Brazil behaving like an adult. Dilma ran them out of money now it's time to reduce the power of government.

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May 31, 2016 4:00 pm

Brazil moves to shrink the state

Joe Leahy in São Paulo

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©Reuters

Michel Temer, Brazil's interim president

How do you shrink a government? That is a thorny political question anywhere in the world but especially in Brazil, which has traditionally favoured a bloated state. 

Now, however, the new government of interim president Michel Temer is trying to tackle this issue as it grapples with a fiscal crisis that is threatening to unwind the country’s economic achievements of recent decades. Sign up now

Mr Temer’s answer is as bold as it is unorthodox — a constitutional amendment to freeze for the foreseeable future public expenses in real terms at 2016 levels. If implemented, the move could help cure one of Brazil’s biggest ills — a spendthrift budget with constitutionally mandated expenditures that have led to constant increases in government spending. This has been exacerbated by a blowout in spending by the previous governments of the leftist Workers’ Party, or PT. 

“I’m very encouraged by this,” said Raul Velloso, an economist and specialist on Brazil’s budget. “If we manage to do this, we will free ourselves of the possibility of future populist experiments.” 

Brought to power after congress voted in May to begin impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, Mr Temer and his supporters in congress have staked their rule on solving a deep economic crisis afflicting Brazil. 

The economic dip was fanned by a fall in commodities prices but its ferocity is due to a crisis of confidence among investors in the ability of Ms Rousseff to restore Brazil’s sinking public finances after more than five years in power. 

If gross domestic product in the first three months of this year declined again as expected when the figures were announced on Wednesday, in just two years, Brazil’s per capita real GDP would have declined by nearly 10 per cent, Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos said in a report. 

This would exceed the 7.6 per cent contraction in the economy during the country’s so-called “lost decade” of the 1980s, a period of runaway inflation. He said he expected the economy would start to bottom out during the second half on stabilising sentiment amid hopes “the new administration will be able to boost domestic confidence by showing tangible progress on the fiscal consolidation agenda”. 

Mindful of the need to satisfy investors’ hopes, Mr Temer’s first success as interim leader was to pass a new bill this month setting a more “realistic” target for the budget. 

The bill envisaged a primary fiscal deficit — the balance before interest payments, considered a key gauge of fiscal health in Brazil — at a record of nearly R$171bn for the central government, or 2.75 per cent of GDP. This was up from R$97bn set by Ms Rousseff. 

Once interest rate payments are added, the total deficit for the central government is running at around 10 per cent. This is driving government debt up, placing an enormous strain on the budget with the benchmark Selic rate at 14.25 per cent 

To help solve this, the government is proposing a law restricting any future increases in budgetary spending to the past year’s inflation. 

To implement the law, the government will need to propose a constitutional amendment delinking certain dedicated revenue streams from health and education. It will also in the longer term have to change linkages between the minimum wage and public sector salaries and pensions, a tough issue with the unions. 

The law would help freeze a constant increase in the size of the Brazilian state. Central government spending alone has risen from 14 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 18.6 per cent in 2015. The overall government including states and municipalities spends about 40 per cent of GDP — the equivalent of an advanced economy without the services. 

In a report, Moody’s Investors Service described the proposals as short on detail and “arduous” to implement and said it did not see a clear path to implementing structural reforms. 

“It’s very across-the-board, you could call it a blunt instrument,” Samar Maziad, a senior analyst at Moody’s said of the budget expenses limit. “The important point is to know what exactly is going to be cut and this is why we don’t have enough information.” 

David Beker, an economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said the measure looked “aggressive”. One problem was that it did not allow for countercyclical policy for future economic crises. 

“Normally, you discuss every single year depending on the situation, what you expect for the following year in terms of expenditures,” Mr Beker said. 

However, Mr Velloso said once the economy started growing again, tax revenues would rise at a faster rate than inflation, allowing the government to accumulate ever greater primary fiscal surpluses and pay down debt. 

He said the crisis had created an ideal opportunity to pass such difficult measures. Since most of congress had supported the impeachment, members needed to support Mr Temer’s measures to resurrect the economy or risk being collectively blamed for Brazil’s situation. 

“Temer can go to congress and say: ‘Listen, if we commit an error here, we’ll all be held responsible for the disaster’. We can’t let that happen,” Mr Velloso said.

Conservatism

Schumer once again proving he's a true partisan hack, a tyrant and a truly nasty POS.

Sen. Charles Schumer: David Koch’s ad campaigns are ‘un-American’

Sen. Charles Schumer said Thursday that some of the ads bankrolled by conservative mega-donor David Koch are “un-American.”

