An Homage to Hummer - WSJ.com

Alternate titles I would have liked: 1) “Freedom to be stupid” 2) “Then They Came for the Pie”

Penn Jillette's Homage to Hummer - WSJ.com

Having a Hummer is stupid. It's stupid to waste that much gas. It's stupid to waste that much money on gas. It's stupid to parade your insecurities on public roads. Hummers are stupid looking. You don't need an attack vehicle for the Krispy Kreme drive through.

Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that'll be just a little sad. It's always a little sad to lose some stupid. I love people doing stupid things that I'd never do—different stupid things than all the stupid things I do. It reminds me that although all over the world we humans have so much in common, so much love, and need, and desire, and compassion and loneliness, some of us still want to do things that the rest of us think are bug-nutty. Some of us want to drive a Hummer, some of us want to eat sheep's heart, liver and lungs simmered in an animal's stomach for three hours, some us want to play poker with professionals and some of us want a Broadway musical based on the music of ABBA. I love people doing things I can't understand. It's heartbreaking to me when people stop doing things that I can't see any reason for them to be doing in the first place. I like people watching curling while eating pork rinds.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we're putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I'm not just sad, I'm also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don't need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don't need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don't need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest.

There's a lot of bad stupid around. Really bad stupid. But we can't stop the real horror by stopping just-plain-stupid stupid. We're not going to stop overseas wars by stopping people from driving big stupid cars. As long as we think that "nation building" is part of our destiny, no amount of independence from foreign oil is going to stop us from getting into meddling, expensive, immoral foreign wars. As long as we let terrorism fill us with terror, we're not going to get our nonstupid freedoms back. Our government declaring that we need alternative energy sources, and betting our money on who might get a smart idea, is not going to give smart people smart ideas. It's really easy to see stupid all around us, but I don't think we want to be too quick to stop it. We need to protect other people's stupid to save freedom for all of us.

We're all making bad choices all the time, and most of mine are way stupider than driving a Hummer. I love my freedom of stupid. I bumped into Adrien one time and had a great talk with him, we got along great. I know Carrot Top well enough to call him "Scott." I know that they're both a lot thinner than me. They're both in a lot better shape. They eat better than me, and they can do a lot more push-ups and sit-ups. They can run farther and faster than me. So, in the near future, with us all being involved in each other's health care, Adrien and Scott might make up for their wasted gas mileage paying for my high-blood-pressure meds. If we're all getting together to stop the stupidity of driving a Hummer, will we have to stop the stupidity of eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and pie? Freedom is freedom to be stupid.

They came first for the Hummers.

Then they came for the pie.

'Spreading The Wealth' Isn't Fair - WSJ.com

 

Arthur C. Brooks: 'Spreading The Wealth' Isn't Fair - WSJ.com

 

The president wants to create what he calls "a sense of balance and fairness in our tax code," as he said on the campaign trail, and ensure that well-off Americans "pay their fair share." He famously defended his planned tax hikes to "Joe the Plumber" by saying, "I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody."

If you think spreading money around by force seems like an odd definition of fairness, you're not alone.

Most Americans think tax rates are already unfairly high. A February 2009 Harris poll found that on average, Americans believe the maximum amount anyone should have to pay in total taxes is less than 16% of income.

Nor do Americans believe it is fair to expand the pool of people with no income tax liability at all.  66% of Americans agree with the statement that "Everyone should be required to pay some minimum amount of tax to help fund government." People understand that good citizenship means we all contribute in some way to the national project.

Nobody wants to sound anti-poor, so we too easily concede the notion of fairness to those who define it as redistribution and criticize redistribution only because it leads to economic inefficiency.

This is an error. There is nothing inherently fair about equalizing incomes. If the government penalizes you for working harder than somebody else, that is unfair. If you save your money but retire with the same pension as a free-spending neighbor, that is also unfair.

