Stossel:

“To get an address, somebody’s got to recognize that that’s where you live. That means … you’ve a got mailing address. … When you make a deal with someone, you can be identified. But until property is defined by law, people can’t … specialize and create wealth. The day they get title (is) the day that the businesses in their homes, the sewing machines, the cotton gins, the car repair shop finally gets recognized. They can start expanding.”

That’s the road to prosperity. But first they need to be recognized by someone in local authority who says, “This is yours.” They need the rule of law. But many places in the developing world barely have law.

There can be no real property, without a way to recognize a right to the property.

And for a right to be a meaningful right, it has to endure without regard to who might have a grievance against it being there, or to who is capable of prevailing against whom in a physical contest. If might makes right, order becomes indistinguishable from chaos.

For people to have property, they have to be able to keep it just because they have earned it, and for no other reason. Regardless of who it ticks off, how upset they get about it, or what they can do.

It’s clear the number of fans does not tell the whole story; in fact, it may be irrelevant, and it’s even more likely that it’s something of a negative indicator.

The whole article is here (hat tip to Instapundit).

…to the student who earned a “C”:

You have asked me why this happened. I offer the following explanatory theories:

1) You are so dull that you couldn’t find East with the rising sun, a compass, and a praying Arab as visual aids. To call you a lunkhead insults lunks everywhere. If dumb were population, you would be China.

2) Perhaps due to 1), you have mistaken the professor’s advice for a complete proofing/copy editing service. It is not. Showing your professor a draft is not an abdication of your responsibility for the quality of your work.

3) Perhaps due to 2), you have decided that specific, marked instances of mechanical/formatting/syntactical errors are the only times such errors occur in your draft. This is not a wise decision.

4) The various instructions I gave earlier in the semester regarding such niceties as citation form continue to apply, even later in the semester.

5) The initial draft of your paper made me long for the Purgatorial terrace where the eyes of the envious are sewn shut, as that would have kept me from having to read it. As that was not an option, I informed you that your draft “need[ed] a lot of work.” Pursuant to 2), you were the one expected to do said work.

6) My international students (who are non-native speakers) have a finer grasp of elegant expression than you do. You have taken the language of Shakespeare, Milton, Strunk and White and made it read like marbles being poured into a wood chipper.

7) Did I mention that in a game of Jeopardy! against Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, you would still somehow manage to finish fourth?

8 ) Yeeeaaargh!

9) All of the above.

Therefore, I suggest you take the C (which left me wanting to shower after writing it in my gradebook) and be grateful. Also, never darken my classroom again.

Love and sloppy wet kisses,

Prof. M

Ah, the professor who takes his job seriously, meets up with the grown-up man-child who has thus far been able to argue his way into & out of everything. Hilarity ensues, although not from the point of view of the man-child.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. — allegedly written by an English professor at Ohio University.

The things you find in the New York Times letters section:

Robert H. Frank’s article (“Taxing the Rich: It’s All Relative,” Economic View, Nov. 28), on the rationale for allowing tax cuts to expire for families’ income over $250,000, is focused on the wrong issue. It’s our spending that’s a problem, not the ability of the wealthiest to pay even more.

I want the wealthy to keep doing what they’re doing. Personally, I am happy I have spreadsheets (thank you, Bill Gates) and can order all my holiday gifts in 15 minutes (thank you, Jeff Bezos). The richest of the rich, in most cases, provide more value to the world via the items they create than any charity or government organization could dream of. Their wealth is an exact measure of the value they have provided to society.

J. Todd Larson

Bainbridge Island, Wash.,

Nov. 29

The writer is the president of Citium Wealth Management and an adjunct professor in the M.B.A. program at Seattle University.

The Frank article is here.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin’s page on the Hello-Kitty-of-blogging.

Blogger friend Phil has thoughts on this issue too.

But it’s really not about “fair shares”. It’s about people wanting something, seeing someone who has the means to give them what they want, and getting their grubby hands on the levers of government power to force those other people to cough up more of their dough. Not only are they already giving more dough, they’re giving a bigger percentage of their dough for the cause. At what point will it become “fair” if it is not “fair” now?

