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“No change is permitted”

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“It takes people putting their thoughts and ideas together to actually accomplish something. These ideas must take into consideration the reality of the situations and the means to correct the problems.” Jerry Bishop, 6-11-14, The Prairie Times

Jerry wrote these words in a lead editorial where he also took exception to being labeled a leftist. Well if the shoe fits Jerry, you may as well put it on and lace it up. Look at the rest of the authors Jerry printed in this same Viewpoint edition of his fishwrap:

Paul Crisan, notorious planner, eco-green anti-business zoner, and leftist.
Robert Thomason, Democrat Party official, notorious leftist.
Jill Duvall, Democrat Party official, notorious leftist. (2 articles)
Anne Johnson, advises Republicans to “vote outside the party.”
Susan Shick, Democrat Party official, notorious leftist. (2 articles)
Name Withheld, advocates for totalitarian planning control.
Kelly Dore, “government’s role is to work with people to make their lives better.”
John Dorman, “commissioners have to manage the business of the county.”

Non-leftist viewpoints: None.

Not an individualist in the bunch, including Jerry. Not a hint of recognition in the whole lot of them that it’s the private sector who create wealth, provide jobs, and solve problems. These people share an obsession with all things collective and governmental.

Now let’s face it, government is the 900 lb. gorilla in the living room of Elbert County. There is no substantial private sector here so there’s little else to talk about in a local newspaper besides government. Government is the largest employer by far with the largest payroll in Elbert County.

It doesn’t matter which party controls here, government’s been used by all parties to keep Elbert County’s economy stuck in the 19th century from as far back as anyone remembers; and this will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

It would be so much more honest if all of these collectivists could just hang a sign out at the county border saying that Elbert County is a preservation zone where there will be no economic growth, no enabling of the private sector, no new jobs, and no changes. Perhaps they could purchase the right to name the county Pleasantville.

Just get rid of all the legal mumbo jumbo in county zoning, dump all the expensive lawyerly jargon that pays lip service to the illusion of property rights and constitutional liberties, and replace it with a simple sentence; “No change is permitted.” Put that on the sign at the county border.

Then all the leftists could go off to other battleground locals to community-organize and inflict their advocacy, and people would know before ever considering putting down roots here just what they’re in for.

Think of all the time and money this would save. All of the public meetings we now have with foregone conclusions – gone. All of the empty rhetoric from government officials and would-be government officials – gone. All of the legal work around the regulatory edges – gone. People in the private sector would still drive to town for work. The number of government employees could be cut way back. And Jerry would have to find something else to publish and write about.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. The myth of American freedom in Elbert County is an expensive joke. Freedom, as an ideal, deserves better than this. If we’re not going to serve it, then we should at least stop sullying it.

the progressive’s debt to slavery

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Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical. by Henry Hughes, 1854

(Conclusion)

CHAPTER XII.

In the economic system of the Free-labor form of societary organization, order is not ordained and established. Association, adaptation, and regulation are free. They are not essential; they are accidental. They are not fundamental. They are not publicly instituted. The relation of capitalist and laborer, or of master and servant, is private. Their interests are not syntagonistic.

Systematic quantitative adaptation of laborers and capital, is not actualized. Laborers are not appreciated. They have not the value produced by circulation; the value of local production from where they are not in demand to where they are. To the capitalists, superficiency or excess of laborers, is desirable ; because more than a sufficiency, is more orderly.

Distribution is not by the function of justice or the State. It is accidental. The distributor may be either the capitalist or the laborer. Their interests are antagonistic. Their antagonisms are not equipollent. Injustice is actualized. Wages may vary below the standard of comfortable sufficiency. Inefficients are not warranted subsistence. None are warranted. Want is not eliminated. Wages are variable to unhealthy, criminal, and mortal want. The young, the old, and other inefficients are supported not by the capital of capitalists, but by the wages of the laborers. The amount of these wages, is not adapted to the amount of the consumers; there is no discrimination. Pauperism is not eliminated.

The consumption of laborers is not the least possible. The capitalist has no preservation-interest in the laborer. Loss of a laborer is not the capitalist’s loss.