Real fairness, as most of us see it, does not mean bringing the top down. Yes, free markets tend to produce unequal incomes. We should not be ashamed of that. On the contrary, our system is the envy of the world and should be a source of pride. Generation after generation, it has rewarded hard work and good values, education and street smarts. It has offered the world's most disadvantaged not government redistribution but a chance to earn their success.

That is true fairness, American-style.

 

 

 

Reaganism, New Jersey Style - WSJ.com

 

William McGurn: Reaganism, New Jersey Style - WSJ.com

 

Mr. Christie knows he needs to put the hard choices before the state's citizens, and to speak to them as adults.

Budgets are serious business, but it's been a long time since anyone in New Jersey has been serious about the budget. This year, gross mismanagement and accumulated fictions have left state taxpayers a $10.7 billion gap on a total state budget of $29.3 billion. Mr. Christie's answer is simple: "a smaller government that lives within its means."

However quaint that may sound, when you have to cut nearly $11 billion in state spending to get there, you are going to get a lot of yelling and screaming. Most comes from the New Jersey Education Association, hollering that "the children" will be hurt by Mr. Christie's proposals for teachers to accept a one-year wage freeze and begin contributing something toward their health plans. What makes the battle interesting is the way Mr. Christie is throwing the old chestnuts back at his critics.

Here are a few examples, culled from his budget address, public meetings and radio appearances:

The children will be the ones to suffer from your education cuts. "The real question is, who's for the kids, and who's for their raises? This isn't about the kids. Let's dispense with that portion of the argument. Don't let them tell you that ever again while they are reaching into your pockets."

Budget cuts are unfair. "The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word—which, coincidentally, is my 9-year-old son's favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—'unfair.' . . . One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?"

 

 

 

World Tariff Wars - WSJ.com

 

World Tariff Wars - WSJ.com

 

President Obama launched his National Export Initiative last month. Objective: Double exports in five years. Sounds good. Too bad some of our trading partners missed the memo.

Brazil, in the same week, announced a plan to impose new tariffs on 102 U.S. products. On some items, the tariffs will go as high as 100%. In all, it will affect about $1 billion a year in U.S. exports. Brazil also announced it's considering sanctions against U.S. intellectual property, including compulsory licensing in pharmaceuticals, music, chemicals and software.

Before screaming for a first strike on Brazil, bear in mind that what it did is an approved action under World Trade Organization rules. Brazil won the right to retaliate against U.S. exports because U.S. subsidies to cotton growers contravene the rules of the multilateral trading system. Because we are in "non-compliance," they get to engage in "retaliation." On Monday Brazil gave the U.S. a reprieve until April 22 on the new tariff implementation in the hopes that a negotiated compromise might be reached. If not, we will have an old fashioned trade war on our hands.

The destructive clash with Brazil is not an isolated case. WTO-approved retaliation to counteract U.S. trade violations is spreading. More than $3.4 billion of U.S. exports now face punishing retaliation tariffs.

It is possible that Brazil will back down, but the damage to U.S. leadership on free trade cannot be underestimated. The common thread linking these threats to U.S. export growth is America's current antitrade compulsions, typified by Congress's refusal to ratify free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. If Mr. Obama really wants to open new export markets, he doesn't need to slap the word "export" on new bureaucracies. He needs to honor U.S. commitments and explain the dangers of a creeping global protectionism.

 

 

 

Taking the Driver Out of the Car - WSJ.com

 

Randal O'Toole on Taking the Driver Out of the Car - WSJ.com

 

Driverless cars have so far remained the stuff of science fiction. Seventy years after Mr. Bel Geddes's promise, they are finally close to reality.

Consumers today can buy cars that steer themselves; accelerate and brake to maintain a safe driving distance from cars ahead; and detect and avoid collisions with other cars on all sides. Making them completely driverless will involve little more than a software upgrade.

Driverless vehicles offer huge advantages over current autos. Because computer reaction times are faster, driverless cars can safely operate more closely together, potentially tripling highway throughput. This will virtually eliminate congestion and reduce the need for new road construction.

