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Post-Nixon, Obama lets loose IRS rattlesnakes

May 19, 2013

Any one who works for the IRS is predisposed to hate his neighbors, to relish invading individual privacy, and to pleasure himself through harassing threats and audit interrogations. Why else would he join the agency? ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you?’ No way!

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Given the modern Imperial Presidency, it takes a truly great man to withstand the temptation. Barack Obama is weak and dysfunctional as a consequence of a disturbed childhood, essentially orphaned by two utterly selfish and dysfunctional parents.

But Barack Obama is not entirely clueless. He remembers the fate of Richard Nixon, and does not relish the prospect of an aborted second term. All those golf treats with Tiger Woods and all those basketball treats with Michael Jordan! So this president is more tricky than Tricky Dick when he sets loose his IRS rattlesnakes on his political opponents.

The right-wing media may be sleuthing for some hint that Obama picked up the phone and sicced his tax snakes on his enemies. But that is not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. All that he needed to do was exactly what he did, in full view, throughout his three-year campaign for the 2012 elections: publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious activities, publicly call out by name political opponents whom he wanted to be harassed,and publicly encourage his party to pressure for IRS investigations. Even in his 2010 State of the Union address, this paranoid president cast aspersions on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, claiming that it opened the floodgates to conservative special interests. Well guess which party expended most on the 2012 elections?

The president publicly derided ‘tea-baggers’. Vice President Joe Biden compared them to terrorists. In case the IRS missed the point, Obama publicly raised the threat of illegality: ‘All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates…And they don’t say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign corporation.’

How much more prodding do you think was necessary to set loose the IRS snakes on the names that Obama listed? Does this paranoid man think that Americans are completely stupid? Does he truly believe that Americans- independent of his left-leaning ideology – will ever believe that he played no role whatsoever in this disgusting partisan episode?

I’m from the government, and I’m here to take you down’.

Hat Tip: Kimberley A. Strassel, ‘The IRS Scandal Started at the Top’, The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

IRS targets Obama’s enemies in extraordinary scandal

May 18, 2013

“We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department’s assault on the associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, possibly irretrievably damaged….Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.” Peggy Noonan, ‘This Is No Ordinary Scandal’, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2013

President Obama, albeit sheepishly, acts as though these scandals are unconnected to the White House.Like the chief of police in Casablanca he is shocked, shocked, to discover in the newspapers what has happened! President Obama, however, is deeply connected to these scandals. He is not a bystander, like you and I. This happens to be his administration. The Justice Department and the IRS are his executive agencies. He runs and oversees them.

In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.

Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.

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Posted in economics and public choice, nature of an autocracy, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Obama White House is corrupted by Chicago machine-politics

May 11, 2013

Just about any one who has followed this week’s discussion of the Benghazi terrorist attack knows that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Rice repeatedly lied about the nature of the event and why American government officials were not protected by F-16s and SAS forces.

A not-uncommon response to the sequence of lies exposed by Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom before the House oversight committee this week is ‘who cares?’ The dead are long buried, other events now dominate public discussion, and come 2016, Hillary Clinton will be on her way to the White House. The victors get to write the history.

Now all this may be true. It is an old adage that a democracy gets the government it deserves. And the present government is showing itself to be about as despicable as one could ever imagine. So that pretty much sums up the moral and intellectual caliber of the electoral majority that currently controls the United States political market-place.

However, I beg to differ with this dismissive view of Benghazi. What Benghazi told a watching world is that the President and the Secretary of State of the United States both care more for their political prospects than for the honor of their country. Both are prepared to lie, not just to the world at large, but to the families of the fallen, about the reason for their murders and the retribution that will be exacted. For an al Qaeda attack on U.S. property and personnel, a crackpot California video-maker will be wrongly jailed. Some honor regained, some retribution extracted!

“From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they saiud it was too far in the past: ‘Benghazi happened a long time ago’, Jay Carney, The White House press secretary, really said that. Think of that. They can’t give answers when the story’s fresh because it just happened, they’re looking into it. Eight months later they don’t have anything to say because it all happened so long ago. Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.” Peggy Noonan, ‘The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi’, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013

Well, not the entire American people. Just those who sheepishly voted a Chicago-machine politician back into office in the teeth of one of the worst first-term records in the history of the Republic. These voters truly got what they expected and what they deserved. Their children and their grandchildren may well live to despise them for their failure of good judgment if, that is, they are not wiped out by a nuclear terrorist attack on their undefended homeland.

