COMMENTARY for November 23, 2013 LIFE - LIBERTY - PROSPERITY Pray for our Patriots in uniform -- Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen -- standing in harms way in defense of Liberty, and for their families. THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Thinking about what you need to do is depressing. Doing what you need to do is uplifting. -- Rabbi David Aaron Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own. --James Madison, Essay on Property, 1792 A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired. --Alexander Hamilton “”Let’s Cut Income-Tax Rates” is not going to get the job done—politically or economically—might begin by point out that we have an expensive welfare state that has not contributed much to the measureable welfare of its so-called beneficiaries, that the War on Poverty has been a much larger an costlier disappointment than the War in Ira, and the political party that has wrapped itself in the mantle of justice for the black and the brown has left a lot of them with nothing more than couch-cushion money to show for themselves.” – Kevin D. Willlianson Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own. –James Madison, Essay on Property, 1792 Some regulation is useful. But when we passively accept government regulation of everything, thinking were protecting people from evil corporations run amok, were really making life harder for ordinary people. Every profession, from cab driving to floral arrangement, is now burdened with complex rules. ... Jeff Rowes, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties group that defends many people caught up in regulatory cases, says, America was conceived as a sea of liberty with islands of government power. Were now a sea of government power with ever-shrinking islands of liberty. The little guys dont have an army of lawyers to defend those islands of liberty one regulatory battle at a time. We should get rid of most of these regulations -- and sail back, together, to a free country. -- John Stossel Democrats flat-out despise insurance companies. Theyve been called immoral villains (Pelosi), deceptive and dishonest (President Barack Obama), fly-by-night (former Gov. and DNC chair Howard Dean), rapacious (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.) and greedy (Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.). Are health insurance companies any greedier than any other for-profit sector of the economy? In 2009, before Obamacare, profit margins for the network and communications equipment industry averaged 20.4 percent; Internet services and retailing was 19.4 percent; pharmaceuticals averaged 19.3 percent; railroads 12.6 percent; gas and electric utilities 8.7 percent; and food consumer products 6.7 percent. Health insurance and managed care companies? They averaged 2.2 percent. -- Larry Elder OVER-REGULATION MUST END: Accoring to a new study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a new regulation is created every 2.5 hours! This incredible statistic puts makes it a little easier to undertstand why our country is in such bad economic shape. Regulations are the antithesis of prosperity. For every new regulation created by government, a new barrier appears that hinders business. Congress has become so numb to this fact that Nancy Pelosi famously said We need to pass the bill before we can see what is in it when talking about Obamacare. Small businesses are being suffocated by the endless regulation coming out of Washington D.C. and none is more poisonous than Obamacare. With thousands upon thousands of pages of regulation, Obamacare is one of the biggest job killers in American history! -- Contract From America Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. -- late Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan WANT TO REDUCE CORRUPTION? REDUCE THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT By Troy Senik | November 21 2013 Youll only get money out of politics when you get politics out of money. The worst thing that ever happened to the United States of America was dependable air conditioning and central heating. Sure, it’s made life hospitable for those who live in climates that are less than temperate, but it’s had this regrettable consequence: It’s made it that much more tolerable to live in Washington, D.C. We’ve come a long way since the days when serving a stint in the nation’s capital was a burden to be suffered rather than a check waiting to be cashed. Washington may not have been built on a swamp, as the popular telling has it, but it’s still considerably different from the city founded in the late 18th century. Long gone are notions that it’s a place where one goes to serve the nation. If anything, the country now works for D.C. A report by Greg Jaffe and Tim Tankersly in the Washington Post earlier this week revealed that D.C. has added 21,000 households in the top one percent of income over the past decade, a number greatly surpassing that of any other city. Whether intentional or not, there’s a tremendous irony to that statistic. For a president who’s taken so many rhetorical potshots at the one percent, Barack Obama seems to have done an awful lot to make them feel at