Driverless cars and trucks will be safer. They will also be greener, first by significantly reducing congestion, and eventually because vehicles will be lighter in weight due to reduced collision risks.

Automobiles continue to maintain a huge cost advantage over passenger rail. Counting both subsidies and personal costs, Americans spend less than 25 cents a passenger mile on autos, nearly 60 cents a passenger mile on Amtrak, and more than 90 cents a passenger mile on urban transit. No wonder 85% of all our passenger travel is by automobile.

The call to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to build the world's finest, 1930s-era transportation network would benefit the wealthy and those willing to live and work in expensive quarters near rail stations.

In contrast, the driverless scenario relies on new technology, not old; and will largely be self-funded by users rather than paid out of tax dollars. Most important, driverless vehicles will bring mobility to almost everyone.

 

 

 

Jaime Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn. - WSJ.com

 

Andrew Coulson: Jaime Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn. - WSJ.com

 

Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film, "Stand and Deliver," died this week at the age of 79. With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High.

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success—and then fix it.

America not only needs more teachers like Jaime Escalante, it needs an education system that recognizes them and helps them to reach a mass audience. The tutoring sector is a proven model for doing so: Unleash the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace, so teachers like Escalante become the Steve jobs or Bill Gates of education, profiting from their exceptional ability to serve our children.

 

 

 

Finding Science in Acupuncture - WSJ.com

I’ve never had acupuncture, but I found this very interesting.  I’d be open to trying it if the need arose…

 

Finding Science in Acupuncture - WSJ.com

 

High-Tech Tools Show How Acupuncture Works in Treating Arthritis, Back Pain, Other Ills

 

Acupuncture has long baffled medical experts and no wonder: It holds that an invisible life force called qi (pronounced chee) travels up and down the body in 14 meridians. Illness and pain are due to blockages and imbalances in qi. Inserting thin needles into the body at precise points can unblock the meridians, practitioners believe, and treat everything from arthritis and asthma to anxiety, acne and infertility.

Acupuncture has long baffled medical experts and no wonder: It holds that an invisible life force called qi (pronounced chee) travels up and down the body in 14 meridians. Illness and pain are due to blockages and imbalances in qi. Inserting thin needles into the body at precise points can unblock the meridians, practitioners believe, and treat everything from arthritis and asthma to anxiety, acne and infertility.

 

 

Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory - WSJ.com

The details of the backroom dealing described in this article cannot be easily summarized, but they are astounding.

 

Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory - WSJ.com

 

Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view of the sordid politics necessary to push a deeply flawed bill to completion. It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line.

Perhaps the most remarkable Democratic accomplishment this week was to make the process of passing ObamaCare as politically toxic as the bill itself.

President Obama was elected by millions of Americans attracted to his promise to change Washington politics. These were voters furious with earmarks, insider deals and a lack of transparency. They were the many Americans who, even before this week, held Congress in historic low esteem. They'll remember this spectacle come November.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - A Setback for Educational Civil Rights

 

Father Theodore M. Hesburgh: A Setback for Educational Civil Rights

 

If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country's race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the "civil rights issue of our generation." Millions of our children—disproportionately poor and minority—remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.

For all these reasons, I was deeply disappointed when Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) successfully inserted a provision in last year's omnibus spending bill that ended one of the best efforts to give these struggling children the chance to attend a safe and decent school.

That effort is called the Opportunity Scholarship program. Since 2004 it has allowed thousands of children in Washington, D.C., to escape one of the worst public school systems in the nation by providing them with scholarships of up to $7,500.

Despite its successes, it is now closing down.

I know that some consider voucher programs such as the Opportunity Scholarships a right-wing affair. I do not accept that label. This program was passed with the bipartisan support of a Republican president and Democratic mayor. The children it serves are neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal or conservative. They are the future of our nation, and they deserve better from our nation's leaders.

I have devoted my life to equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of skin color. I don't pretend that this one program is the answer to all the injustices in our education system. But it is hard to see why a program that has proved successful shouldn't have the support of our lawmakers. The end of Opportunity Scholarships represents more than the demise of a relatively small federal program. It will help write the end of more than a half-century of quality education at Catholic schools serving some of the most at-risk African-American children in the District.