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Posted in economics and public choice, media rhetoric, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

President Obama vanishes into the ether of ego

May 2, 2013

“At the president’s news conference Tuesday, when a reporter wondered whether setbacks on gun control and the sequester suggested Mr. Obama was having problems pushing his second-term agenda, the president replied, ‘Well if you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should pack up and go home.’ Whoa, big fella. The presidency is a big game. We want you suited up and on the floor.’” Daniel Henninger, ‘Presidential Followership’, The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2013

That the presidency attracts individuals focused on Number One is no revelation. That the focus sometimes reaches the psychological condition of narcissism, when a president actually lacks self-love, because of a disrupted childhood, and seeks compensatory adoration from campaign followers, is also not unknown. President Obama suffers from an excessive focus on Number One and a chronic form of narcissism. With 40 months in office remaining, this is a dangerous situation for the United States.

It is dangerous because such a leader essentially becomes a follower of any group of adoring citizens, concerned never to breach their love by an act of statesmanship. Standing essentially aloof from the major branch of government – the Congress – unable to lower his self-esteem by negotiating deals that are helpful to the public at large, Obama is trapped by his followers into a followership mode of governance. That is why he is essentially impotent on gun control laws, on fiscal policy, on Syria, and on Middle East policy.

“Whether Roosevelt, Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W Bush, every second-term president must in time come to grips with the reality that it can’t be about just him. It, the presidency, is unavoidably about offering clear leadership for all the American people and a watching, always unsettled world. If Barack Obama insists it’s about something else, everyone, including him, will have their bags packed for a long 40 months.” ibid.

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 5 Comments »

One more day, one more Obama wobble

May 1, 2013

In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a facility that he claimed was assisting the recruitment of terrorists. To that end he appointed the worst Attorney General ever in the United States, Eric Holder, purely because he also was a Bush-hater and a man who had no understanding of the nature of terrorism.

Early on during his first term, Obama discovered that George W Bush had a great deal more wisdom than he had imagined.Those prisoners held in Cuba were truly the scum of the earth. Almost every single prisoner released from that prison went straight back into anti-U.S. terrorism. Obama abandoned his campaign promise early in his first term after resistance from both political parties in the Congress. Eric Holder smoldered with anger at this retreat, but continued to serve in his lucrative and powerful office.

In his 2012 re-election campaign, Guantanamo Bay was well off the Obama agenda. Now he is wobbling once again, in response to a hunger strike adopted by some 100 of the remaining 166 prisoners. Apparently, Obama is deeply disturbed because 25 of those hunger strikers are being force-fed.

Given who and what those prisoners are, Obama should be rejoicing in the hunger strike and advising prison officials to to leave food and water in their cells, but otherwise let them do what they will. If 100 prisoners starve themselves to death, everyone is better off – the prisoners who hope to reach Paradise, the taxpayers who pay hard-earned money to keep them in prolonged captivity, and the civilized world that does not have to protect itself from their evil.

Obama is out of ideas and out of energy. So he looks for a fight with Congress on a truly wobbly agenda that he will not win

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Posted in Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political philosophy, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

Obama confronts a bleak second term

April 30, 2013

Barack Obama ran a carefully orchestrated 2012 re-election campaign. For any one who bothered to read or to listen carefully, however, Obama had remarkably little to say on what he would do during his second term, should he be re-elected.

So it comes as no surprise to discover that Obama has only one policy initiative – immigration reform – that stands even a remote chance of passing into law, unless the House of Representatives falls into Democratic Party hands in November 2014. The optimism about immigration reform stems not from any leadership from Obama, but from concern within the Republican Party about losing Hispanic voters, many of whom should find a natural position within the GOP.

After winning a marginal tax rate increase on individuals earning in excess of $400,000 per annum, Obama’s economic policies are in disarray. The sequester, that he had signed into law was allowed to take place, so far with minimal harm to the economy. His attempt to use his presidential powers to impose maximum harm on U.S.citizens – a strange presidential tactic do you not think – failed when a vote-conscious Congress moved to protect the flying public and Obama had to confirm their intervention. He has no chance whatsoever of imposing any additional taxes on Americans – rich or poor – unless he accepts major tax reforms designed to bring down rates while eliminating exemptions. And that he will not do.

His ineffectual attempt to tighten gun laws, even following the gift-horse of the Newtown massacre, has ended in ignominious defeat in no small part at the hands of Democratic members of the Senate. That policy will not be revived certainly prior to 2015.

