Libertarian Leanings

Obama Justice Department's "Civil Rights" Instigations

The Obama administration might accurately be described as a criminal enterprise, what with the way the Obama Justice Department has taken to inciting violence against George Zimmerman.

Zimmerman, 29, shot and killed Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2012. The jury determined that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense.

The acquittal prompted dozens of protests across the country this past weekend and his lawyers have said that Zimmerman has been the subject of death threats. His lawyers said Zimmerman has been wearing a bullet-proof vest when he ventures out in public.

Zimmerman's parents told ABC News' Barbara Walters they too have received death threats and have been unable to return to their home.

"We have had an enormous amount of death threats. George's legal counsel has had death threats, the police chief of Sanford, many people have had death threats," Zimmerman's father, Robert Zimmerman said."'Everyone with Georgie's DNA should be killed' -- just every kind of horrible thing you can imagine."

An indication of the animosity toward Zimmerman is the number of threatening phone calls being received by a woman in Winter Park, Fla.

Lori Tankel told ABCNews.com that someone had incorrectly posted her cell phone number online thinking it was Zimmerman's. She said she started receiving threatening calls within an hour after the jury had reached a verdict on July 13.

"They were saying things like, 'Zimmerman? Is this George? We're going to get you, we're going to kill you,'" she said.

Her cell phone number is only one digit off from Zimmerman's, she said.

George Zimmerman had been in hiding since his acquital, but he came out to help rescue a family trapped in an overturned SUV.  Dana and Mark Gerstle and their two children were trapped inside their car after it rolled on a Sanford, Florida highway at approximately 5:45 p.m. Thursday.

The Obama Justice Department's part in this has been to stoke African-American rage over the acquital.  It began even before the verdict was in. 

Judicial Watch has released documents showing the latest abuse of power by the Department of Justice (DOJ): helping “organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman.”

Whatever one may think about the guilt or innocence of Zimmerman in his ongoing trial, we should all agree that the chief law enforcement agency of the federal government should not be involved in stage-managing public protests. Yet according to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Community Relations Service at Eric Holder’s DOJ “deployed to Sanford, FL, to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen.”

The Community Relations Service provided “support for protest deployment” and “technical assistance” to event organizers for a march and rally on March 31. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Community Relations Service staff even helped organize a meeting between the city of Sanford and the local NAACP that resulted in the temporary resignation of police chief Bill Lee. One of the local pastors whose church was the focal point of protests aptly summarized the bias of Community Relations Service when she was quoted as saying that it was “there for us.” Apparently, it wasn’t “there” for Zimmerman.

After the jury said "not guilty," in spite of all of the political pressure brought to bear, Attorney General Eric Holder publicly announced his disatisfaction with the verdict by vowing to conduct an investigation into the possibility of charging Zimmerman with civil rights violations. 

Just one day after the verdict was read in the Trayvon Martin case, the Justice Department pledged: “Experienced federal prosecutors will determine whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation of any of the limited federal criminal civil rights statutes within our jurisdiction, and whether federal prosecution is appropriate.”

In other words, because Florida’s judicial system is apparently incapable of ensuring justice on its own, a full-throttled federal investigation is needed to uncover any hint of racist beliefs or tendencies in Zimmerman’s past that might support a prosecution under federal hate-crimes or civil-rights statutes.

The investigation is nothing more than a "Hail Mary" that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with sowing outrage ahead of the 2014 midterm elections.  President Obama has been doing his part in the effort.  John Hinderaker called it what it is at Powerline Blog — race baiting.

Yesterday President Obama delivered extended observations on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case to reporters, on a seemingly impromptu basis. Obama’s comments werewidely praised, and Paul gave them a characteristically generous assessment here yesterday. My own view of Obama’s comments is more negative, and I also think it is important to put Obama’s often high-sounding statements about race in the context of his administration’s deliberate promotion of racial division to advance political ends.

Yesterday, Obama began:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

As many have pointed out, Obama could have been Martin only if he had committed an unprovoked aggravated assault.

Never before have we had such a politically activist federal beauracracy.  The Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, all are working hard for the election of Democrats.  Their power will expand with a Democratic congress.  

Obama has vowed to be the transformative president.  Look what America has become.

Liberal Outrage

Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal explored the seeds an apparent outpouring of liberal outrage in North Carolina.

So what are liberals of all stripes so angry about in North Carolina? I put that question to the organizer of the Moral Monday movement, Rev. William Barber II, a loquacious, likable and politically shrewd preacher and leader of the North Carolina NAACP.

