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Jim Babka, President of DownsizeDC has more to report today:
The Senate is supposed to vote on REAL ID Act this afternoon. “Roll Call” reports yesterday that governors are protesting the creation of a national identification system. Plus, we know of other organizations that are now rallying their forces. We’re not alone in this fight.
It’s traditional for the Senate to vote unanimously in favor of Conference Committee Reports – to rubber stamp them. As a result of all the voices they’re hearing, I’m not so sure that’s how this is going to play out. Let’s keep up the pressure all the way to the finish line.
The REAL ID Act could signal the end of real privacy in America, as this article suggests.
And I told you yesterday about my experience on an Omaha, Neb. radio show. Well the host might not have gotten it, but his local paper certainly did! Did our interview influence the following editorial? {Registration required} Who knows? But it’s well worth reading to get a clear understanding of this issue. And when you share our campaign with your friends, encourage them to read this article for a clear explanation.
Send another message to the Senate right now, asking them to vote down the appropriations bill containing the REAL ID Act. Tell the Senate to send the appropriations bill back to the Conference Committee to remove the REAL ID Act. Send your message by Clicking here
I just can’t help myself, it seems. I suppose my attitude towards Dems suffers from the soft bigotry of low expectations, – I really don’t expect any better from them. For the Reps, well, they have been marginally better than the Dems on liberty issues, but whatever principled commitment they had to Constitutional limited government is apparently no match for the strong solvent of controlling the unitary state.
This time, really, a nice even-handed non-partisan bashing that indicts both Dems and Reps on federalism. I happen to think that dispersed power is one of the most critical bulwarks for freedom in any society, and one to which many seem oblivious to. The column details the ways in which the dispersion of government power in the US has been destroyed by both Dems and Reps.
Since the Great Society delusions of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats have assumed the powers of Congress are unlimited absent an express constitutional prohibition. The assumption turned the Constitution on its head. It evoked stentorian pledges from Republicans to honor traditional state prerogatives and to restore the Founding Fathers’ design of a limited federal government, not a Leviathan. But after capturing control of Congress and the White House, Republicans are bettering the instruction of Democrats in pulverizing federalism. The pledges of change proved hollow, like a munificent bequest in a pauper’s will, to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
The US Constitution successful in preserving individual freedom as long as it did in large part because it dispersed power so widely among and between the state and national governments, the governments and the people, and between the branches of the national government. That dispersion is at an end, and with it is born the unitary totalising state that is, and always has been, the bane of individual freedom.
One side note – the article actually does a decent job of capturing the embryonic “new federalism” jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, but any Court that will uphold an abomination like the McCain-Feingold political speech controls offers faint hope indeed to libertarians.
This item is in from the folks at DownSizeDC:
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
I’m sending out today’s Downsizer-Dispatch message earlier than usual. The Senate may vote TODAY on the “emergency” appropriations bill and the REAL ID Act. Hammer them. And do it now.
Let them know that you know that they can vote down this bill and then come back and do the spending bill again (that is, if they really must take another step toward national bankruptcy), only next time they should do it without the REAL ID Act. Tell them you know it won’t be easy, but you want them to show some backbone on this vote. Tell them you will remember what they do. The REAL ID Act must not be passed.
Send your message by clicking here.
This is interesting. It is Maurice Saatchi, in the Telegraph, ruminating upon the Conservative electoral defeat:
It will come as a surprise to my Conservative colleagues, as they absorb the lessons of last week’s defeat, to learn that the Tory Party lost the 2005 election in 1790. That was the year Edmund Burke first advised Conservatives to concentrate on: What is not What should be.
With that single fatal distinction, pragmatism became the hallmark of Conservatism. Absence of idealism became its invisible badge of honour. And aimlessness became the pinnacle of its morality. There would never be a romantic bone in a Conservative body – or so Burke hoped.
Two hundred years later, Conservatism has fallen into an electoral slump, because it remains captive to his bleak instruction. At the 2005 election, the authentic voice of 18th-century Tory pragmatism spoke through the medium of the Conservative spokesman who said: “If you want philosophy, read Descartes.” He meant that the function of the Conservative Party is to make the trains run on time. That may be so, or at least partly right. But the lesson of the campaign we have just fought is that the mere promise of efficiency is not enough to persuade people that you would be an efficient Government. Mere anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince the voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.
Read the whole thing. And while you are about it, read this Paul Marks paper to see what a misreading of Burke much of the above is. The usual Conservative practice where Edmund Burke is concerned is to misread him to be an unthinking, anti-principled pragmatist, and agree with that misreading. Saatchi misreads in the usual manner, but at least disagrees with the misreading. With the flair of the advertising man that he is, he signals his argument for principle by being a Conservative and opposing Burke. Good grief!! Would Burke himself have been pleased or infuriated? A bit of both, probably.
But never mind about such scholarly digressions. The point about this piece is not just what is being said but who is saying it. → Continue reading: Dumping pragmatism on pragmatic grounds
Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.
Just another stone in the bucket:
The Republican promise of smaller, less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe. Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to pursue a political strategy based on big spending.
It’s not always easy to see how radically Bush has transformed the GOP — from Reagan’s admonition that “government is the problem” to Dubya’s own assertion that “when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” But it’s a real transformation — and an expensive one.
I have never been a big fan of GW Bush’s domestic policies, although the primary complaint from the loyal oppo has generally been along the lines that he isn’t a big enough spender/regulator. Still, the refrain that “But Kerry would have been worse” is starting to wear a little thin.