“I think the commercials he is running are against the American dream are un-American,” Mr. Schumer, New York Democrat, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I think what Harry Reid was saying is the actions are un-American, and they are, and they should change.”

David and Charles Koch have become favorite targets of Democrats in the run-up to the 2014 election, where they are trying to defend the Senate.

Republicans need to pick up a net of six seats to capture the upper chamber.

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer refused to say whether he agreed with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, who called the Koch brothers “un-American.”

Mr. Schumer said the David Koch-funded ads calling for less government spending could hurt cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.

He said the negative impact of those ads outweigh Mr. Koch’s charitable giving.

“Private charity cannot deal with the major problems we face as good and noble a thing as it is,” the New York Democrat said.

“David Koch’s commercials, which are huge amounts of money, I think they should not be allowed,” he said. “The commercials he runs are not part of the American mainstream, are not what should happen. No two people should have such a huge influence on our politics.”

Schumer exposes his tyrannical nature. His self righteousness is puke inducing. He and Harry Reid are the arbiters of what constitutes acceptable Americanism. 

Schumer follows the Democrat nasty straw man argument. To reduce the size of government automatically means disaster. Obama, Reid, Pelosi and other Democrats don't debate they demonize just like Alinsky advises.

Factual Free-Market Fairness

A superb post by Diedre McCloskey:

The story is, in a few brief mottos to stand for a rich intellectual tradition since the 1880s:  Modern life is complicated, and so we need government to regulate.  Government can do so well, and will not be regularly corrupted.  Since markets fail very frequently the government should step in to fix them.  Without a big government ee cannot do certain noble things (Hoover Dam, the Interstates, NASA).  Antitrust works.  Businesses will exploit workers if government regulation and union contracts do not intervene.  Unions got us the 40-hour week.  Poor people are better off chiefly because of big government and unions.  The USA was never laissez faire.  Internal improvements were a good idea, and governmental from the start.  Profit is not a good guide.  Consumers are usually misled.  Advertising is bad.

Thus Anderson: ”Externalities, asymmetrical information, and other collective action problems are . . . pervasive in economic life.  Countless ways of conducting business reap gains for some while imposing unjust costs on others.  Create a cartel.  Stuff rat feces in sausages.”  Thus Freeman: “It is a truism to say that in order to achieve the benefits of an efficient market economy (increasing productivity, greater economic output, increasing productive capital, etc.), the basic rules of property, contract, and exchange must be structured [by government] to realize efficient market relations.”

No.  The master narrative of High Liberalism is mistaken factually.  Externalities do not imply that a government can do better.  Publicity does better than inspectors in restraining the alleged desire of businesspeople to poison their customers.  Efficiency is not the chief merit of a market economy: innovation is.  Rules arose in merchant courts and Quaker fixed prices long before governments started enforcing them.

I know such replies will be met with indignation.  But think it possible you may be mistaken, and that merely because an historical or economic premise is embedded in front page stories in the New York Times does not make them sound as social science.  It seems to me that a political philosophy based on fairy tales about what happened in history or what humans are like is going to be less than useless.  It is going to be mischievous.

How do I know that my narrative is better than yours?  The experiments of the 20^th century told me so.  It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun.  But anyone who after the 20^th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19^th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries ordinary Europeans were hurt, not helped, by their colonial empires.  Economic growth in Russia was slowed, not accelerated, by Soviet central planning.  American Progressive regulation and its European anticipations protected monopolies of transportation like railways and protected monopolies of retailing like High-Street shops and protected monopolies of professional services like medicine, not the consumers.  “Protective” legislation in the United States and “family-wage” legislation in Europe subordinated women.  State-armed psychiatrists in America jailed homosexuals, and in Russia jailed democrats.  Some of the New Deal prevented rather than aided America’s recovery from the Great Depression.

Unions raised wages for plumbers and auto workers but reduced wages for the non-unionized.  Minimum wages protected union jobs but made the poor unemployable.  Building codes sometimes kept buildings from falling or burning down but always gave steady work to well-connected carpenters and electricians and made housing more expensive for the poor.  Zoning and planning permission has protected rich landlords rather than helping the poor.  Rent control makes the poor and the mentally ill unhousable, because no one will build inexpensive housing when it is forced by law to be expensive.  The sane and the already-rich get the rent-controlled apartments and the fancy townhouses in once-poor neighborhoods.