I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice stand.

 

Father Hesburgh is the former president of the University of Notre Dame.

 

WSJ.com - The President vs. Health-Care Reform

 

WSJ.com - Opinion: The President vs. Health-Care Reform

 

There's remarkable agreement among experts about the problem of skewed tax incentives.

Let us flip back to an epic series of Senate Finance hearings in 1992. They represented a remarkable meeting of minds across a broad swath of health-care wonks and economists that the original sin was the exclusion of employer-provided health insurance from taxable income—imposed carelessly by the IRS in 1943 so defense contractors could compete for workers without transgressing Roosevelt-era wage and price controls.

Everybody knows this turned "insurance" into something else. Call it prepaid health care, as Milton Friedman did. Call it a giant tax Laundromat for the nation's private health spending.

It became a massive subsidy to third-party payment, an incentive to channel every ache and pain through an "insurance" bureaucracy. It became an incentive for the most economically competent Americans—the secure, high-earning employees of corporate America—to overspend on health care, treating it as a free good.

What a surprise that the medical-industrial complex reorganized itself in light of this central driver. Nobody was looking for price tags so price tags disappeared, as did any competition on price, and any clarity on price versus value. Voilà.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Hoosiers and Health Savings Accounts

WSJ.com - Opinion: Hoosiers and Health Savings Accounts*

 

What we, and independent health-care experts at Mercer Consulting, have found is that individually owned and directed health-care coverage has a startlingly positive effect on costs for both employees and the state. What follows is a summary of our experience:

State employees enrolled in the consumer-driven plan will save more than $8 million in 2010 compared to their coworkers in the old-fashioned preferred provider organization (PPO) alternative. In the second straight year in which we've been forced to skip salary increases, workers switching to the HSA are adding thousands of dollars to their take-home pay.

Most important, we are seeing significant changes in behavior, and consequently lower total costs.

It turns out that, when someone is spending his own money alone for routine expenses, he is far more likely to ask the questions he would ask if purchasing any other good or service: "Is there a generic version of that drug?" "Didn't I take that same test just recently?" "Where can I get the colonoscopy at the best price?"

By contrast, the prevalent model of health plans in this country in effect signals individuals they can buy health care on someone else's credit card. A fast-food meal costs most Americans more out of pocket than a visit to the doctor. What seems free will always be overconsumed, compared to the choices a normal consumer would make. Hence our plan's immense savings.

Americans can make sound, thrifty decisions about their own health. If national policy trusted and encouraged them to do so, our skyrocketing health-care costs would decelerate.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - No (Tenured) Teacher Left Behind

WSJ.com - Opinion: No (Tenured) Teacher Left Behind

 

School reformers generally agree that the most important education resource is the teacher. But one of the biggest obstacles to putting a good instructor in every classroom is a tenure system that forces principals to hire and retain teachers based on seniority instead of performance.

California grants tenure to teachers after merely two years in the classroom. New York, like most other states, makes teachers wait a grand total of three years before giving them a job for life. In most cases tenure is granted automatically unless administrators object, which is rare.

This means that large numbers of ineffective teachers wind up with ironclad job protection. When low-performing teachers can't be fired, it's the students who suffer.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - It's the Spending, America

WSJ.com - Opinion: It's the Spending, America

 

With voter anger at federal profligacy and states teetering on the verge of financial collapse, the moment is ripe for an historic reordering of American politics.

Finally, after a nonstop, nearly 80-year upward climb, government spending has hit a wall. It didn't seem possible but this is a big wall. It's the American voter.

This has been an unforgettable year in the history of American spending.

All the anxiety coursing through the country now is over the scale, size and scope of government, in Washington or where people live, in the states. The issue that Barack Obama's presidency has put squarely before the American people is how big is too big? How much is too much?