His parody of a foreign policy is collapsing before his eyes as Bashar Al-Assad openly flaunts the use of chemical weapons jeering at Obama’s non-existent red-line. His shift of emphasis away from the Middle East to Asia is stymied as long as the Syrian civil war results in cataclysmic death rates and as al-Qaeda watches hopefully for chemical and biological weapons’ pickings from the disintegration of what once could be called a country.

Sadly for the United States, President Obama looks increasingly like a man in an empty suit, bereft of ideas, unwilling to take time out from fund-raising to do the heavy lifting of policy formation is a divided government. The President, in short, has decided to coast through his second term.

Bring on the clowns!

Hat Tip: Edward Luce, ‘All Obama’s manoeuvres lead back to impasse’, Financial Times, April 29, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, immigration policy, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

The closing of the Yale University mind

April 28, 2013

On Thursday April 25, 2013, Donald Kagan made his farewell address to Yale University. The 80-year old scholar of Ancient Greece provided a biting critique of American higher education in general and of Yale University in particular. He was too civilized to call his farewell address by its correct name: ‘The closing of the Yale University mind’, though his in-office comment prior to the address tells it all:

“You can’t have a fight because you don’t have two sides. The other side won.”

Universities, he proposed in his address, are failing students and hurting American democracy:

“On campus, I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness. Rare are faculty with atypical views. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.”

Mr Kagan courted hostility many times during his stint at Yale University. In 1990, as Dean of Yale College, he argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an ‘infamous’ address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed on a campus that was dominated by Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology. He was called a racist – or as the campus daily more politely editorialized – as a peddler of European cultural arrogance.

In April 1992, Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship, lobbing a bomb at the faculty that had bucked his administration. His plan to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale – funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and alumnus, Lee Bass – blew up three years later amidst a political backlash. ‘I still cry when I think about it’, says Mr. Kagan.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says: ‘You can’t find members of the faculty who have different opinions.’

The tussles over course offerings and campus speech at Yale speak to something much larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in Pericles of Athens is one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience. It relies on free, autonomous and self-reliant citizens and extraordinary leadership to flourish, even survive. These kinds of citizens are not born – they need to be educated. the essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make. If you don’t have that, it’s not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It’s that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know, or do think you know, or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial.

Evidently, the mold from which Mr. Kagan emerged has now been crushed across the Yale University campus – and many many more across the United States. However, there remains a sliver of hope for the future. Mr. Kagan’s farewell address received a standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. The faculty for the most part either boycotted his address or remained sullenly on their seats, resistant to the last to atypical ideas that challenge the hegemony of the closed Yale faculty mind. Let us hope that the current Yale faculty is a dying breed, to be eviscerated by the free-flowing ideas that pulse across the Internet and cannot so easily be shut down.

Hat Tip: Matthew Kaminski, ‘Democracy May Have Had Its Day’, The Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2013

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Posted in political philosophy, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Francois Hollande and the French economy both down the drain

April 27, 2013

Francois Hollande is down and out in Paris, his popularity rating as President having fallen faster and further than that of any other president since the Fifth Republic began in 1958.

The reason for his decline and fall is the progressive socialist agenda that he touted during the election campaign and that he has attempted clumsily to pursue since gaining office. The French economy has seized up in response to his anti-business rhetoric, unemployment now stands at 11 per cent, and the targeted reduction in the budget deficit to 3 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of 2013 has already been abandoned. That target will not be achieved during a progressive’s presidency.

The 75 percent top marginal income tax rate that he imposed immediately upon accessing the Elysee Palace succeeded in driving a number of top companies and a number of top celebrities into exile in other grateful European Union countries. The increased tax rate failed to generate any net revenue as tax avoidance and tax exile escalated in response to what is widely considered to be government theft.

In December 2012, France’s constitutional council provided Francois Hollande with a second chance when it ruled that the 75 per cent tax rate was unconstitutional and noted that no individual tax should exceed 66.6 per cent. Alas! progressives are not to be deterred by such rulings. Caught between political betrayal and folly, Mr. Hollande naturally chose folly.

On March 28, 2013, Hollande announced that the 75 per cent tax rate would still be imposed on incomes in excess of E1 million, but that they would be paid for by firms rather than their employees. Clearly this stupid man has no understanding of the nature of tax incidence, in particular of the conditions required for an income tax increase imposed on an employer not to be passed on in a salary reduction to an employee.

Why are progressives always so ignorant of basic economics? My former colleague Gordon Tullock explained the lacuna by noting that no good economist could ever be a progressive.

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Posted in economics of John Maynard Keynes, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Disability welfare cheats undermine U.S. economic recovery

April 11, 2013

The Federal Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI) supposedly provides a safety net to workers with severe illnesses and injuries. To obtain an award workers must prove that they have not worked substantially for at least five months and Social Security must determine that a medical impairment will prohibit work for at least one year.