Regulation of electricity hurt householders by raising electricity costs, as did the ban on nuclear power.  The Securities Exchange Commission did not help small investors.  Federal deposit insurance made banks careless with depositors’ money.  The conservation movement in the Western U. S. enriched ranchers who used federal lands for grazing and enriched lumber companies who used federal lands for clear cutting.  American and other attempts at prohibiting trade in recreational drugs resulted in higher drug consumption and the destruction of inner cities and the incarcerations of millions of young men.  Governments have outlawed needle exchanges and condom advertising, and denied the existence of AIDS.

Germany’s economic Lebensraum was obtained in the end by the private arts of peace, not by the public arts of war.  The lasting East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was built by Japanese men in business suits, not in dive bombers.  Europe recovered after its two 20^th-century civil wars mainly through its own efforts of labor and investment, not mainly through government-to-government charity such as Herbert Hoover’s Commission or George Marshall’s Plan.  Government-to-government foreign aid to the Third World has enriched tyrants, not helped the poor.

The importation of socialism into the Third World, even in the relatively non-violent form of Congress-Party Fabian-Gandhism, unintentionally stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor.  Malthusian theories hatched in the West were put into practice by India and especially China, resulting in millions of missing girls.  The capitalist-sponsored Green Revolution of dwarf hybrids was opposed by green politicians the world around, but has made places like India self-sufficient in grains.  State power in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa has been used to tax the majority of farmers in aid of the president’s cousins and a minority of urban bureaucrats.  State power in many parts of Latin America has prevented land reform and sponsored disappearances.  State ownership of oil in Nigeria and Mexico and Iraq was used to support the party in power, benefiting the people not at all.  Arab men have been kept poor, not bettered, by using state power to deny education and driver’s licenses to Arab women.  The seizure of governments by the clergy has corrupted religions and ruined economies.  The seizure of governments by the military has corrupted armies and ruined economies.

Industrial policy, from Japan to France, has propped up failing industries such as agriculture and small-scale retailing, instead of choosing winners.  Regulation of dismissal has led to high unemployment in Germany and Denmark, and especially in Spain and South Africa.  In the 1960s the public-housing high-rises in the West inspired by Le Courbusier condemned the poor in Rome and Paris and Chicago to holding pens.  In the 1970s, the full-scale socialism of the East ruined the environment.  In the 2000s, the “millennial collectivists,” Red, Green, or Communitarian, oppose a globalization that helps the poor but threatens trade union officials, crony capitalists, and the careers of people in Western non-governmental organizations.

Yes, I know, you want to reject all these factual findings because they are “right-wing” or “libertarian.”  All I ask you to do is, once in a while, consider.  Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.

Follow the link and read it all.

Election Day

An election day reminder from Doc Zero:

The 111^th Congress began by dropping a trillion dollars in debt on the American taxpayer.  The money disappeared in a wild spending spree, buying $2 million jobs in Los Angeles, and evaporating into nonexistent zip codes.  Billions of dollars remain clogged in the filthy pipes of government, producing nothing but more debt through accumulated interest payments.  Much of the “stimulus” money was used to pump lard into government payrolls, creating useless jobs that vanished as soon as the taxpayer subsidies ran dry.  The President recently admitted that the stated reason for appropriating this vast sum of money, the creation of “shovel-ready jobs,” was an outright lie.

Government payrolls, are the only thing that expanded during the past session of Congress.  Public sector jobs multiplied like a virus, and the number of six-figure government employees skyrocketed.  Meanwhile, real unemployment in the private sector – including seasonal adjustments, long-term discouraged workers, and the underemployed – hit 22% nationwide.  The lights burned bright and merry in the plush offices of K Street lobbying firms, while the rest of the economy slid into darkness.

This Congress demonstrated its economic wisdom with the Cash for Clunkers program, which wasted billions of your dollars in a futile attempt to shovel new car sales from one quarter to another, giving them a “success story” to tout for a while… until they realized nobody was gullible enough to consider it successful.  Meanwhile, it drained sales from healthy industries, destroyed the used-car market, and provided incentives for low-income buyers to rack up more debt they cannot afford to repay.

The 111^th congress stank with the corruption of Christopher Dodd, Jack Murtha, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, and Harry Reid.  The ruling Party made it clear that it would go to any lengths to protect its worst members from investigation and punishment.  The agenda of this Congress was conducted behind closed doors, or slipped like poison into the legislative bloodstream, to escape the notice of the American people.  Fat bailouts for loyal union allies were hidden inside bills that were supposed to fund the military.  Nobody knew what this Congress was really voting on… including members of Congress, who didn’t bother to read the bills anyway.