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Building Team Spirit

WSJ.com - Building Team Spirit

 

Nurses hesitate to challenge doctors even when doctors are ordering the wrong drug or operating on the wrong limb.

 

When it comes to safety, the aviation industry has it down to a science, compelling pilots to go through checklists before takeoff and relying on every crew member, regardless of rank, to work as a team and report dangerous lapses. But in hospitals there is no such fail-safe system, one reason that tens of thousands of American patients annually are harmed or killed by preventable infections, wrong-site surgeries and medication mishaps.

A few years ago, after seeing a toddler die from substandard care, Peter Pronovost, an anesthesiologist and critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, set out to change the way that hospitals function.

Too often, Dr. Pronovost writes, doctors "think they are infallible, communication between nurses and doctors is poor and accountability is virtually non-existent." He notes that doctors aren't trained to listen to nurses, family members or anyone else for that matter. "Medicine operates like a private club of self-styled deities where the entrance requirement is an M.D."

Dr. Pronovost proposes a two-fold strategy for bringing health care closer to the standards of aviation: simple, rigorous checklists designed to deliver proven treatments and procedures; and a cultural makeover aimed at tearing down the traditional hospital hierarchy that makes nurses afraid to challenge doctors even when doctors are ordering the wrong drug or operating on the wrong limb. Hospitals need a collaborative model, Dr. Pronovost says. Members of a medical team need to work like flight crews to redesign flawed systems of care.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - The Continuing Climate Meltdown

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Continuing Climate Meltdown

 

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable.

All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby's regulatory agenda.

The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Trimming the Fat

WSJ.com - Opinion: Trimming the Fat

 

Rarely is there much good to say about the Obama Administration's health-care agenda, so its childhood anti-obesity campaign is a welcome turn. The American waistline is a genuine public health concern, and the White House's ideas may even do some good.

Nearly one of three children are overweight or obese, which is astonishing enough except that two-thirds of adults are too—and thus at risk for diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

Mostly, the White House plan encourages parents to be better role models. Obesity is the result of caloric imbalance, and the only way to prevent it is healthier habits like a better diet and more physical activity.

The ultimate solution is to give people direct financial incentives to be healthier, in the form of more personal responsibility for routine and preventable medical costs. National health care would do the opposite, so the best outcome would be if ObamaCare dies and the first lady's anti-obesity campaign results in some modest success.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Milwaukee's Voucher Graduates

WSJ.com - Opinion: Milwaukee's Voucher Graduates

 

President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget calls for a 9% increase in federal education spending, and he has famously said that the money should go to "what works" in education. So he ought to take another look at Milwaukee, where the nation's oldest and largest publicly funded school voucher program is showing academic gains.

The Milwaukee voucher program serves more than 21,000 children in 111 private schools, so nearly 20% more graduates mean a lot fewer kids destined for failure without the credential of a high school diploma. The finding is all the more significant because students who receive vouchers must, by law, come from low-income families, while their counterparts in public schools come from a broader range of economic backgrounds.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Democratic Climate Revolt

WSJ.com - Opinion: Democratic Climate Revolt

 

The Obama Administration has been moving full-speed ahead on anticarbon regulation, never mind waiting for Congress to pass a bill. But now opposition is building among senior Democrats, with two powerful committee Chairmen introducing a bill last week to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from declaring that carbon is a dangerous pollutant.

This is bipartisanship we can believe in. Such legislation would vaporize the EPA's "endangerment finding" for carbon and thus require the Administration to use democratic debate and persuasion if it really wants to reshape the energy markets and impose huge new costs on American consumers. What a thought.

"If Congress doesn't do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own," Mr. Peterson [Democrat] said. "I have no confidence that EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without severe harm to all taxpayers."

Added Mr. Skelton [Democrat]: "Simply put, we cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats at EPA. America's energy and environmental policies should be set by Congress." Yes, they should be.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Washington vs. 'Common Sense'

WSJ.com - Opinion: Washington vs. 'Common Sense'

 

'Let's try common sense," President Obama said in the State of the Union address, provoking a spontaneous burst of laughter in the House of Representatives chamber. The unintended humor exposes an important truth about Washington: Everyone knows that won't happen.

