken-down economy (and collective mentality) of the Greeks.
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.
He continues:
We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.
Read the rest of his latest column here, and ask yourself this: "What worth having in this life does not come with sacrifice?" There really is no such thing as a free lunch, and we're going to have to make the tough, unpopular decisions if we want to preserve economic, personal, political, and religious liberty.
What are you willing to do for those things?
Steyn closes his piece with a wake-up call to those who think "It can't happen here."
Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway.
The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans.
What could go wrong?
Health Care Summit = Joke
President Obama and the Democrats have been trying for a year to get their brand of health care "reform" passed. They had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, yet nothing happened. The American people have shown up at town hall meetings, called and emailed their representatives, and the people of the most liberal state in the Union (Massachusetts) turned out in droves to vote for a Republican whose sole campaign promise was to vote against the president's health care package.
Today he is holding what seems to be his 54th "summit", this time on health care. Liberals love talking about things when they could have just been doing them. But why pass up a chance to try and make the Republicans look like the overly-used cliche "Party of No"? Why pass up an opportunity for a photo-op that makes un-informed Americans think you are really trying to reach across the aisle?
This is all you need to know about the White House's true intentions:
From Politico.com
After a brief period of consultation following the White House health reform summit, congressional Democrats plan to begin making the case next week for a massive, Democrats-only health care plan, party strategists told POLITICO.
A Democratic official said the six-hour summit was expected to “give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans.”
Democrats plan to begin rhetorical, and perhaps legislative, steps toward the Democrats-only, or reconciliation, process early next week, the strategists said.
After the summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid planned to take the temperature of their caucuses.
“The point [of the summit] is to alter the political atmospherics, and it will take a day or two to sense if it succeeded,” the official said.
"We're going to have a health care summit to look like we're listening to the people, but you can go jump off a bridge for all we care America 'cause we're not really listening anyway.
You republicans never listen...and oh, btw, we're not listening to what you say in this meeting we called to show how much more we listen to our political enemies than you. Meanies!"
Wait until you get home tonight and watch how ill-tempered President Obama was with Republicans like John McCain (AZ) and Eric Cantor (WI).
I smell another Beer Summit to mend some fences!
This is the Left's attempt to give the federal government control over health care permanently, and create a new and eternal entitlement. The president has said so himself, in his own words. It is about ideology (progressivism) and it is about politics (buying voters). It stands against everything the Founders envisioned.
Has the Stimulus Worked?
From Robert J. Barro, writing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:
The first anniversary of the Obama stimulus package generated a lot of discussion about whether and how much the package (originally estimated at $787 billion but now priced at $862 billion) moderated the recession. These are complex questions, and their answers require more than merely counting the quantity of goods and services that the government purchased or the number of people that the government hired.
We need to ask whether the government's spending reduced or enhanced private spending and whether public-sector hiring lowered or raised private hiring. This requires an empirical model based on the history of past fiscal actions in the U.S. or other countries. The administration must have such a model, but my own analysis makes me skeptical about the numbers they've reported about GDP increases and saved jobs.
I'm so disgusted with this new "jobs bill" that was passed this week. Just read the rest of the Barro article and mentally prepare for November.
Walter E. Williams Isn’t Happy About The Census
Dr. Williams is certainly one of the clearest thinkers and best communicators of free market principles in the country, but no one has ever accused him of mincing words. His target this week: the 2010 U.S. Census.
The Census Bureau estimates that the life cycle cost of the 2010 Census will be from $13.7 billion to $14.5 billion, making it the costliest census in the nation's history.
That's a pretty penny in a time of economics crisis. Williams sees not only wanton waste in the Census, but a unnecessary (and un-Constitutional) intrusion into the lives of American taxpayers and voters.
What purpose did the Constitution's framers have in mind ordering an enumeration or count of the American people every 10 years? The purpose of the headcount is to apportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives and derived from that, along with two senators from each state, the number of electors to the Electoral College.
He continues
The Census Bureau also asks questions about race, and I want to know what does my race have to do with apportioning the U.S. House of Representatives?
If I'm asked about race, I might respond the way I did when filling out a military form upon landing in Inchon, Korea in 1960; I checked off Caucasian. The warrant officer who was checking forms told me that I made a mistake and should have checked off "Negro." I told him that people have the right to self-identify themselves and I'm Caucasian. The warrant officer, trying to cajole me, asked why I would check off Caucasian instead of Negro. I told him that checking off Negro would mean getting the worse job over here. I'm sure the officer changed it after I left.
Most people don't care that the government incrementally intrudes into their lives more and more each year. People want jobs and food on the table and some vacation time. I get that. Dr. Williams gets that.
But there are some principles and values and ideals that are worth taking a stand for NOW so that we can avoid things like top-down Socialism LATER. On a very basic level, and if nothing else raises your ire about this year's Census, consider the absolute waste of time and taxpayers' money it is to hire the workers to administer and collect the Census data (many of whom quit after getting paid for their "Census Training").
From The Washington Post:
Thousands of workers hired last year for temporary positions by the U.S. Census Bureau were trained and paid but never worked for the agency, while others who fulfilled assignments overbilled for travel expenses, according to an audit released Tuesday.
Nice. Here's more from Williams on the waste in government:
Breitbart, Big Government, and Welfare
I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with Andrew Breitbart, but I couldn't recommend him (and his work) more highly to you. Chances are, if you do know who he is, it is because of the now-famous ACORN-prostitute videos he helped facilitate the release of last September.
As great as those videos were, and the fall out for the radical-Leftist ACORN was, Breitbart has so much more to offer.
His site, Breitbart.com, is the closest thing to DrudgeReport.com in terms of timely, important news reporting. What is more, Andrew has launch a series of websites intended to specifically combat progressive and liberal ideas in the areas of Government, Hollywood, and Journalism.
Spend a few minutes and check each of those sites out, and make Breitbart.com a "Favorites" on your home computer.
At Big Government.com today, Dan Mitchell discusses the New York Times' report that more and more New Yorkers are accepting the welfare entitlement known as food stamps. As frustrating as this news is, what makes it even worse is the key role some Republicans have played in promoting the culturally-crippling practice of A forcibly taking from B to give to C.
The ranking Republican on the Agriculture Committee is a big defender of the program, in part because of the sordid pact among urban and rural politicians to support each other’s handouts. And President George W. Bush’s food stamp administrator actually had the gall to assert “food stamps is not welfare.” No wonder the burden of federal spending skyrocketed during the reign of so-called compassionate conservatism.
The correct policy, of course, is to get the federal government out of the welfare business. If Mayor Bloomberg thinks it is a “civic duty” to expand food stamps, he should see whether New York City voters agree with him – and want to foot the bill.
What is “Mere Conservatism”?
The basic ideas, ideals, and values that generally define and characterize the central tenets of what today might be termed "modern conservative thought."
We believe that a proper understanding of history, economics, and theology leads to certain conclusions. Many of these are the same conclusions our Founding Fathers arrived at in constructing a "more perfect union."
All ideas and opinions are welcome; not all are correct.
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