Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
be not envious of wrongdoers!
For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act.
Psalm 37:1-40
Facebook Post of the Day
The "progressive" Nation magazine has finally agreed to pay its interns minimum wage. But courtesy of the Dept. of Unintentional Humor, and Making the Other Side's Point to Boot, The Nation says:"This fall we are anticipating hiring ten interns rather than twelve." - Tom WoodsAs the cost of hiring interns increases, fewer interns are hired. Or what happens when you raise the minimum wage of interns?
Original Quote
This comes from an unpublished email to one of my often-cited free market economists:
Libertarians would rather kill the heretic than the infidel.
America's Longest Failed War
Former Secretary Schultz is spot on; the demand is there, otherwise there would be no suppliers, domestic or otherwise. Anyone who uses drugs in my opinion is a loser, and he or she stops being a loser by becoming healthy. Instead of spending ungodly amounts of money in law enforcement and prisons, I would really prefer to see part of the savings used to heal addicts and other users.
Rand Paul Joins Pat Leahy on Prison Sentence Reform: THUMBS UP!
Recall my criticism of Holder's announced policy of working around charges associated with minimum sentences, that this violates the rule of law and what we really need are policy reforms originated from the Congress? It's almost as if the senators read my post:
Attorney General Eric Holder's decision not to pursue mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug cases is an encouraging step. Few have criticized the merits of his proposal, but some say that it is for Congress, not the executive branch, to take action. To them we say: we are ready. Join us.
In just the last three decades, the federal prison population has soared by almost 800 percent. Our bill would expand that safety valve to more defendants in more types of cases and has earned support from across the political spectrum, including conservative columnist George Will, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, former National Rifle Association President David Keene, the New York Times, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and more than 50 former federal prosecutors and judges.George Will explains the motivation behind the Leahy/Paul reform:
Approximately 80,000 persons are sentenced in federal courts each year. There are an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes, and tens of thousands of regulations backed by criminal penalties, including incarceration. There can be felony penalties for violating arcane regulations that do not give clear notice of behavior that is prescribed or proscribed. This violates the mens rea requirement -- people deserve criminal punishment only if they intentionally engage in conduct that is inherently wrong or that they know to be illegal. No wonder the federal prison population -- currently approximately 219,000, about half serving drug sentences -- has expanded 51 percent since 2000 and federal prisons are at 138 percent of their supposed capacity. The Leahy-Paul measure would expand to all federal crimes the discretion federal judges have in many drug cases to impose sentences less than the mandatory minimums.Of course, the real action is in STATE courts because by the Constitution, states retain police functions. Reddy and Vikram in their recent NRO post show, as usual, Obama has been leading from behind on this issue:
Since 2010, conservative legislatures in Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota have passed significant reform packages. In all of these states, conservative governors supported the reforms and signed them into law.
Texas is perhaps the most prominent state to be involved. In 2007, the state’s Legislative Budget Board insisted that legislators would need to spend $2 billion on the 17,000 additional prison beds that would be necessary by 2012. Texas legislators were rolling in a multi-billion-dollar budget surplus at the time — but, led by house corrections-committee chairman Jerry Madden (a Republican from north Dallas), they opted to veer from Texas’s longstanding strategy of simply building more prisons. Instead, the legislators worked to develop a reform package that required a far smaller amount of money than would have been spent on prisons, and spent it on alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders. These alternatives included drug courts, electronic monitoring, and enhanced parole and probation supervision. The reforms were signed into law by Governor Rick Perry. When 2013 finally arrived, Texas’s crime rate was at its lowest point since 1968, and the legislature had authorized three prison closures. Texas had succeeded while spending less on prisons.Texas succeeded in part because, unlike the federal government, its courts are not cramped by mandatory-sentencing laws.Of course, counterproductive minimum sentence laws did not happen on their own. For example, populist cable news pundit Bill O'Reilly sees stiff sentences as necessary given liberal justices with victimization perspectives and sees them as ways of being "tough on crime". What is there about having one of the highest incarceration rates and the most, overcrowded, expensive prisons among the developed economies that leads O'Reilly and similar populists to believe we are "soft" on crime?
Cato Institute Event, "Immigration Overhaul: How to Fix a Broken System": Thumbs UP!
This is more of a moderated Q & A session with Alex Nowrasteh. (Note: Nowrasteh gives a more cohesive overview (versus a fragmented interview-style approach) in his ending presentation to the 2013 Libertarian State of the Union address available here. I found his discussion of how the bracero program worked and how it lowered unauthorized immigration rates in the mid 1950's compelling. In terms of citizenship, he noted the overwhelming majority of participants eventually returned to Mexico, not making use of options to gain permanent residency (i.e., a green card).)
