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Thursday, May 18, 2017

Post #3220 M

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I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.
Beverly Sills  

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(Reason). See above clip on partnerships.
I'm still not crazy about the idea of public/private partnerships, which sounds like cronyism and corruption waiting to happen. PPP is the code word partial privatization which is the libertarian equivalent of kissing your ugly sister (apologies to my 4 lovely sisters: it's a saying). Go all the way: PRIVATIZE IT!
 I understand your skepticism but can a business, looking out for the efficiencies that business require, make a significant change in how government bureaucracies operate - force them to be more efficient? Maybe it's worth the effort step by step state by state.
Privatization would be my preference but with the democrats looming victories in the mid term I don't see it happening.
I think many municipalities are in a state of denial until the whole fiscal house of cards collapses on them--witness Chicago and Illinois, Among other things, their state constitution won't allow pension reform, their local property taxes aren't competitive, etc. They'll make changes only when it's forced on them.

 Friedman's law says that it costs the government twice as much to achieve the same end (there's the direct cost offset of 40-100% plus the deadweight cost of additional taxes). One of the problems with Romney's campaign (never mind the Hoover record) was this hubris of wanting government to run more efficiently. We'll never get sustainable government unless we lessen its mandate. we want not only government with less cost but government with less cost.
How bad will the midterms be? On paper a POTUS with 38% approval should get swamped. It'll depend on a number of things, probably the most important whether the economy goes into recession. Pelosi and Schumer aren't popular, and the Dems have twice as many seats up in the Senate, including several in red states. We'll have to wait and see.

(Reason). Why government-funded agencies should display Confederate symbols only at historic sites or museums. http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/16/old-times-there-are-best-forgotte2
No, unfortunately Bailey seems to have accepted a rather conventional historical understanding of the Civil War. Does he not know, for instance, the very Robert E. Lee he cites wrote in 1856, during the Pierce presidency, " There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil."

 Bailey chooses to ignore the fact that Lincoln explicitly noted in his inaugural address that he was willing to accept slavery; what he was not willing to abide was loss of his high tariff cash cow of the South at a time when federal income was largely dependent on it.

 Most libertarians believe that the secession construct is the straightforward application of voluntary association. There is no doubt that the 13% or so of the Southern population who owned slaves and largely produced the nation's largest export, cotton, wanted to continue the practice, but to others who competed against slave labor, it was undesirable. Keep in mind that when the Southern states left the Union, there was still a Fugitive Slave Law and Lincoln behind a constitutional amendment to guarantee preservation of slavery where it existed. So how then was the war about slavery? That status quo hadn't changed. The South felt it was being politically marginalized; the protectionist tariffs imposed by the Northeast were against their economic interests. Was slavery one of the reasons listed by seceding states? Yes, but secession was not over regaining the institution of slavery that had been lost. Secession was not about invading the North in a war of aggression. It was more about independence from the tyranny of a central government, a variation from a war fought some 80-odd years earlier.

 These men fought to protect their homes from Northern aggression. While Bailey pays lip service to the threats to free expression from cultural Marxists, he essentially accepts their critique at face value and contradicts the concept of Subsidiarity over the right of the people to their own symbols.

 Personally I don't care about the statues or the motives of the people who erected them or who are rallying on their behalf. But the cultural Marxists are violating free expression. This has no place in a land based on fundamental rights, including for others with a different point of view.

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Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall

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Amy Grant, "Nothing Is Beyond You". Her last solo Christian #1.

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