The answer is never.

We seem to be caught up in a big national debate about socialism. I notice the socialists are lately deploying an argument that could be expressed as “if you think a socialist is what I am then you obviously don’t know what socialism is.” I hear lots of people begin this argument but then they don’t complete it — they don’t say what exactly it is a socialist does, that they are not doing.

I would expect we can all agree that if your vision is one where everyone has the same amount of stuff, that would make you a socialist. So from this, I infer the quibbling is about matters of degree. I am interpreting the socialists to say “I would be a socialist if I wanted everyone to be left with the same amount of stuff, but I do not want that goal. I just want to use our tax code to sort of trot out in that general direction, a little bit.” I think they rationalize their non-socialism by insisting they’d stop at some point.

That’s what I think when I take them seriously — and maybe that’s a mistake.

But my point is: How come it falls to the rest of us to figure out where they’d stop? How come it isn’t up to them to tell us? They use numbers like “wealthiest one percent” and “those who make $250,000 or more” to assure us that they only want to bring pain to those other guys — we don’t need to worry about it. And if we keep worrying about it it shows how dumb we are.

To be a smarty-pants, I guess you just need to tune out and not absorb any information about anything.

But if we do this tuning out, to show how smart and unconcerned we are…then how far does it go? It goes toward complete entropy but doesn’t actually reach it because they’re not socialists. So how much equalization gets done? When the dust settles, how much loot is the most productive, wealthiest person left with, and how well off is the laziest person? How come they don’t spec it out? Wouldn’t it be to their political benefit to do so?

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, by way of RightNetwork:

Despite protests from the Democrats, the Republican Party made banning slavery part of its national platform in 1864. Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL) wrote the final version of the text, combining the proposed wordings of several other Republican congressmen.

FrankJ is noticing what I’ve been noticing:

…I’ve listened carefully to a number of liberals, and here is a transcription of their argument of why we need to raise taxes on the rich:

“I get really worked up about the rich not paying more in taxes because how much they earn affects me because of [unintelligible]. And we really need the tax money; sure, we did a ton of spending without worrying about having revenue to back it up before, but now it’s really important because of [unintelligible]. And I don’t buy the argument or historical evidence that raising taxes will decrease tax revenue by harming the economy since [unintelligible]. There is just no reason to think that taking money away from job creators will harm job growth if you factor in [unintelligible]. In fact, raising taxes on the rich could help the economy by [unintelligible]. Really, the reason I get so worked up about us needing to tax the rich is because once their taxes are raised we all get the awesome prize of [unintelligible].”

I think that covers their whole argument. Did I miss anything?

I think it does, and I don’t think you did.

Doing crimes, doing time: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Earning money: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Paying taxes: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Hey, give ’em credit for consistency.

Just another smarmy secularist. Oh, no wait, I forgot: She isn’t saying anything about a desire for more secularism, her argument is grounded in diversity. Okay, very well then. She’s a cowardly fucking secularist.

And she’s being eaten alive in the comments section. Oh, that just warms the cockles of my heart. Really, it does. She deserves it. Just give it a read…

It seems there should be no debate that Christmas does not belong in the workplace. The people who disagree do not understand what it’s like to be a minority, and they fail to accept that Christmas is not a universal holiday.

“Should be no debate” — that’s rich. This is where the whole thing falls apart. Diversity has something to do with tolerance, right? Tolerance has something to do with diversity? Diversity-tolerance, tolerance-diversity? Two great tastes that go together like peanut butter & chocolate?

Anybody who thinks so, I’m gong to show them Penelope’s column. It absolutely oozes non-tolerance.

What are my own feelings about it? Ann Landers wedding rule — and longtime readers will know what I mean by that. It’s one of the few pieces of sage advice on which the addled-minded late advice columnist agreed with Yours Truly, or maybe it’s more appropriate to say Yours Truly agrees with the advice of the deceased fuzzy-brained advice columnist: When someone says “If you want me there you’ll have to dis-invite X” there is only one appropriate, one logical answer: “That’s a shame, we’ll miss you.”