Although I often do background research for my commentaries, I don't have the time to do exhaustive research on each topic. So for instance when I read an open borders grumpy economist dismiss the concept of work visas as a means of exploiting foreign-born workers, I was startled; most of us have been looking to fix a broken immigration system and expand opportunities for legal status work. Not everyone who comes to work here wants to stay here. For instance, I've known Indians whom intend to build up savings to retire back in India where the cost of living can be much lower. I was criticizing the work visa quotas in the Senate bill as too limited; that was my personal reaction. I wasn't aware whether the work visa issue was even being discussed by other libertarians--it seemed all the oxygen was taken by discussions of border security and path to citizenship; Nowrasteh, in fact, has a perspective which is uncannily highly consistent with mine on question after question, only he is much more familiar and dexterous with studies and statistics. One of the best Q and A's I've seen on any topic. Highly recommended.
One Blog Not Making my Blogroll
I was intrigued when I first ventured onto the Libertarian Republican blog: the first thing you see are images of Friedman, Rand, and Goldwater (?). The latter choice is enigmatic in the sense Goldwater had broken with the Old Right. Quoting Nisbet:
Of all the misascriptions of the word ‘conservative’ during the last four years, the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to the last-named. For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed.."The Old Right's devotion to anti-imperialism were at odds with the spreading of progressive culture and global democracy, the top-down transformation of local heritage, social and institutional engineering of the political Left and even some from the modern Right-wing." For example, consider the Bush Doctrine, which at one point rationalized intervention in the Gulf region as spreading American democratic ideals; Bush's radical expansion of the federal government's role in education, his encroachments on liberties through the Patriot Act and expansion of Medicare benefits were major departures from twentieth-century conservative thought; I guess I would be part of the revived Old Right.
Goldwater was an interventionist; but both he and Reagan had libertarian streaks. I'm more used to libertarians referencing Reagan; I have sometimes referred to a 1975 Reason interview. But the blog references a belief in a strong national defense. (A lot of conservatives credit Reagan's policies for winning the Cold War, and I think would prefer to promote the winner of two landslide elections than the loser of one. I'm not judging the editors; I just thought it was an odd selection.)
But the editors differ from me in a number of respects; for example, they seem to be obsessed with stories about Muslim radicals, the spread of sharia law, and various protests and violence, in the States and Europe. I do, on occasion, cover stories like how certain Egyptian Muslim radicals have been targeting Copt Christians, churches and property, but the vast number of their stories don't interest me. They also cover a lot more election politics than I do. I've tapered off my discussions of elections; I did write a recent signature Political Potpourri segment
What really ticked me off today was this post headline: "New Poll just released: Native Americans SCREAMING at Congress - NO MORE VISAS FOR LOW-SKILLED WORKERS TAKING AMERICAN JOBS." A short while back the editors pushed a post referencing a Daily Beast smear calling Tea Partiers "nativist". The editor wrote something like "Hey! That's us--nativist"; I commented that wasn't a good thing, something like the xenophobic Know-Nothing's or KKK. I then pointed out that immigration was a win-win for the economy and criticized anti-immigrant labor protectionism. (Someone at the blog called me an [expletive deleted] on the latter point, making a judgment about Mexican worker flow.)
At least the editor is no longer referring to himself as a nativist, but 'Native American' is generally a synonym for American Indians. He's not referring to Indians, of course, but American citizens by birth. But I never thought I would have to explain the good economic growth story behind immigration to an editor with an image of Ayn Rand on the home page. No, when there is unrequited demand for labor, it will attract a supply, including the underground economy. A lot of Americans work those jobs--but often, not enough. Let me provide a case example of the counterproductive effects of state immigration laws in the rush to emulate Arizona in the Old South:
Mayor Paul Bridges of the small farming community of Uvalda, Ga., could have been speaking for counterparts all over the country last week when he pleaded with a Senate panel for passage of an immigration reform bill. The draconian law passed in Georgia in lieu of action by Congress, he said, “will only devastate our local economies.”
Georgia’s farm workers are in the crosshairs of a new law that gives local police expanded powers to enforce immigration laws, and also targets anyone who gives undocumented immigrants a helping hand. These workers are critical to the state’s $6.5 billion agricultural economy, but many have chosen to look for work elsewhere. Though the law remains suspended due to a lawsuit, the Georgia Agribusiness Council reports that farms have already lost $300 million due to a lack of workers and healthy crops have been left to rot in the field.
“This law isn’t immigration reform,” the mayor complained. “This law is government intrusion of the worst kind. It threatens our economy. It threatens our way of life. And it simply makes no sense.” And that’s the sworn testimony of a self-described “conservative Republican mayor” from Georgia.Fear-Mongering Over Fracking
Political Humor
Other than the obvious nonsense of political correctness run amok, hey, look at the bright side: in this case, they can't say that Obama is "all hat and no cattle". No word yet on whether the rodeo clown has been banned from Halloween parties, trick or treating, or First Daughter birthday parties... But I'll use any excuse to embed my favorite Spinners hit.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Ken Catalino and Townhall |
The Beatles, "The Long and Winding Road". The final of the Beatles 20 #1 hits. Ironically Paul cited Phil Spector's reworking of the track as one of his reasons for leaving the Beatles. I did like the later released "naked" version (second video)