Between the Rovian big spenders and the prudish blue-noses pushing their own nanny state, the Republican Party’s status as a better home for libertarians than the Democrats is getting more and more dubious. Truly, libertarians are being cast into the wilderness, with their only company a smattering of gibbering anchorite “true believers” and associated hucksters. Why, its getting almost as bad in the US as it seems to be in Britain!
I have now had some time to reflect on the outcome of last week’s General Election.
In many respects it was something of a non-event. Nobody seriously expected any result other than another Labour victory and the only matter which gave rise to any material speculation was the size of the Labour majority.
As it transpired, that majority was considerably reduced, providing some electoral benefit to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but nonetheless leaving the re-elected government with a perfectly playable hand.
On the face of it, last week’s elections appears to have changed nothing. Tony Blair is still the PM and his brand of ‘modernised’ social democracy appears to be what the public have again decided they want. Yet, a closer analysis of the voting figures reveals what I believe to be a significant development, albeit one that may take a while yet to manifest itself.
I will expand on this but, before I do, I want to make a few observations about the other two main parties. → Continue reading: Naked
These are difficult times in Western car industry. The Economist magazine reports that dark clouds are gathering in parts of the world economy, pointing to a slowing of consumer spending, higher interest rates and large government budget deficits (facts which may start to really hit the re-elected UK Labour government). I hope the Economist is wrong since I have a mortgage to pay and bills to meet, but its arguments are quite convicing. And one possible harbinger of trouble right now is the car industry.
The recent demise of British carmmaker Rover is well known. Across the pond, however, two even bigger auto firms have hit trouble, and yet caused surprisingly scant news coverage outside the serious parts of the MsM and the business news pages: General Motors and Ford. GM and Ford have been downgraded to “junk” status by international credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. That means that as far as S&P is concerned, GM and Ford are risky debtors, and there is a relatively high chance that the rustbelt companies could default on their debt. The downgrade has sent shockwaves through the financial markets, forcing many big investors, like pension funds, to wonder about the wisdom of holding corporate bonds at all.
The problem may be confined to these firms. GM, for example, make a lot of the big SUVs that environmentalists get steamed about, and these monsters of the road are now proving more difficult to afford in a world of high oil prices. There is also a glut of cars on the world market and the industrial growth of China and India, and indeed of parts of Latin America, are a growing threat to GM and Ford’s home market.
Britain’s car industry has been through a torrid period since the 1960s, but even in the world’s largest economy, making cars is proving increasingly tough.
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite…If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.
– Richard Dawkins, from a collection of brilliant essays, “The Devil’s Chaplain”, crushing all manner of shoddy thinking.
We would like to invite our readership to speculate about who is who?
Update:
All you need to do is give Perry a nice cat and he immediately reveals himself to be a complete softie.
The Daily Mail’s print headline screamed “You gave him a bloody nose!” and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a “Kick in the Ballots”.
Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed.
So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in.
In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging ‘libertarians’ not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about ‘libertarians’ at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old “give us your money for skoolzandhospitals” crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative.
And that is exactly what happened.
Xavier Méra has a piece up at Institut économique Molinari about the continuing and seemingly never-ending EU vendetta against Microsoft.
Concluding paragraphs:
That is not all. EU spokesman Antonia Mochan observed that the Media Player affair went “beyond the question of its name,” which has now been settled. Indeed, Microsoft’s rivals complain that the reduced version of Windows is not totally compatible with their programs. The EU’s competition department has stated that tests are under way, and an EU source wishing to remain anonymous confirmed the plaintiffs’ complaints about compatibility. It is perhaps this aspect, the least widely reported in the Media Player affair, which reveals the most about the validity of the charges made against the IT giant. In fact, if the commission ends up denouncing this state of affairs, it will once again be contradicting grievances it has put forward about Microsoft.
The point of the penalty is that the integrated version of Media Player allegedly damages competitors. Withdrawing it should therefore benefit them. If this is not the case, as they say and as the commission spokesperson suggests, that means these rival software writers are in reality third-party beneficiaries of the Windows Media Player system. It cannot be argued in the same breath that Microsoft both hurts and helps its competitors with the same product. It follows then that we cannot criticize Microsoft both for putting forward a Windows “N” that is “flawed” because it doesn’t contain specific Media Player files, and for being an “unfair” competitor with its complete version.
In a trial where logic has not been taken seriously, arbitrary judgement has played a more significant role than reason and experience. As the accusation continues down the same path, the Microsoft case is coming to look more and more like a witch-hunt.
Well, it sounds to me more like that Microsoft, having been ordered to do business differently from the utterly reasonable and beneficial-to-all-except-rivals way that it wants to, may have introduced a little minor self-inflicted sabotage, Atlas Shrugged style, in order to make the EU regulators feel like the prats that they are.
Either that, or they are maybe indulging in that alternative version of sabotage that consists of doing everything you are told and nothing else, which always causes havoc. Few things ruin complicated technological systems more quickly and more completely than pure obedience. Okay, if that is what you bastards say you want, that is what you will get . . .
And I say that they have a perfect right to do all of that. I have always thought that bitching about Microsoft including Media Player in Windows is about as sane as complaining about a car company including hub caps on its cars, on the grounds that this discriminates against disappointed hub cap suppliers. Which it sort of does, but so bloody what?
By the way, the first version of this posting that I stuck up was entitled, in error: “The EU versus the EU (again)”. (I decided to change it from “Microsoft versus the EU” to “The EU versus Microsoft”, but only got half way.) But maybe this was not such an error. Self destruction is what the EU often seems to be all about.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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