You do not negotiate with terrorists, and you do not appease people who make those kinds of ultimatums. Period. It all comes down to this — if your productivity & cheerful demeanor slip a notch or two because you were just reminded someone has a different belief from yours, then you are the problem. Just like the wedding guest who says “I’m not coming if X is coming” is the problem.

Penelope has allowed herself to wander very far afield from where she wanted to go; she’s on a very dark path, although she may not realize it. She has begun to systematically abjure things that are not compatible with “diversity,” and I don’t think it’ll be too long before she starts to target the people she thinks are incompatible with this goal, as she sees it, as well.

And she has a big ol’ fistful of studies that say this is key to workplace productivity; profitability; competitiveness.

Whatever trivial differences there are between the people who are like her, and the classic caricature of Ebenezer Scrooge, are melting away rather quickly huh? Kind of like a snowman whose season has passed. Um…how is she any different…gender, age bracket, nationality. And diet. And she looks kinda hot in her own way, whereas Scrooge certainly did not — although others are hotter. Other than those things she’s pretty much a carbon copy at this point, right?

If I had my way, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Yup. That’s her; she’s there.

You know what I hear when someone says “Merry Christmas”? Lots of things, chief among them the very same thing I hear when someone says “Welcome to Hooters sir!” I know I’m someplace where there aren’t any tightasses. I hear “Come, let us break bread together because we’re all here together, we’re all brothers and sisters; maybe we have some long-simmering dispute, but if we do, we’ll pick it up in January. Have a seat at our table, and leave your troubles on the doorstep!”

I’m sorry, if you have a problem with that there’s something wrong with you. Something frightfully, terribly wrong. I don’t care if you have a bookshelf full of Nobel prizes, a healthy society is not going to be listening to people like you until you get a serious attitude check. The issue is not wisdom, but brotherly love…which, contrary to what may have become my rightfully-earned reputation as a cold-blooded bastard, I daresay is a bit more important. The brotherly love — you people who are like Penelope and Ebenezer, you see it where it doesn’t exist, and you deny it where it is paraded right before your cynical eyes, in as real and genuine a form as it has ever been beheld.

The English language deprives me of the words I need to describe how much I pity you.

Say hi to Marley’s Ghost for me, Penelope. If he doesn’t pop up on your doorstep about seven o’clock tonight, he should. If he and his pals turn your damned attitude around, I’d like to see you over a table filled with num-nums and good wine and a great big ol’ stuffed goose in the middle. If it doesn’t happen, then maybe next year. And pardon me for daring to disagree, but I’m sure your employer & mine would do just as well as they would’ve otherwise.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Just bookmarking without comment.

Other than to give the reason why: Election/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan stuff excluded, this is easily the most important story of 2010.

If you’re unemployed and hoping to land something, you’d better hope to hell some uncharacteristic magnitude of leadership emerges from, of all places, the beltway. Otherwise you’re completely screwed.

Me:

From here forward, no more about the Wonder of Wasilla…Back to Palin, when she points out something meaningful, or is imploded by the major scandal that has been so breathlessly anticipated by her enemies for over two years straight now. Or, when she turns out to be right about something and the O-Man turns out to be wrong…which is the trigger most likely to get tripped first.

But some whiny pussykins writing a meandering screed — thereby proving she’s relevant AND electable — is not going to get any notice from us for the foreseeable future. This is just stupid. Someone wants attention so they write “Palin Go Away!” and they just…get it? Enough is enough.

Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times. Different sentiment, but essentially the same moratorium in effect.

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

She’s the Zsa Zsa Gabor of American politics. She once did something noteworthy, but she’s now just famous for being famous.

…except, of course, I’m breaking my own moratorium by mentioning his. But what the hell, it’s worth it. Besides, I’m a blogger. If I come up with an idea and someone copies me, I have to point it out.