The House of Representatives was presided over by a Speaker of astonishing arrogance, who recklessly abused her power for personal convenience.  Caught in a trap of her own making, after trying to score political points against terrorist interrogation techniques she had been fully briefed on, Nancy Pelosi tried to weasel her way out by claiming the CIA lied to her.  The disgraceful “leadership” of Pelosi and Reid will be studied by generations to come, in the kind of class future kids only have to take when they’re caught skipping more interesting classes to fool around on their hoverboards.

This was a Congress at war with American business, which is a war against American liberty, since business is the instrument through which we invest the hours of our lives.  The 111^th Congress spent its term menacing the private sector with disastrous, economy-killing ideas like cap-and-trade, Card Check, and value-added taxes… then wondered why nobody was creating any jobs.  There’s no point in taking risks and doing the hard work to be a winner, when the losers get taxpayer bailouts, provided they have employees from the right labor unions.

Of course, this is the Congress that shoved ObamaCare down our throats.  Drafted in secret, hidden behind fraudulent cost estimates, and understood by none of the people who voted on it, ObamaCare is the most shocking dereliction of Congressional duty in recent history.  Its architects flirted openly with violating the Constitution to inflict it upon us through reconciliation, before they managed to buy enough votes with our money.  It has already destroyed thousands of jobs, and inflicted painful new costs on hapless workers who thought their health insurance was supposed to get cheaper.

The passage of ObamaCare shattered the myth of the “moderate Democrat” for a generation.  Every one of them is an accomplice to this radical offense against the American people.  Private comments from Congressional representatives made it clear they knew exactly what they were doing to us.  They saddled us with a system designed to fail, and pave the way for something even worse: single-payer socialized medicine.

Faced with electoral destruction at the hands of an enraged populace, the Democrats of the 111^th Congress spent their last days calling the voters stupid and insane.  They scurried out of town without even passing a budget, leaving a recessionary economy tied to the ticking bomb of the expiring Bush tax cuts.
Remember the arrogance.  Remember the cowardice.  Remember the ugly hatred of middle-class America.  Remember the sheer blind stupidity of those who demand the power to write our destiny, when they’re not yelping in surprise at the latest piece of “unexpected” economic news.

Remember the 111^th Congress this Tuesday, and render your verdict in the voting booth.

Bill Whittle's What We Believe

The Iceberg

An all-to-rare new essay up by Bill Whittle is as always a must-read:

But Progressivism is not progressive – it’s ancient. Cyclical. It’s circular. It is, in fact, the symptom and the eventual cause of impending collapse.

In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.

I said that what we today call Progressivism is in fact ancient and circular. Don’t believe me? Well, the great roman orator Cicero, speaking in defense of his friend Sestius, around 55 BC, said – quote:

“Gaius gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw the state treasury would be exhausted.”

When a society – after generations of hard work, sacrifice and hardship – reaches a certain level of prosperity, “Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell and Gaius Gracchus – that last Progressive died in 121 BC – assume that the prosperity is endless, and push for more and more people to get more and more goods and services for less and less work. Why? Because – as today, in America, as with the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, Rome, Greece, Eqypt, Babylon… They do it for political power. They live for political power. This “Progressivism” is ancient, recurring, tyrannical and ruinous.

And we voted for it. Just like the Romans did.

We can see from Cicero that throughout history, the disease is always the same – too much security and prosperity breeds laziness, narcissism, resentment and entitlement.

So if this is the cycle of civilization, and we see these same recurring signs around us in abundance today – how can there be any hope?

Go and read the whole thing.

The Limits of the Welfare State

An excellent column today by George Will:

Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of "progressivism," was the first President critical of the nation's founding. Barack Obama's Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake's rejection of limited government.

Lack of "a limiting principle" is the essence of progressivism, according to William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in his new book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." The Founders, he writes, believed that free government's purpose, and the threats to it, is found in nature. The threats are desires for untrammeled power, desires which, Madison said, are "sown in the nature of man." Government's limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.

Wilsonian progressives believe that History is a proper noun, an autonomous thing. It, rather than nature, defines government's ever-evolving and unlimited purposes. Government exists to dispense an ever-expanding menu of rights -- entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being.

The name "progressivism" implies criticism of the Founding, which we leave behind as we make progress. And the name is tautological: History is progressive because progress is defined as whatever History produces. History guarantees what the Supreme Court has called "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

The cheerful assumption is that "evolving" must mean "improving." Progressivism's promise is a program for every problem, and progressivism's premise is that every unfulfilled desire is a problem.

Franklin Roosevelt, an alumnus of Wilson's administration, resolved to "resume" Wilson's "march along the path of real progress" by giving government "the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity." He repudiated the Founders' idea that government is instituted to protect pre-existing and timeless natural rights, promising "the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order."