home in recent years. To read the rest of the article go to: cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2032-want-to-reduce-corruption-reduce-the-size-of-government ANDREW MCCARTHY: SENATE NOW UNDER LAW OF THE JUNGLE By Bill Hoffmann | 21 Nov 2013 Its the law of the jungle on Capitol Hill now that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has enacted the nuclear option, giving Democratic lawmakers more power, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says. If they can change this rule on a dime, they can change any rule on the dime … What that ends up meaning is that you basically have the law of the jungle, McCarthy told The Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV. To read the rest of the article go to: newsmax/Politics/harry-reid-nuclear-law-jungle/2013/11/21/id/538007?ns_mail_uid=8498855&ns_mail_job=1547129_11222013&promo_code=15B2F-1 A VASTLY CHANGED MIDDLE EAST By Caroline B. Glick | Nov. 22, 2013 | JewishWorldReview Transformation is occurring on a regional and indeed global level, as the full significance of the Obama administrations withdrawal of US power from the region becomes better understood A week and a half ago, Syrias Kurds announced they are setting up an autonomous region in northeastern Syria. The announcement came after the Kurds wrested control over a chain of towns from al Qaida in the ever metastasizing Syrian civil war. The Kurds announcement enraged their nominal Sunni allies — including the al Qaida forces they have been combating — in the opposition to the Assad regime. It also rendered irrelevant US efforts to reach a peace deal between the Syrian regime and the rebel forces at a peace conference in Geneva. But more important than what the Kurds action means for the viability of the Obama administrations Syria policy, it shows just how radically the strategic landscape has changed and continues to change, not just in Syria but throughout the Arab world. To read the rest of the article go to: jewishworldreview/1113/glick112213.php3#.Uo_GP9Ksgyo TOO CONVOLUTED TO SUCCEED: WHY DODD-FRANK WON’T PREVENT ANOTHER FINANCIAL CRISIS Nicole Gelinas Autumn 2013 | City Journal Five years ago this September, the Lehman Brothers investment bank collapsed. Markets around the world froze until Western governments devised a massive bailout plan that kept investors from pulling trillions out of the global financial system and precipitating a worldwide depression. The financial crisis helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency. In his inaugural address, Obama said that the crisis was a reminder that “without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” After the February 2009 stimulus law and the March 2010 “Obamacare” health-insurance overhaul, the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act of July 2010—meant to sharpen the vision of that “watchful eye”—became Obama’s third signature legislative victory. “The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Obama said as he signed the bill into law. “There will be no more tax-funded bailouts—period.” To applause, he added that “there will be new rules to make clear that no firm is somehow protected because it is ‘too big to fail.’ ” But three years later, “too big to fail” lives on. “There’s a growing bipartisan consensus that the Dodd-Frank Act regrettably did not end the ‘too-big-to-fail’ phenomenon or its consequent bailouts,” Texas congressman Jeb Hensarling, head of the House financial-services committee, said just before Dodd-Frank’s third anniversary this summer. Republicans aren’t the only ones saying so. Elizabeth Warren, the new Democratic senator from Massachusetts, recently introduced her own “end too big to fail” bill, implicitly suggesting that Dodd-Frank did not fix the problem. At one congressional hearing after another, independent expert witnesses, To read the rest of the article go to: city-journal.org/2013/23_4_dodd-frank.html WHY CONGRESS DOESN’T WORK: LAWMAKERS’ AVOIDANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY UNDERMINES SELF-GOVERNMENT. By Leo Linbeck III • June 25, 2012 Faced with a complex, hard-to-solve problem, there is a natural human tendency to solve a much simpler, easier one instead. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, dubs this cognitive process “substitution.” We know our political system is broken. The signs are everywhere: knee-jerk partisanship, massive debts and unfunded liabilities, widespread citizen dissatisfaction, trillion-dollar deficits, rampant public and private corruption, and a federal government that has less support than King George III at the time of the American Revolution. But fixing the system is a staggeringly complex undertaking. The causes of its dysfunction are deep and obscure. So what do we do? We use substitution: we focus on electing a president who promises to solve all our problems. Conservatives did this in 2000, progressives did it in 2008, and both sides are doing it again in 2012. To read the rest of the article go to: theamericanconservative/articles/why-congress-doesnt-work/
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 01:39:35 +0000
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