Blow just doesn’t get it. “Famous for being famous” is Courtney Peldon. Now, did you recognize that name? Probably not; you’ve probably read the name “Sarah Palin” a whole lot of times since the last time you’ve heard any mention of Peldon. In fact, there are really only two things in common between Palin and Peldon, and “famous for being famous” is not one of them.

They’re both vastly more aesthetically appealing than the average chubby-liberal-goth-chick in Seattle, and each is more qualified to be President than our current one.

The one that is being talked about more often, however, is constitutionally eligible to run in an election for that office. And, I still maintain, if she comes gunnin’ for it the job is hers. I maintain, furthermore, that deep down everybody with a working brain knows this, including Charles Blow. That’s why nobody anywhere is actually ceasing & desisting from talking about what’s-her-name. We have a lot of people (including me) saying they will. We have lots of people talking about how everybody else should. And we have truckloads and truckloads of liberals who are wishing everybody would. Starting now.

And absolutely nobody is saying “hey, it’s a great idea if we start talking about Sarah Palin!”

But people are talking about her anyway…all the time. You know the real reason? Because it is becoming an impossibility to imagine a credible sequence of events, between this moment and 2012, culminating in an outcome other than Gov. Palin being our new President-Elect. Lot of comments about how it can’t happen because this-insurmountable-obstacle or that-insurmountable-obstacle. But not a single credible scenario that stops it from happening.

Reuters, via Yahoo News:

Employment barely grew in November and the jobless rate unexpectedly hit a seven-month high, hardening views the Federal Reserve would stick to its $600 billion plan to shore up the fragile recovery.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 39,000, with private hiring gaining only 50,000, a Labor Department said on Friday. However, data for September and October was revised to show 38,000 more jobs were gained in those months than previously estimated.

The unemployment rate in November jumped to 9.8 percent, a troubling sign for an economy many had thought was strengthening. Economists had expected 140,000 new jobs last month with the jobless rate holding steady.

“The U.S. economy has yet to achieve the escape velocity needed to improve the worrisome jobs picture,” Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment offer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California.

No hiring, few working, little to none among the new businesses being launched. Local, state and federal governments awash in red ink with nobody left to tax.

How much more evidence does one need before one is ready to chisel the epitaph? How about…every single city with a population greater than 250,000 mired deeply in liberalism, with a democrat mayor and a big ol’ mess of leftists on every council and advisory panel. And, in all those cities, the primary metropolitan newspapers splash whiny human-interest stories on every single square inch, every single day, of someone being dependent on a government program and they’re in dire straights because the budget is going to get cut again. Because that municipality just can’t make ends meet.

When everybody, everywhere, has run out of things to tax. And the demands for more and more government largess just keep right on rolling in.

When it’s like that in all fifty states, all across the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea…can we then proclaim that liberalism doesn’t work?

Or no. Will it somehow be Bush’s fault.

Much thanks to Neo-Neocon for this bit of unpleasant reality.

VDH:

When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
:
There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
:
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating…

Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
:
Surely one lesson is that when out of power one is not responsible for Americans’ being murdered, and thus has the leeway to call for a sort of cosmic justice in a way one cannot when in power.
:
What are we to make of this great history lesson of the last two years?

Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.

It’s very much like parenting, methinks. You can make a successful go out of it without being a dickhead about it every day, or even much of the time. If you’re blessed with a child who doesn’t force you to be a dickhead, maybe you’ll never have to be a dickhead at all.

But if you go through the experience determined to use it to prove what a nice person you are, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bollux it up. Because that would necessarily mandate a fuzzy sort of dogmatic extremism: Every single time you can make a problem go away by spending some loot, you have to; every single time you can suspend a rule that would make life inconvenient in the moment, you must; each time you can appease someone who’s trying to get something he wants by flouting common sense and basic good manners, then appeasement is the order of the day.