He promised "a right to make a comfortable living." Presumably, the judiciary would define and enforce the delivery of comfort. Specifically, there could be no right to "do anything which deprives others" of whatever "elemental rights" the government decides to dispense.

Today, government finds the limitless power of dispensing not in Madison's Constitution of limited government, but in Wilson's theory that the Constitution actually frees government from limitations. The liberating -- for government -- idea is that the Constitution is a "living," evolving document. Wilson's Constitution is an emancipation proclamation for government, empowering it to regulate all human activities in order to treat all human desires as needs and hence as rights. Unlimited power is entailed by what Voegeli calls government's "right to discover new rights."

"Liberalism's protean understanding of rights," he says, "complicates and ultimately dooms the idea of a principled refusal to elevate any benefit that we would like people to enjoy to the status of an inviolable right." Needs breed rights to have the needs addressed, to the point that Lyndon Johnson, an FDR protege, promised that government would provide Americans with "purpose" and "meaning."

Although progressivism's ever-lengthening list of rights is as limitless as human needs/desires, one right that never makes the list is the right to keep some inviolable portion of one's private wealth or income, "regardless," Voegeli says, "of the lofty purposes social reformers wish to make of it." Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be, but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is. Furthermore, by making a welfare state a fountain of rights requisite for democracy, progressives, in effect, declare that democratic deliberation about the legitimacy of the welfare state is illegitimate.

"By blackening the skies with crisscrossing dollars," Voegeli says, the welfare state encourages people "to believe an impossibility: that every household can be a net importer of the wealth redistributed by the government." But the welfare state's problem, today becoming vivid, is socialism's problem, as Margaret Thatcher defined it: Socialist governments "always run out of other people's money."

Wilsonian government, meaning (in Wilson's words) government with "unstinted power," is hostile to Madison's Constitution which, Madison said, obliges government "to control itself." Thus our choice is between government restraint rooted in respect for nature, or government free to follow History wherever government says History marches.

Letter from Cliff Asness

The Republican (and Tea Party) Way Forward

What Our President Should Have Said

I think Bob McDonnell has a bright future ahead of him in politics. The Virginia Governor had this to say following Obama's speech:

Good government policy should spur economic growth, and strengthen the private sector's ability to create new jobs.

We must enact policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation, so America can better compete with the world.

What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation, and litigation that kill jobs and hurt the middle class.

It was Thomas Jefferson who called for A wise and frugal Government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry ....and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned... He was right.

Today, the federal government is simply trying to do too much.

Last year, we were told that massive new federal spending would create more jobs 'immediately' and hold unemployment below 8%.

In the past year, over three million Americans have lost their jobs, yet the Democratic Congress continues deficit spending, adding to the bureaucracy, and increasing the national debt on our children and grandchildren.

The amount of this debt is on pace to double in five years, and triple in ten. The federal debt is already over $100,000 per household.

This is simply unsustainable. The President's partial freeze on discretionary spending is a laudable step, but a small one.

The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper, limited role of government at every level.

Without reform, the excessive growth of government threatens our very liberty and prosperity.

In recent months, the American people have made clear that they want government leaders to listen and act on the issues most important to them.

We want results, not rhetoric. We want cooperation, not partisanship.

There is much common ground.

All Americans agree, we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality.

But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government.

Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform healthcare, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes.

We will do that by implementing common sense reforms, like letting families and businesses buy health insurance policies across state lines, and ending frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals that drive up the cost of your healthcare.

And our solutions aren't thousand-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests.

...

Here at home government must help foster a society in which all our people can use their God-given talents in liberty to pursue the American Dream. Republicans know that government cannot guarantee individual outcomes, but we strongly believe that it must guarantee equality of opportunity for all.

That opportunity exists best in a democracy which promotes free enterprise, economic growth, strong families, and individual achievement.

Many Americans are concerned about this Administration's efforts to exert greater control over car companies, banks, energy and health care.

Over-regulating employers won't create more employment; overtaxing investors won't foster more investment.

Top-down one-size fits all decision making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market, nor undermine the proper role of state and local governments in our system of federalism. As our Founders clearly stated, and we Governors understand, government closest to the people governs best.

And no government program can replace the actions of caring Americans freely choosing to help one another. The Scriptures say To whom much is given, much will be required. As the most generous and prosperous nation on Earth, it is heartwarming to see Americans giving much time and money to the people of Haiti. Thank you for your ongoing compassion.

Some people are afraid that America is no longer the great land of promise that she has always been. They should not be.

