This post deals with 3 newly introduced awards which may or may not continue in future years, in part because I didn't publish as many nominees as for my core "awards": the Bad Judge of the Year, the Economic Illiterate of the Year, and the Scumbag Public Servant of the Year.
- I have had a number of disagreements with outrageous judges this past year, including but not restricted to an Illinois court rejecting Illinois' modest, inadequate public pension reforms. ("The reform law was enacted in December 2013 to help save Illinois' sinking finances. It reduces and suspends cost-of-living increases for pensions, raises retirement ages and limits salaries on which pensions are based. Employees contribute 1 percent less of their salaries toward pensions.")
As a libertarian, I believe that marriage and family law should be privatized, and I think that gays have the right to freely associate, for government and others to respect their right to be left alone. This includes whatever they wish to name their domestic partnerships. As a Catholic, I have a moral position on the gay lifestyle, but I believe that men have free will and are responsible for their own life decisions, and I will not stand in the way of their pursuit of happiness. But I differ from many other libertarians in that I see government intervention on the status of relationships within the social context as unwarranted; I view states as a form of free association, and the free market of states should allow me to live in a state reflecting a context of traditional values, and for other states to market themselves as "gay-friendly". Certainly gays would have the right to migrate to friendly states. Note that in the traditional marriage states, there was no ban on nontraditional relationships, for gays to have commitment ceremonies, to list gay partners in wills, etc. Social recognition is a type of qualification; for example, I hold a PhD from an AACSB-certified program. It may very well be the case that instructors without a PhD, PhD's from unqualified programs or PhD's from a different discipline may also do a competent job teaching MIS classes. But the college, mindful of its own accreditation requirements, will generally hire professors from accredited discipline programs. In the context of this nation's general Judaic-Christian (and other cultural) tradition, marriage reflects social norms for partner exclusivity and the foundation for procreation and family; marriage and family are tied to social stability and survival. Gay partners, by nature, don't procreate; there is no general social need to recognize these relationships outside of gay communities. This doesn't mean that similarly friendships and other non-marital relationships (consistent with sexual partner exclusivity) are without value. But I find it morally offensive that fellow libertarians, like Cato Institute, would cheer on judicial tyranny to impose its politically correct values on traditional value states like Utah and South Carolina.
- For Economic Illiterate of the Year, as bad as American "progressives" are, including nominee Hillary Clinton (remember, don't let them tell you businesses create jobs?), it's hard to match the utter incompetence of certain Latin American leaders. Although I was disappointed to see the reelection of the leftist Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (if you want to see how populist policies can undermine the business model of a once high-flying PBR, that in and of itself would merit nomination to this category), it's hard to top Argentina's Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro.
President Nicolás Maduro may need a higher oil price than any other OPEC nation. The country has an ambitious socialist program of government spending that is overwhelmingly pegged to oil-related receipts. It is running a huge deficit equal to 11.5% of the country's GDP — $438 billion, according to the World Bank — and has borrowed billions from China. Falling oil prices almost certainly mean more economic hardship in a country where there are chronic shortages of basic consumer products, such as toilet paper, and the inflation rate is over 50%, among the world's highest.
Argentina’s new ‘supply law’, or Ley de Abastecimiento, due to take effect in December next year. Under this new law, the government will have the honorable burden of defending consumers from greedy producers. Companies are now prohibited from setting their prices too high, generating too much profit, or producing too little. And unlike the country’s astronomically high taxes (which at least have defined numbers and penalties), the new supply law doesn’t even say what is meant by too high, too many, or too little. It simply reinforces the government’s unchecked power to arbitrarily audit, fine, shut down, and expropriate production of private companies.
- Finally, Scumbag Public Servant of the Year. There were the various scandals--the VA, the IRS, the lack of disclosure of the Congress from National Intelligence. But what really got on my bad side as recent was the unconscionable counter-attack by police union spokesman and other sympathizers in the wake of the Garner homicide.
As I've repeatedly pointed out, Gardner had been similarly charged in the past for selling individual untaxed cigarettes without complications. The man was obese, a significant risk factor for asthma; I don't expect police officers to be able to diagnose asthma, but most people have enough common sense to realize that overweight people run out of breath with significant physical exertion, even climbing a floor of stairs. This arrest is beyond "he said...he said"; it was videotaped. Garner was surrounded by a handful of cops and was not a flight risk; he did not act aggressively. One of the cops jumped him from behind and wrapped his arm around Gardner's throat and continued applying the hold, even as the victim repeatedly argued that he couldn't breathe. Garner lost consciousness at the scene, suffered a heart attack on the way to the hospital, and died. The medical examiner unambiguously pointed at police behavior as the cause of death, with Garner's health condition being a contributing factor.
Now I personally think the best way to handle a tragedy is to acknowledge the city mismanaged the matter and make an unconditional apology to surviving family members: PERIOD. Instead what I heard from the police union and police sympathizers was an attempt to dispute the medical examiner's findings, to blame the victim for his own death, to paint the killer cop as a model cop, petty talking points over whether the cop's choke hold was a "real" choke hold, what the meaning of "homicide" by the medical examiner, that none of us watching the video is entitled to an opinion because we weren't on the grand jury to hear "all" of the evidence, ad nauseam. One particularly tiresome talking point was the assertion, by Bad Elephant of the Year Peter King and others, "if you can speak, you can breathe", an attempt to suggest that if the victim was being choked, you couldn't hear him say that he couldn't breathe. (For an example debunking of this talking point, see here.) But also offensive are responses in the form of a cop-owned enterprise subsequently selling a t-shirt saying "Breathe easy--don't break the law." No, a cop doesn't have a right to threaten your life; you have an unalienable right to live, and the accused has a presumption of innocence before a judge and jury.