...

After a near-five minute sermon about how Republicans have made the state a "crucible of extremism and injustice," it became clear the answer to my question is he and his followers are mad as hell about, well . . . everything.

...

Mostly, however, these protests are about money. The Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank in North Carolina, recently published an analysis of the financial statements of the left-wing groups sponsoring these rallies, such as the Community Development Initiative and the Institute of Minority Economic Development. It found they have collected about $100 million in state grants, loans and contracts. No wonder they're enraged over GOP lawmakers' attempts to rein in spending.

Oh, the injustice!

Another Gift That Keeps On Giving?

Abe Greenwald contends that "Occupy Wall Street" could be a disaster for Democrats.

If you’re having problems grasping the nuances of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you haven’t been paying attention to the present-day left. And good for you.

The self-demonizing millionaires and state-worshipping police haters barely scratch the surface of the ideological dyslexia at work. Occupy Wall Street’s “list of demands” calls first for nativist “trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market,” and then for one-worldist “open borders migration,” so that “anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.” The document, like the group that composed it, is a hodgepodge of paranoia, entitlement, self-pity, self-righteousness, class warfare, and economic illiteracy.  If this spotty protest moment becomes broad-based and loud the thorough airing of modern-day leftism will prove to be a conservative’s election-year dream come true.

On Monday, with Occupy Wall Street spawning copycat demonstrations in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, the Washington Post​’s E.J. Dionne asked hopefully, “Can the left stage a Tea Party?” I don’t know if it can but if I were a GOP strategist I’d be praying that it does.

Paying The Price

According to Shaun Bailey, the London riots and wreckage are part of a price Britain is now paying.

In a way, we are all responsible for the riots, whether directly or indirectly. We watched the previous government talk up rights for young people but with no mention of responsibilities. We have allowed our welfare system to prop up immoral lifestyles. We have not taught all our young people that an entitlement culture is morally wrong. And we have paid the price for this liberalism.

Taxation Fixation

We get it again today, this time from Peter Beinart who says,

In the short term, America needs stimulus. But in the longer term, virtually every graybeard ex-senator and blue-ribbon panelist agrees that the only way to confront our frightening national debt is to cut health-care spending, cut defense, and raise taxes, beginning by letting some or all of the Bush tax cuts expire.

The last is crucial for two reasons. First, because the Bush tax cuts really do constitute a large part of America’s structural deficit.

Oh, really?

Revenues fell in Bush's first two years because of a combination of the tech bust and the start of the tax cuts. But then things took off. After taking in $1.782 trillion in tax revenues in 2003, the government collected $1.88 trillion in 2004; $2.153 trillion in 2005; $2.406 trillion in 2006; and $2.567 trillion in 2007, according to figures compiled by the Office of Management and Budget. That's a 44 percent increase from 2003 to 2007. (Revenues slid downward a bit in 2008, and a lot in 2009, when the financial crisis sent the economy into a tailspin.) "Everybody talks about how much the Bush tax cuts 'cost,'" says one GOP strategist. "We're saying, no, they led to a huge increase in revenue."

And deficits shrank. After beginning with a Clinton-era surplus in 2001, the Bush administration ran up deficits of $158 billion in 2002; $378 billion in 2003; and $413 billion in 2004. Then, with revenues pouring in, the deficits began to fall: $318 billion in 2005; $248 billion in 2006; and $161 billion in 2007. That 2007 deficit, with the tax cuts in effect, was one-tenth of today's $1.6 trillion deficit.

I used to believe that liberal elites such as Beinart had to be either ignorant or dishonest.  I know better, now.  They're both.

Earned Success

Although it isn't the point of his column today at Real Clear Politics, Michael Barone touches on one of the perennial perplexities plaguing progressives.  His point is that Americans want earned success, not a handout.

Mead makes an even stronger point when he writes that "for large numbers of voters, the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest." One, he adds, that acts "only to protect their turf and fatten their purses."

This helps explain why majorities continue to oppose the Obama Democrats' stimulus package and Obamacare. Democratic elites thought these laws would be seen as helping ordinary people. But they aren't.

They are seen as special interest legislation that helps politically favored constituencies. Which, as my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has documented, is an accurate view.

I think the larger mistake the Obama Democrats have made is that they suppose ordinary voters want government to channel more money in their direction.

There it is.  Books have been written that explore why the liberal message doesn't resonate.  Think of Thomas Frank and What's the Matter With Kansas.  The presumption, that ordinary voters want government to "channel more money in their direction," has liberals are asking themselves, "Why aren't they more like us?"  The question is quickly dismissed, though, so obvious that it's just the stupidity of the little people.