America will always blaze the trail of opportunity and prosperity.

America must always be a land where liberty and property are valued and respected, and innocent human life is protected.

Government should have this clear goal: Where opportunity is absent, we must create it. Where opportunity is limited, we must expand it. Where opportunity is unequal, we must make it open to everyone.

More Good News

In the second great blow to the ever-expanding Leviathan this week (the first being the complete repudiation, obvious to all but the editorial writers of the NYT and some of the dimmer lights of the loony left, of the Democrats ever-expanding government trick), the SCOTUS has finally realized its original error with regard to McCain-Feingold and has re-discovered that section of the Constitution that guarantees free speech.

Although the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” §441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions. It is a ban notwithstanding the fact that a PAC created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials ac-countable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. Laws burdening such speech are subject to strict scrutiny, which requires the Government to prove that the restriction “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.”

Change You Can Believe In

Victor Davis Hanson offers some of his own suggestions for change. I am in full agreement.

1. Pay as you go, balanced budget—whatever you wish to call a return to fiscal sanity. Conservatives need to stop talking about tolerable deficits in terms of GDP; and liberals should cease the charade that trillion-plus annual borrowing is great stimulus.

The psychological effect on the American people of paying down the debt through annual surpluses would be incalculable. “Decline” is as much psychological as real, and begins with perceptions of financial insolvency. We have a $11 trillion economy, so balancing the books is not impossible. Note how Obama intends to “address the deficit” only after he has set two budgets that will increase it by nearly four trillion dollars. Note how Bush’s sin of running up large annual deficits is used to excuse Obama’s mortal sin of doubling them. Note how Democrats, after lining up for a trillion-dollar federal take-over of health care, are worried about a multi-billion dollar expense in Afghanistan. Cuts in defense, as the later Romans knew, are always the first reaction to profligate domestic spending and entitlement.

2. Freeze federal spending at the present rate, and let increased revenues balance the budget. The idea that we could ever cut outright the budget seems long ago impossible—given the culture of complaint and the melodramatic rants about starvation and murder if another entitlement is not granted. Still, some sort of leadership is required to remind the American people that much of what their government does is not just unnecessary, but counter-productive and they would be better off without it.

Apparently, Obama simultaneously believes (a) he can create a permanent loyal constituency of millions who either receive or disperse federal “stimulus”, in the fashion of the old Roman turba; (b )he can borrow so much money that higher taxes will be seen as vital and therefore the original intent of income redistribution accomplished; (c) that, having had little experience in the private sector, but much financial success as a community or government employee, he can assume that money comes out of thin air and is to be dispersed non-stop through public benefaction; (d) the upper-middle class, which strives to be as rich as he is, is somehow culpable. A common theme throughout history is a paradoxical hatred of the equestrian, productive class, by both the idle aristocratic and entitlement constituents, who hand in glove need each other.

3. Some sort of fair or flat tax that ends the trillion-dollar industry of tax preparation, avoidance, and fraud. For about a quarter of the population April 15 is a spooky sort of Halloween. Instead, we need a tax system in which one can complete the necessary preparation in about 2 hours. Whose bright idea was it to excuse nearly half the American households from income tax exposure (Clinton and Bush, and now Obama?)—a fact that explains why in Pavlovian fashion recently Senators have been saying that we can add on a new war tax, a health-care surcharge, and a new high rate on “them”? The justification of a 40% income tax, 10% state income tax, 15.3% payroll tax, and new war and health care surcharge taxes can only be that one’s income was undeserved, ill-gotten, and thus better “rectified” by more enlightened federal redistributors.

4. Close the borders to illegal immigration, through completion of the fence, biometric IDs, employer sanctions, beefed up enforcement—coupled with a radical change in legal immigration law that favors education and skill, rather than simply family ties. The present mockery of existing law undermines the sanctity of every law. Those who knowingly break immigration laws, and know that they will not in the future be enforced, naturally assume that other laws likewise will not apply to them, from tax reporting to the vehicle code. We really must ask—why the national outcry over whether illegal aliens will be included in the new health care plan when $50 billion is sent back as remittances to Latin America each year? In rough math, each of the supposedly 11 million illegal aliens sends out on average around $4000-5000 per year southward. Perhaps we could tax remittances to fund their health care? Something is strange about the attitude of “I must send $400-500 a month home to support my family, but now I am broke and need someone to pay for my care at the emergency room, etc.”

The rest here.

Read the bills? How about reading the Constitution?

Gene Healy:

You can live in this town for years and still occasionally find yourself gobsmacked by what counts as "normal" by Washington standards. Take the ongoing debate over whether it's fair for us to expect our elected representatives to read the laws they pass and expect us to follow.