I think Obama does deserve some credit. Disaster would surely ensue if He were to take an approach of, “but I promised my constituents I’d turn all these things around” and went ahead, facts and national security be damned. Maybe not that day, or that year, but eventually. And, to the best I know about it, He hasn’t done that. I don’t know if that begins and ends with Him, though. I’d like to think there are some Col. Nathan Jessup types out there, in “places you don’t talk about at parties,” who managed to convince the right people that if the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff went forward as planned things would get really, really ugly. If so, we want them on that wall; we need them on that wall.

What makes me think it went that way? Not much. Just, the stuff that does not directly relate to national security — the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff has indeed gone forward as planned. We are in hock up to our ass. I haven’t seen profligate spending of this magnitude of recklessness since the first Christmas shopping season after my ex-wife got hold of the household credit card.

It comes from the authorities in charge excluding it as a possibility that anybody from among the “right” people can every be told no. Generally, that is the anatomy of a poor decision. Somebody didn’t want to tell somebody else no.

William Voegeli, Commentary Magazine.

The liberal-opinion industry spoke with one voice: President Obama’s tax plan was his party’s best hope to avert a midterm disaster. Over Labor Day weekend, Obama called on Congress to continue the Bush tax cuts for every family making less than $250,000 per year and to let income tax rates revert to their pre-2001 levels only on income above that threshold.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote that raising taxes on the rich is “wildly popular.” Indeed, voters “are in favor of pretty much any measure that takes money from the rich.” The columnist E.?J. Dionne agreed. Refusing to continue the Bush tax rates for high-income families would rally the Democratic base in advance of the 2010 midterm elections: “What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause?” The New York Times editorialized that the Obama plan, by cornering the GOP, was smart politics on behalf of good policy: “Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.”

And then a funny thing happened. Nothing. First the Democratic House and then the Democratic Senate decided to adjourn without holding a vote on Obama’s tax proposal. They wanted to go home to campaign, but a decisive contingent of vulnerable incumbents refused to campaign on that. Democrats postponed consideration of the issue to the relative safety of a post-election lame-duck session.

The commentariat was furious. The Democrats have taken the “Curl Up in a Fetal Position Plan on taxes” wrote Chait, a choice he found “crazy,” “pure political suicide,” and “one of the nuttiest decisions, on pure political grounds, I’ve ever seen.” Expressing himself more temperately than Chait, as most people do, Dionne wrote, “For the life of me, I don’t get why some Democrats are so afraid of this vote.” “Profiles in Timidity” was the Times’s editorial verdict when the Democrats decided not to decide.

There are two problems with this indictment. First, voting for the Obama tax plan wasn’t supposed to require any Democratic courage. All the risks would befall those Republicans who were so foolish or doctrinaire that they would vote against lowering taxes for lots of people to avoid raising them for just a few. Second, this threat analysis was confidently delivered by people who were not themselves threatened—­journalists, whose careers won’t be altered by the midterm elections—and rejected by people who were—legislators who would be hoping to catch on with lobbying firms or think tanks if the Obama tax plan turned out to be less popular than the journalists had promised.

Found Chait’s article here. Chait points to Matthew Yglesias, who calls it “Voters Want To Soak The Rich” when poll respondents indicate, 55-43, that it would be “acceptable” to increase federal taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year.

You can come to your own conclusion of whether too much meaning is extracted from too little evidence. I think I’d be in the 55% that say a tax increase on families making a quarter million is “acceptable”; it’s constitutionally permitted at this point. But that doesn’t mean it would be good for this economy.

Neon-Dionne opined here. I find the statement “In the absence of a coherent case, Republicans were winning by default on a wave of protest votes” to be a real howler. Let’s see: The nation is in financial chaos because not enough people are making money. In my book, “it oughtta be alright to make some money” is a coherent case if nothing else is. If a culture is created in which there’s something wrong with you when you’re too productive, and you need to be punished for it — how in the world can any recession ever end?

The Times editorial is here. It makes the argument that a tax cut for the “wealthy” — this is already treacherous territory, for this country doesn’t have a wealth tax, only an income tax — would cost revenue. Hundreds of billions of dollars “would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise.”