Goldberg On Lefty Cognitive Dissonance

Jonah Goldberg takes up the case of "A Gay Girl In Damascus."

I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important -- this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian-American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus." According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing.

A couple of problems here.  For one thing she was a he.  Further, he was an American not a Syrian.  And then there was "her" story.

...how dare "advocates of war, occupation, dispossession and apartheid" use Arab and Muslim hostility to gays as "'evidence' that the primitive sand-people don't deserve anything other than killing by the enlightened children of the West."

Besides, "she" has never been harassed by Arabs for being gay. But in America, "she" has been "struck by strangers for being an Arab" and "had dung thrown at me" for wearing the hijab.

Except that is a lie.

Worse, it's propaganda. McMaster's fake-but-accurate lesbian was perfectly pitched to Western liberals desperate to alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance. No longer must you think too hard or make tough choices if you're, say, anti-Israel and pro-democracy, or pro-gay rights and in favor of the self-determination of Muslim fanatics. Heck, you can even stop worrying and love a lesbian feminist who sees no big deal in wearing a religiously required sack over her head. With Amina, all contradictions are resolved -- in favor of the incoherent biases of the anti-America and anti-Israel left.

But that's what they do on the left.  They make stuff up.

The Left Coast Explained

From the Los Angeles Times:

USC Researchers Say Pollution May Be Harming Our Brains

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — New research suggests that pollution in Southern California may be harming our brains.

This might explain why they mistake left wing politics for enlightenment out there.

Libertarian Strategies -- Seeking Balance

Let me begin with a story.  It's a true story, if maybe a little boring, but I want to use it as an analogy. 

It was several years ago.  I was helping my good friend Wally do something about the springtime runoff that turned his backyard into mud every year.  His house was built on the side of a hill on a 2-acre lot that sloped down from the road.  Every spring the melting snow would create a seasonal brook that ran from the other side of Wally's street through a culvert emptying into his side yard on the uphill side of the house.  He had dug himself a channel to get the water past his lawn, but after that, with no other place to go, it would saturate the hillside turning it into a muddy mess.  It got too sloppy for him to get his pickup down in back where at that time he was cutting firewood.

Our plan was to continue the channel downward across the hill, but once we got to working on it we almost automatically began looking to get the water to cut the channel by itself.  We found likely spot where the flow of surface water was visible, and with the points of our shovels we scratched a groove in the dirt, through the trees, down and across the yard to the vacant lot next door.  Water from each side seeped into the groove making a tiny rivulet down that ran down the hill.   

We left it alone for a while, and when we went out later to check on it later, our little stream had grown a little wider and seemed pretty well established, but the hillside wasn't drying out to any noticeable degree.  That would take days, but we were optimistic that our idea was going to work.

And it was some days later that Wally called, astonished at what became of our little stream.  I went over to see it, and I was astonished myself.  He had a little brook, about a foot and a half wide, but the little brook had carved out a stream bed that was three to four feet wide and a foot to two feet deep.  Small boulders were unearthed.   It was a thing of beauty.  I thought so anyway.  It was big enough that Wally had to build a makeshift bridge to get his pickup to the lower end of his lot, but the hillside dried out very nicely. 

So here's the analogy.  Just as our groove channeled the water to where water ultimately wants to go -- downhill -- America's legal framework, based on individual liberty and responsibility, provides the guidelines that are intended to keep us from ruining the proverbial hillside as we go about the business of living our lives. 

There are two aspects to this.  First is that the water created its own stream bed, just as we in America create our own law.  At least in theory we create our own law.  Rules and regulations might start out being relatively unobtrusive, and then get more elaborate as time passes and as needs (legitimate or otherwise) arise.  Sometimes, though, laws and regulations seem as though they've been imposed by Washington against our will.  Which brings me to the second point.

Passing laws that go directly counter to people's desires generally doesn't work any better than trying to channel water to run uphill.  A great example of the negative unintended consequences of a law passed with good intentions is prohibition. 

We can thank prohibition in large part for the rise in organized crime in America, because it was left to the criminals to fill our demand for liquor.  While average Americans thumbed their noses at the law by frequenting speakeasies or making their own bathtub gin, criminals organized vast liquor supply chains, greased the way with bribes, and literally went to war with each other over control of lucrative territories.