Recently, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-DE, and Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, scoffed at the idea that they should read the health care legislation working its way through Congress (hey, it's only a matter of life and death). That attitude has inspired the "Read to Vote" campaign--designed to get congressmen to pledge to "read every word of every bill before casting my vote."

Read to Vote's efforts earned them a condescending Washington Post editorial last month, complaining that their proposal "would bring government to a standstill." (Heaven forbid.) "To read all 1,427 pages of Waxman-Markey," the Post fretted, "it would take at least 12 hours -- tough on a tight legislative timeline."

Is reading the cap and trade bill tough? Tough. If you're planning to regulate every industrial process in America, you may have to do some heavy slogging.

True enough, the bills Congress passes have become increasingly impenetrable over the years. In Abraham Lincoln's first State of the Union, he worried about the growing complexity of federal law, but noted that, with a modest effort at revision, "all the acts of Congress now in force [could fit in] one or two volumes of ordinary and convenient size." Today, the Senate Finance Committee's 1,502-page health-care bill would take up more than that much space by itself.

Worse still, most of the actual "law" in this country--the rules that citizens have to follow, at pain of fine or imprisonment--is generated by unelected administrative agencies, which use broad authority delegated by Congress to add over 75,000 new pages to the Federal Register every year.

It's said that the Roman emperor Caligula posted new laws high on the columns of buildings so citizens couldn't read them and figure out how to avoid their penalties. He could have achieved the same effect by covering the country with such a dense thicket of rules that no one could tell what the law commands.

Legend has it that Caligula also made his favorite horse a senator. Considering how lightly most of our legislators take their constitutional obligations, you could probably do worse.

In February 2003, the New York Times reported that both parties had hired lawyers to run seminars for congressmen, explaining the requirements of the McCain-Feingold campaign

finance law they had just passed. "I didn't realize what all was in it," said Rep. Robert Matsui (D.-CA); "A real education process," echoed Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R.-NY).

If congressmen can't be bothered to read a law that directly affects them, should we be surprised that they're not planning to read the health care bill, which won't?

But, even assuming we could force legislators to read the bills, would that lead to better government? Maybe not. Carper had a point when he said that modern legislative language "is so arcane, so confusing...[that] it really doesn't make much sense."

If congressmen had to read what they passed, they might draft shorter, more comprehensible bills. But one way to do that is by punting yet more lawmaking authority to the permanent bureaucracy, which can then issue its own mammoth set of unintelligible rules. That hardly solves the problem.

A better idea can be found in a resolution recently introduced by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-KY, requiring all new legislation to be posted online for 72 hours before consideration. That could put the distributed intelligence of the web to work, ferreting out the many devils in the details of proposed laws.

However, that's still just treating symptoms. Federal law has become incomprehensible because Congress has inserted itself into every area of American life. As James Madison explained, though, Congress's constitutional powers are "few and defined.... [to be] exercised principally on external objects," like foreign policy and international trade.

Read the bills? It's more important for congressmen to read the Constitution. They'll be pleased to learn that it's short and written in plain English.

What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian

by John Hasnas

Political analysts frequently consider what it means to be a libertarian. In fact, in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled "What It Means to Be a Libertarian" that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy. But almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a libertarian. How does it actually feel to be someone who holds the principles described in Murray’s book?

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920's that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

Imagine spending years decrying federal intervention in the home mortgage market; pointing out the dangers associated with legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act that forces lenders to make more risky loans than they otherwise would; testifying before Congress on the lack of oversight and inevitable insolvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to legislators who angrily respond either that one is "exaggerat[ing] a threat of safety and soundness . . . which I do not see" (Barney Frank) or "[I[f it ain’t broke, why do you want to fix it? Have the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises] ever missed their housing goals" (Maxine Waters) or "[T[he problem that we have and that we are faced with is maybe some individuals who wanted to do away with GSEs in the first place" (Gregory Meeks) or that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are "one of the great success stories of all time" (Christopher Dodd); and arguing that the moral hazard created by the implicit federal backing of such privately-owned government-sponsored enterprises is likely to set off a wave of unjustifiably risky investments, and then, when the housing market implodes under the weight of bad loans, watching the collapse get blamed on the greed and rapaciousness of "Wall Street."

I remember attending a lecture at Georgetown in the mid-1990s given by a member of the libertarian Cato Institute in which he predicted that, unless changed, government policy would trigger an economic crisis by 2006. That prediction was obviously ideologically-motivated alarmism. After all, the crisis did not occur until 2008.