This has been exposed as a falsity the first time we cut tax rates and experienced increased tax income as a direct result. And then, we did that a few more times. I’ve yet to hear of it going the other way; we cut a tax rate, and aw darn the revenues fell because the rate was cut. Are there examples of this? I don’t see anyone offering any. That is why we have this notion of a “tax cut costs money” down as Item #7 on our list of things that give you away as a clueless dork.

So our usual leftists are irked by the idea of taxes being cut for the “wealthy,” and they like to see the taxes increased in those brackets. This is not new, and it may be legitimate to say in these post-French-Revolution times, this is a good definition for what that word “left” really means: Make some profit for yourself, and you shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. The more you’re taxed, the better.

What I do not understand is the adrenaline. Why do they get so upset when the possibility emerges that a rich person might not get taxed? It’s not just Chait/Yglesias/Dionne/Times-editorial-board. Could it really be explained by arrested development? I’m middle class, I want everyone else to be middle class too…I have to carry a lunch box to work, I want everyone else to have to make themselves baloney sandwiches every morning too…I can’t drive a Lexus, I don’t want you to drive one either…

That can’t be it. There are rich liberals around, and I’m not just talking about Warren Buffet. Some liberals are richer than other liberals. How come we don’t have liberals grilling other wealthier liberals about mailing off extra dough to the IRS, until the glorious day comes that their tax liabilities are assessed at the level they should be?

Are they being deficit hawks? Don’t make me laugh. Yeah, a lot of liberals qualify for Item #7. But if they cared about deficits, they’d remain concerned about the deficits when the time came to spend money.

I don’t understand why the average progressive mind becomes so agitated and unhinged about the slope of this taxation curve. Even if they are the direct beneficiaries of the associated services, this country has been drunk on deficit-spending for decades so it’s not like they’ll feel it when the rich are soaked-real-good. Is this nothing more than a middle-school-level “us versus them” thing? I just don’t understand it, the hatred.

Their more moderate fellow citizens aren’t backing ’em on it. Most of the fleecing that’s been pulled off on me personally, successfully and otherwise, has actually been perpetuated by poor people; “rich” people have been relatively nice to me. And I have the impression most people share that general experience.

But when the rubber hits the road, when a rich person makes a little bit more money, alright let’s say there’s a marginal possibility some other fellow would be a better judge of how that money should be spent and where it ought to go. But if that other guy can make a better decision there than the rich guy who made the money, wouldn’t the other guy have been the one to make it?

Volokh has thoughts on it.

Co-blogger Randy Barnett’s proposed Repeal Amendment has generated a great deal of controversy. The amendment would give a two thirds majority of the states the power to repeal any federal law or regulation. The idea has now been endorsed by a number of congressional Republicans, including soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Randy argues that the amendment could play a significant role in “deterring even further expansions of federal power.” Critics such as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claim that it would seriously undermine the Constitution or even “destroy” it.

I think that both sides’ claims are overstated. If enacted, the Repeal Amendment would have only minor effects because mobilizing 34 states (the number needed for a two-thirds majority) to oppose any congressional enactment is extremely difficult. Proponents of repeal would have to win not just 34 votes, but 67 or 68, since every state but Nebraska has a bicameral legislature. In some cases, the party that controls the state senate is not the same as the one that controls the lower house, which makes it difficult to get both to vote for the same repeal proposal.

As Randy himself points out, “[g]etting two-thirds of state legislatures to agree on overturning a federal law will not be easy and will only happen if a law is highly unpopular.” If it were that unpopular, it seems unlikely that the law would be enacted by both houses of Congress and the president in the first place. In practice, therefore, the Amendment’s effects would largely be limited to repealing a few old laws that no longer have significant political support. And even in those cases, assembling the required two-thirds majority will be difficult.

Generally, I’m not too charitable toward arguments that take the form “once it’s in, it ought to be in for good.” We have a lot of lavishly funded political movements lately — ObamaCare was one, but there are many others — that have something to do with a “deflowering” event. Say yes here, and it will never be possible to say no, ever again.