This was not the way lawmakers thought the "stream bed" would go when they forbade people the consumption of alcohol.  Progressives obviously didn't foresee that all that water, in the form of people's demand for liquor, wasn't about to dry up just because they were able to pressure lawmakers into legislating that it ought to.

Forunately, prohibition was an exception.  For the most part we generally haven't allowed our government to put significant obstacles between ourselves and the things we want.  The effect of this has been astounding.  Sometimes it's hard to notice, or easy to credit other circumstances.  We tend to take things for granted. 

But in the historical blink of an eye, the land where we live, America, was transformed from a wilderness to a nation of astonishing wealth and power.  The primary reason for this was America's legal framework which allowed people to pursue what they believe to be in their best interests.  Contrast this with Egypt where legal barriers prohibit the vast majority of their citizens from the most basic economic pursuits.

Let me concede right up front that America's past includes injustice.  Yes, land was taken from native Americans.  It's true that the law did not guarantee every citizen the same economic opportunity.  But neither conquest nor discrimination is an American invention, and they don't account for America's wealth and power.  Even though different people at different times were barred, and none more so than African-Americans, more people than ever before in history were afforded the freedom to pursue opportunity in whatever way they believed would make their lives better.  That is what has made the difference.  Americans are the source of American power. 

It may be interesting to consider that as hard as economic times have been recently, America is still the world's leading manufacturer.

But let's turn to the flipside of this "freedom to pursue" coin.  The framework that permits us the liberty to go after our dreams also provides the sets of rules to follow as we chase them. 

Libertarians generally make a big deal out of the power of market forces to regulate its participants.  It's justifiable in many circumstances.  We know from experience that competition tends to keep prices in line.  We know that competition tends to improve the reliability of the things we buy.  A highly competitive market tends to protect the consumer, but there are situations where a competitive market is not sufficient protection. 

One of the many opportunities afforded me over the course of a career in information services was in the role of lead programmer on the development of a system designed to help brokerage firms comply with the SEC 15C3-3 Customer Protection Rule.  The system dealt specifically with margin account segregation.  And what, you may ask, does that mean?

One of the outcomes from the stock market crash of 1929 was the formulation of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, which among other things, gave the Federal Reserve Board authority to limit the amount a broker-dealer is allowed to lend to an investor for the purpose of buying stocks.  Borrowing from the broker-dealer to buy stocks is called buying on margin.   Federal Reserve Board Regulation T is the rule that limits the amount a broker-dealer can lend to an investor to 50% of the price of the investment.  Prior to passage of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 an investor could borrow 100%.  That created a stock market bubble in much the same way that easy credit created our recently deflated real estate bubble. 

When an investor buys on margin, the securities purchased are collateral for the loan.  Among other things, the Customer Protection Rule puts limits on how that collateral may be used by the broker-dealer, and it provides specific formulas for calculating just how many shares are collateral and how many are the customers' fully paid securities.  These calculations, by the way, must be done on a daily basis since the value of the collateral, and therefore the number of collateral shares held, constantly changes with the rise and fall of share prices.

The Customer Protection Rule also requires that fully paid securities in customer accounts be in the possession or the control of the broker-dealer, whether they are in the firm's depository account, in the vault, or in another designated location.  One thing this does is to insure that customers don't lose the securities they own in the event that a broker-dealer goes belly up.

SEC auditors descend upon securities firms annually to comb through their books.  Among the things they look for is evidence of failure to maintain proper segregation of customer fully paid securities.  They also look to confirm that every effort has been made to have customer fully paid securities in the firm's possession or control.  Violations can mean heavy fines for firms and their officers, and can even result in a firm being shut down.

Here is a situation where competition by itself is not enough to protect the customers.  Competition is necessary, but we also need those SEC regulations that compel companies to demonstrate that they exercise proper safeguards on the inventory of securities held on behalf of customers.  Without SEC oversight customers have no way of knowing if a firm has the proper internal controls, or if it does have them, is it following them.  The SEC's demand for transparency provides that additional and necessary incentives for broker-dealers protect their customers' investments.

The point of all this is to illustrate that we seek a balance.  Ideally our laws and regulations will permit us to do pretty much what we'd like to do, while preventing us from stepping on the rights of others or causing them harm.   This is not to downplay the importance of competition.

The beauty of competition is in the swiftness of its effect.  It can be instantaneous.  When consumers decide, in a competitive free market environment, that a product, or service, or a particular supplier no longer meets their needs, the negative impact on the producers and suppliers is an immediate and painful loss of revenue.  There is no waiting around for consumer protection regulations or legislation to be formulated and passed.  There are no loopholes, and the verdict is final.  Companies either fix their problems or suffer severe consequences, even to the point of being forced out of business.