Libertarians spend their lives accurately predicting the future effects of government policy. Their predictions are accurate because they are derived from Hayek’s insights into the limitations of human knowledge, from the recognition that the people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment, from the awareness that for government to provide a benefit to some, it must first take it from others, and from the knowledge that politicians cannot repeal the laws of economics. For the same reason, their predictions are usually negative and utterly inconsistent with the utopian wishful-thinking that lies at the heart of virtually all contemporary political advocacy. And because no one likes to hear that he cannot have his cake and eat it too or be told that his good intentions cannot be translated into reality either by waving a magic wand or by passing legislation, these predictions are greeted not merely with disbelief, but with derision.

It is human nature to want to shoot the messenger bearing unwelcome tidings. And so, for the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe.

Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth about the future, but never be believed. If you add to that curse that she would be ridiculed, derided, and shunned for making her predictions, you have a pretty fair approximation of what it feels like to be a libertarian.

If you’d like a taste of what it feels like to be a libertarian, try telling people that the incoming Obama Administration is advocating precisely those aspects of FDR’s New Deal that prolonged the great depression for a decade; that propping up failed and failing ventures with government money in order to save jobs in the present merely shifts resources from relatively more to relatively less productive uses, impedes the corrective process, undermines the economic growth necessary for recovery, and increases unemployment in the long term; and that any "economic" stimulus package will inexorably be made to serve political rather than economic ends, and see what kind of reaction you get. And trust me, it won’t feel any better five or ten years from now when everything you have just said has been proven true and Obama, like FDR, is nonetheless revered as the savior of the country.

(h/t Matt Welch)

The Proper Role of Government

Tibor Machan explains the proper role of government:

In my own reflections and comments about various topics, I do invoke certain basic principles of political life and perhaps it will be useful to lay these out, briefly. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of these principles concerns the nature and limit of a proper, just government. And where the position I hold is most challenged is how much government ought to do for those who lack the ability and resources to get into various areas of social life with some reasonable hope of success.

The government's role in helping to get people into the game, so to speak, when they are virtually or completely out of it, is, as I understand it, nil: this just isn't the state's proper and safe function. Putting it another way, the government isn't there to be generous, kind, helpful, supportive, charitable and so forth -- it exists so as to make sure peace prevails and justice is done. We, as human beings in our various relations to one another, must deal with innumerable challenges as the government protects our rights mainly so we are then free to choose to do what is right on our own initiative. (The government, like referees at a sports event, must take care of the rules, not play the sport, as it were. The players must do that!) And the system of rules, or justice, requires that no one's rights be violated, no one's rights to life, liberty and property and all the derivative rights that flow from these.

Now this is of course something not likely to be fully realized, even if it is in fact realizable. (Here a very handy work is Tom G. Palmer’s Realizing Freedom [2009].) But it is imperative for those who understand it never to give up the fight. That is a duty of citizenship -- to strive to advance and uphold the principles of justice as much as that is possible to do, whatever disagreements and opposition one faces.

It is not that the government might not here and there, now and then, do some extra good besides maintain peace and justice -- even help deserving people. But on average it does so at paying a price that is prohibitive, namely, becoming a criminal organization that subdues and robs Peter to "help" Paul. Government isn't able to produce wealth with which to help -- it must forcibly get people to work and confiscate their wealth to provide its support. And that is plain assault and robbery, however much cost-benefit analysis has gone into the process.

When government gets into helping people by hurting other people, it loses sight of its proper job and that encourages very serious malpractice. One reason so much goes awry in countries around the globe is that the governments do not devote themselves to their proper task of securing individual rights but have gone about doing innumerable other things that destroyed its integrity as a peacekeeping organization. And once the government lends its hand -- its legitimate tool of physical force when properly limited -- to purposes other than keeping the peace -- securing our rights -- there is no end to the corruption. Everyone will want to have the same done for his or her vested or special interest. So, even those exceptions that may seem so minor and have such good reasons behind them contribute to the corruption of the proper function of governments.

As to democracy, its role isn't to set the rules or establish the principles governments should uphold but to select the personnel who will administer the rules and work hard, often valiantly, to protect those principles. Otherwise democracy becomes complicit in perpetrating injustice -- as when people vote to take property from each other, to restraint trade, to set wages or to control peaceful sexual practices and otherwise attempt to regiment people to behave well. This is an assault on the dignity of the human individual and democracy cannot justify that.

Obviously no brief discussion can do this topic sufficient justice. Still, it might be of some use to know where some of us concerned about the growth of the scope and size of government are coming from as we offer our criticisms of its expanding scope and power.