More troubling, however, was that the president's speech revealed why common sense is nonexistent. Mr. Obama wants new laws to tell us how to do things better—when the need is to overhaul old laws to restore freedom of choice and individual responsibility. Up and down the chain of authority, the accumulation of law and entitlements precludes sensible decisions.

****

Americans know what's wrong: Government has taken on a life of its own, dragging our country down to some horrible pit of quicksand where, increasingly, no one can make sensible choices.

Washington is broken. So are most state governments. The reason is the same. Government is out of control, schools are out of control, health-care costs are out of control, lawsuits are out of control—because law has supplanted the responsibility of people needed to keep them in control.

Fixing modern government, Peter Drucker once observed, requires returning to first principles. What's missing in government is the activating principle of all human accomplishment—individual responsibility.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - A Short History of American Populism

WSJ.com - Opinion: A Short History of American Populism

 

Ask anyone reasonably well versed in American history to name our most populist-minded president, and you'll likely hear the name of Andrew Jackson. He was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, raised on the frontier, and he ran the first democratic (and Democratic) campaign…. But Jackson was not a "spread the wealth" populist. On the contrary, he opposed the American System of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay to have the government build roads and canals and other public works. He killed the central bank and paid off the national debt.

Jackson argued that government interference in the economy would inevitably favor the well-entrenched and well-connected. It would take money away from the little people and give it to the elites.

That view seems to be shared today in what I have called the Jacksonian belt, the broad swath of America settled by the Scots-Irish from the Appalachian chains in Virginia southwest to Texas. The Obama administration argues that Democratic big government and health-care programs will help the little guys. Jacksonians today, as in the 1830s, don't agree.

Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.

Now the president and his advisers seem to be assuming that populist attacks on the rich will rally the downtrodden masses to their side. History does not provide much hope for this audacity. William Jennings Bryan, whose oratorical skills outshined even Mr. Obama's, got lower percentages of the vote each time he ran.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - The Best Thing About Orphanages

I found this very interesting, especially after reading the several reader comments in support of orphanages from those who were raised in one.

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Best Thing About Orphanages

 

Last month, Duke University researchers issued the first report on their multiyear study of 3,000 orphaned, abandoned and neglected children in developing countries in Africa and East and South Asia. About half were reared in small and large "institutions" (or orphanages) and half in "community" programs (kin and foster care). Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that children raised in orphanages by nonfamily members were no worse in their health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth than those cared for in their communities by relatives. More important, the orphanage-reared children performed better than their counterparts cared for by community strangers, which is commonly the case in foster-care programs.

Critics of orphanages point out that children are always better off in loving and safe biological families. That's always been the case, of course, but many kids have no hope of access to such families. There are about 143 million orphaned children, and tens of millions more abandoned, in the world today. Over a half-million American kids are in foster care (which is often luxury care by the standards of orphanage care in poor countries), but still a sizable percentage of American foster-care kids will have their disadvantages compounded in one important way: They will spend their entire childhoods in the worst of all possible situations, "permanent temporary care," in which they will be moved from one placement to the next to the next, many losing count of their foster homes before they "age out" of the system at 18.

I wrote a column for this newspaper defending my own orphanage and others like it: "Most critics would like the public to believe that those of us who went through orphanages were throttled by the experience. No doubt, some were. However, most have charged on." The children at Barium Springs Home for Children worked a lot and didn't get the hugs many children take for granted, but we did get advantages that many children today don't get—a sense of security, permanence and home.

I was shocked by the number of orphanage alumni who called, faxed or emailed in agreement. What's more, many added, "My orphanage was better than yours," which made me wonder if the experts knew what they were talking about.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid

The timing of this article doesn’t match up well with the current need for massive humanitarian relief, but the point is well taken that traditional aid hurts much more than it helps.  Not mentioned in this article are the (much smaller) untraditional aid practices that deliver help directly to individuals, as opposed to governments, such as loans to individuals for education & small businesses, that do have a record of delivering real improvements.  But those successful aid programs tend to be administered by private organizations and charities and not national governments.