In 1984, Congress expanded the list of disabilities to encompass a number of impairments that are difficult to assess. As a consequence, more than 50 per cent of individuals receiving disability awards now qualify because of musculo-skeletal problems – most frequently involving back pain – mood disorders and other mental problems. Such claims can take a year or more to assess because of their often-subjective nature.

Given the particularly large number of baby-boomers suffering from such subjective ailments, it would seem that this generally problematic generation somehow inherited physical and mental defects disproportionate to the population at large. However, any genetic defects somehow assimilated by this generation now seem to be moving down the the age profile. For boomers are not the only generation seeking disability support. Of the nearly 9 million former workers now receiving federal disability payments, more than 2.5 million are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. If the baby-boomers bodies and minds are breaking down in their 50s and early 60s, the bodies and minds of their afflicted offspring are taking turns for the worse much earlier in the life-cycle.

Incentives to cheat one’s way into the SSDI program are greater for low-income than for high-income workers, although payments are tied to a worker’s wage history. Payments average $1,130 per month, which totals $13,560 per annum. That is approximately $2,000 more than the federal poverty level for a single person and about $2,000 less than full-time wages at the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. After two years on disability, individuals are eligible for Medicare – another government benefit that encourages recipients to stay put with their back pains and mental disorders.

Between December 2007, when the recession kicked in, and June 2009, when it officially ended, the number of Americans in receipt of disability benefits increased from 7.1 million to 7.6 million. Then the rolls swelled, reaching 8.9 million in March 2013. This constitutes approximately 5.4 per cent of the civilian workforce between the ages of 25 to 64. In 1970, a presumably significantly healthier population suffered from only 1.7 per cent on disability welfare.

Since the recession ended, more individuals have gone on disability on net than new workers have joined the work force. In 2012, Social Security paid nearly $137 billion to 8.8 million disabled workers and 2.1 million of their spouses and children. Related Medicare outlays were approximately $80 billion. Program trustees estimate that by 2016 Social Security will not be able to cover all of the disability claims.

A number of states encourage their residents to apply for SSDI support as a means for reducing their own welfare costs. States save money when federal disability checks replace state-aid benefits. Former workers on federal disability can also switch from state-supported health insurance programs – such as Medicaid – to Medicare.

Of course, there are genuine cases of worker disability, and a suitable fully-funded SSDI program should take care of such instances. Currently, however, the program is dominated by fraud. The federal government should deal exclusively with clearly identifiable disabilities and recipients should be evaluated at six monthly intervals by government-appointed physicians. The welfare cheats should expect to stand on their own two feet, back pains and mental disorders notwithstanding. What was good enough for the 1970s is good enough for the twenty-first century. Back to work should be the clarion call – you have nothing to lose except your neuroses and your excessive love of remunerated leisure!

Hat Tip: ‘Growing Disability Rolls Stunt U.S. Recovery’, The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2013

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Posted in do well while doing good, economics and public choice, redistributive politics, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Are We Equal?

April 9, 2013

This column draws from an article written by my good friend and George Mason University colleague, Professor Walter Williams, one of the two leading black economists in the United States (the other being Thomas Sowell of The Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California.

Professor Williams answers his own question categorically in the negative:

“Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal – or should be equal – is foolhardy and creates mischief.” Walter W. Williams, ‘Are We Equal?’ https://mail.gmu.edu/frame.html?rtfPossible=true&lang=en

Some of the counter-examples deployed by Professor Williams in his article are as follows:

Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men’s intelligence has far greater variability. There are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots.

Blacks comprise 80 per cent of the players in professional basketball. There are only two Chinese players.
Blacks are among the highest paid players and achieve the highest number of awards for excellence.

Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 per cent of the top times in sprinting.

Blacks comprise only 2 per cent of the NHL’s ice hockey players. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player was born in Hawaii (no the Messiah himself never made it in that profession).

Are different races of equal intelligence? No, they are not. Jews represent only 3 per cent of the U.S. population. Yet they constitute a whopping 39 per cent of all U.S. Nobel Laureates. At the international level, the disparity is even more marked. Jews comprise less than 1 per cent of the world’s population. Yet, they constitute 20 per cent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners.

Many other disparities are evident. Asians routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT. Blacks routinely score the lowest. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S.than among white women.

“Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination we’d be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality’s being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.” Walter Williams, ibid.

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Posted in media rhetoric, redistributive politics, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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