Rather like throwing a match into a drum of gasoline. Once it’s lit, there will be no way to extinguish it. In what way does this quality of “can’t ever extinguish it, ever, no matter what” serve the interests of a constitutionally representative republic?

And our democratic process does very little to persuade me that once The People have spoken, the matter should be settled forevermore. I live in California, where it seems just yesterday our union apparatus was clamoring from the rooftops that the recall effort must fail, should fail, and inevitably will fail…because Gray Davis, dang it, had just been re-elected as our governor. The people obviously wanted him! Well, that’s not the way things shook out.

Sometimes…a lot of the time, in fact…there is an advantage to be had from asking “okay one last time: Are you sure you really want this?” That’s what responsible people do with the important decisions they make in their personal lives, and I don’t see why they should be prohibited from doing the same thing in the voting booth, through their state representation.

Politico:

The House Democrats’ prized global warming committee died quietly on Wednesday.

It was four years old.

Created in 2007 by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to draw attention to the causes and effects of climate change, the committee didn’t have much of a chance to survive the upcoming Republican takeover. Wednesday, the axe fell.

“We have pledged to save taxpayers’ money by reducing waste and duplication in Congress,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for incoming Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “The Select Committee on Global Warming – which was created to provide a political forum to promote Washington Democrats’ job-killing national energy tax – was a clear example, and it will not continue in the 112th Congress.”

With the end in sight, Committee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) organized what was billed as an “all-star” cast of witnesses to testify Wednesday on the dangers posed by climate change. And like the Democrats’ hopes for a bill limiting carbon dioxide emissions, things didn’t turn out exactly as planned.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark didn’t show and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was delayed by several hours.

I decided to go ahead and include that last paragraph because I think it’s important. When you watch all the shakers and movers and eggheads and authority figures, with the presumption that the planet is indeed in danger and the cream of our society understands all of the relevant details…their actions present you with one conundrum after another, many of them logically unworkable.

When you presume the climate change thing is a scam and a naked power grab, there is no conundrum. It all makes sense. Gen. Clark has been part of a power grab, for the time being it is a futile one, so he just can’t find the time to show up. Is that how you act when the planet is in danger and the know-nothings have been voted in to restore all the policies that will slide the entire planet into oblivion? I seem to recall Dennis Quaid had some passion to show in “Day After Tomorrow” — he showed up. With the planet on the line, wouldn’t you, y’know, find the time to be there?

Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook:

‘It is not a sensible way to run a country to have this magnitude of tax issues left to annual uncertainty,” said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner earlier this month, and he’s certainly right about that. But at the current moment the single biggest obstacle to more certainty is his boss, President Obama, who still refuses to compromise on the tax increase set to whack the economy in a mere 30 days.

After meeting with Congressional leaders yesterday, Mr. Obama dispatched Mr. Geithner and budget director Jacob Lew to negotiate a deal. Yet the President is still holding out against even a temporary extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax rates. Republicans won 63 House seats running against those tax increases, but Mr. Obama still seems under the spell of the dead enders led by soon-to-be-former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The magnitude of the looming tax increase ought to snap him out of this hypnosis. If the Democrats who still run Capitol Hill for another month fail to act, tens of millions of American households will see their paychecks shrink immediately in the New Year.

One of many reasons why the donkey party lost me, years and years ago. Whenever you talk about some kind of subsistence that relies on loot involuntarily collected from the taxpayers — welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance extensions, social security, medicare — it seems they get it: The economy can’t do well unless people have money to spend. Heck, they’re the the ones selling this idea; they use it to justify everything they have to say.

And then when you start talking about earning paychecks this entire principle just sails out the freakin’ window.

Well, unless you’re talking about paychecks earned by unionized employees.

It’s not free enterprise they hate. It’s that F-word, free. They like that other F-word, “forced,” so much better. Rules, rules, rules deciding where every single nickel is supposed to go, how long it’s supposed to stay there, how fast it’s supposed to come back, and under what conditions.

In the things that separate the political parties, this is one of the very few constants, the “free” in free enterprise. They’re against it, everlastingly.