 

WSJ.com - Opinion: To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid

 

For actual Haitians, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

A better approach recognizes the real humanity of Haitians by treating them—once the immediate and essential tasks of rescue are over—as people capable of making responsible choices. Haiti has some of the weakest property protections in the world, as well as some of the most burdensome business regulations. In 2007, it received 10 times as much in aid ($701 million) as it did in foreign investment.

Reversing those figures is a task for Haitians alone, which the outside world can help by desisting from trying to kill them with kindness.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - The Message of Massachusetts

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Message of Massachusetts

 

Whether or not Republican Scott Brown wins today in Massachusetts, the special Senate election has already shaken up American politics. The close race to replace Ted Kennedy, liberalism's patron saint, shows that voters are rebelling even in the bluest of states against the last year's unbridled pursuit of partisan liberal governance.

The real message of Massachusetts is that Democrats have committed the classic political mistake of ideological overreach. Mr. Obama won the White House in part on his personal style and cool confidence amid a recession and an unpopular war. Yet liberals in Congress interpreted their victory as a mandate to repeal more or less the entire post-1980 policy era and to fulfill, at last, their dream of turning the U.S. into a cradle-to-grave entitlement state.

Had Democrats modified their agenda to nurture a fragile economy and financial system, they could now claim their policies worked and build on them later.

Instead, their frenetic agenda has frightened voters and businesses about the vast expansion of government power and enormous tax increases to come. The resulting uncertainty and the anticipation of higher costs for labor, taxes and energy have undermined what ought to be a more robust pace of job creation and overall recovery.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Keep on Truckin', Detroit

 

WSJ.com - Opinion: Keep on Truckin', Detroit

 

The domestic auto makers' fuel-economy games start anew—this time with taxpayer help.

GM says it has new ideas on how to build its large trucks while still meeting Washington's tough new fuel-economy standards, but don't let the spin kid you: Its main way of meeting those rules will be simply to push small and electric cars into the market at a loss in order to create the "fleet average" freedom to sell larger vehicles.

This is exactly the Faustian compromise that kept the industry together for 25 years, albeit with one big difference today: Now GM will be counting on direct taxpayer subsidies added to the mix.

We hasten to add that one old and hidden subsidy will continue to prevail, as it has for four decades, namely Washington's 25% tariff on imported "light trucks," imposed by LBJ in response to a long-forgotten chicken dispute with Western Europe. Detroit and Washington worked together to exploit the chicken tax to create a protected niche for the Big Three to make large passenger cars, call them "light trucks," and thereby shield them from foreign competition as well as the stricter fuel economy rules that apply to cars that are called "cars."

But the chicken loophole is no longer sufficient, so taxpayers will have to pitch in too. They will do so with a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric cars like the forthcoming Chevy Volt, plus some $25 billion in direct loans to carmakers to retool plants dedicated to "green" cars.

If this is beginning to sound like the ethanol boondoggle writ large, the parallels (and perils) are impressive.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional

Finally – I’ve been waiting for a serious discussion of the constitutionality of this bill!  Not that most Americans (or even most Congress-critters for that matter) know squat about the U.S. Constitution and could have a serious discussion about it...

 

WSJ.com - Opinion: Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional

 

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress's powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

Congress has many times stretched this power to the breaking point, exceeding even the expanded version of the commerce power established by the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned.

A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This violates the letter, the spirit, and the interpretation of our federal-state form of government.

The federal government may exercise only the powers granted to it or denied to the states. The states may do everything else. This is why, for example, states may have authority to require individuals to purchase health insurance but the federal government does not. It is also the reason states may require that individuals purchase car insurance before choosing to drive a car, but the federal government may not require all individuals to purchase health insurance.

America's founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.