Government regulation that encourages competition is a necessary piece of our free market system.  Unfortunately, there is a tendency for politicians to use regulatory power to protect favored interests, be they companies, labor unions, or other organizations.  The capital-L libertarian argument is that regulation will always be corrupted in a way that favors the politically connected.  There is much truth to that, and for that reason we need fierce competition in the market place and in the political arena to counter the tendency for favoritism and corruption. 

As a side note, the current notion that Wall Street is loosely regulated is fairly wide of the mark.

Muscular Liberalism

The phrase "muscular liberalism" came into the news when British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech last Saturday in Munich on the failure of multiculturalism.  According to Cameron multiculturalism has enabled the rise in Islamic extremism among British-born Muslims, and further, that Islamic extremism breeds terrorism. 

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.  We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.  We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

So, when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them.  But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them.  The failure, for instance, of some to confront the horrors of forced marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes taken abroad to marry someone when they don’t want to, is a case in point.  This hands-off tolerance has only served to reinforce the sense that not enough is shared. And this all leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless.  And the search for something to belong to and something to believe in can lead them to this extremist ideology.  Now for sure, they don’t turn into terrorists overnight, but what we see – and what we see in so many European countries – is a process of radicalisation.

We're just not accustomed to world leaders speaking in such blunt terms.  At least not since George Bush, and he was roundly vilified for it.  The progressive ideology demands that we all refrain from saying anything that might remotely be construed as defamatory of some minority group -- which was how they construed anything Bush said as soon as he said it. 

So it's a big surprise to hear David Cameron proposes a form of "muscular liberalism" intended to build stronger national identities as a way of countering the failed policies of multiculturalism.  He was speaking, of course, of the British identity.  

Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism.  A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone.  It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them.  Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.

Of course, whenever anyone talks about a strong national identity here in America, they are immediately branded as a racist, or a tea bagger, or a racist tea bagger.  How dare we suggest that our values are in any way superior to anyone else's?  Why that's jingoism at its worst. 

But the Prime Minister was in Germany, and he was speaking of Europe.  Progressives on this side of the ocean ignored him.  A quick search through some dependably lefty blogs found nary a mention of David Cameron.  Not on TalkLeft, Taylor Marsh, Matthew Ygliesias, or Empty Wheel.   I gave it up after that.

Our progressives have a much different view of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, and equal rights from David Cameron's.  Those phrases are popular among our own muscular liberals here in the States, but they don't mean what Cameron meant, and they don't mean what was originally intended when men conceived the idea that has become America.

Freedom of speech was always intended to protect political speech, and to guarantee that ideas are not suppressed -- that they are to stand or fall in the marketplace of ideas according to their own merits.  As we know, progressives don't care much for ideas that compete with their own.  Progressive media engage in a practice of self censorship as a way of hindering the transfer of "inappropriate" ideas.  Our liberal bloggers provide the example.  Campaign finance reform, a progressive favorite, has always been about preventing certain political speech from reaching an audience.   

Freedom of worship has come to mean freedom from worship.  Religion has no place in the progressive scheme of things, except for those moments on the campaign trail when it's advantageous for a progressive politician to appear devout.  For the multiculturalists, freedom of worship means freeing people, especially children, from exposure to Christianity wherever possible.  Prayers have no place in progressive schools, not Christian prayers anyway.  In the interest of full disclosure let me confess that I am not even slightly religious, but I hold no grudge against people who truly are.

Over recent years progressives have demonstrated that they see democracy as a tool for gaining power.  Their support for Card Check shows that they are not in favor of secret ballots for union membership drives.  Secret ballots don't reveal exactly who needs to be pressured into making the right vote.  And then there's the issue of voter fraud.  Over there on the left there is no appetite anything that might reduce voter fraud. Think of ACORN.

Equal rights has come to stand for equality of outcomes.  Most commonly equal rights has come to mean that government has a right to the money you earn so that it may distribute it among those it deems to be disadvantaged or more deserving. 

Our muscular liberals are not at all in sync with David Cameron with regard to muscular liberalism.  Progressives here in America are not about to abandon multiculturalism.  They don't want anybody to be ingrained with a strong national identity, especially a strong American identity that embodies a belief in freedom in its original meaning.  We can expect our muscular liberals to oppose Prime Minister Cameron's brand of muscular liberalism with all of their might.