Subsistence is not warranted to the laborers; neither is work or the means of subsistence.

In the Free-labor hygienic system, hygienic necessaries are not an element of laborers’ wages. Capital is not supplied for the production of his health. The capitalist is not hygienically syntagonistic. Medicine, medical attendance, nursing, and therapeutical necessaries, are not warranted to laborers. They are not treasured. Their sickness or death, is not a direct economic injury to the capitalist.

In the Free-labor political system, the interests of classes are not syntagonistic. Taxes are not an element of wages paid by the capitalist. Crime from economic causes, is not eliminated. There are no economic methods, for the prevention of offences. There are no economic general and special securities. The magistracy are expensive and political only. The rich and poor, conflict. Agrarianism is not eliminated. The fundamental laws for the public health, public peace, public industry and public subsistence, are not executed. The interest is deficient, and the order. Strikes and riots are not eliminated. The expediencies of the political system, are political only; the economic system is not civilly ordained and established. It is not a civil implement.

Both Free-labor and Warrantee forms of society, are progressive. Free-labor progress is a progress by antagonisms. Warrantee progress is a progress by syntagonisms. The Free-labor form of society, must be abolished; it must progress to the form of mutual-insurance or warranteeism. It must progress from immunity to community. It must necessitate association. It must warrant the existence and progress of all. Men must not be free-laborers; they must be Liberty-laborers. Liberty-labor Must Be The Substitute Of Free-labor. That must be abolished. But the abolition must not be sudden, or disorderly. It must not be that kind of abolition, which is mere destruction. It must be canonical. It must be humane, just, truthful, pure, and orderly; the envelopment of the evil, by the development of the good. The economic system in the United States South, is not slavery. It Is Warranteeism With The Ethnical Qualification. It is just. It is expedient. It is progressive. It does not progress by antagonisms. It progresses by syntagonisms. It is in no way slavery. Religiously, it is Ebedism; economically, Warranteeism. The consummation of its progress, is the perfection of society.

And when in other generations, this progress, which is now a conception and a hope of all, shall be a memory and a fact; when what is now in the future, shall be in the present or the past; when the budding poetry of the allhoping sociologist, shall ripen to a fruitful history; that history will be thrice felicitous; for it shall unroll the trophied poem, the rhapsody of a progress epic in its grandeur; pastoral in its peace; and lyric in its harmony. Such shall be its fulfilment. And then on leagued plantations over the sun-sceptred zone’s crop-jeweled length, myriad eyes, both night-faced and morning-cheeked, shall brighten still the patriot’s student glance and fondly pore upon the fullgrown and fate-favored wonder, of a Federal banner in whose woven sky of ensign orbs, shall be good stars only, in such happy constellations that their bonds and beams, will be sweeter than the sweet influences of the Pleiades, and stronger than the bands of Orion ; unbroken constellations—a symbol sky—a heaven which also, shall declare the glory of God, and a firmament which shall show His handiwork. Then, in the plump flush of full-feeding health, the happy warrantees shall banquet in Plantation-refectories; worship in Plantation-chapels ; learn in Plantation-schools ; or, in Plantation-saloons, at the cool of evening, or in the green and bloomy gloom of cold catalpas and magnolias, chant old songs, tell tales; or, to the metred rattle of chattering castanets, or flutes, or rumbling tamborines, dance down the moon and evening star; and after slumbers in Plantation-dormitories, over whose gates Health and Rest sit smiling at the feet of Wealth and Labor, rise at the music-crowing of the morning-conchs, to begin again welcome days of jocund toil, in reeling fields, where, weak with laughter and her load, Plenty yearly falls, gives up, and splits her o’erstuffed horn, and where behind twin Interest’s double throne, Justice stands at reckoning dusk, and rules supreme. When these and more than these, shall be the fulfilment of Warranteeism; then shall this Federation and the World, praise the power, wisdom, and goodness of a system, which may well be deemed divine; then shall Experience aid Philosophy, and Vindicate The Ways Of God, To Man.

The End.

carts before horses

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In his book The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, Tim Ball, Phd, reported that on July 5th, 2005, Phil Jones, Directer of the CRU [Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia], wrote in an email to a colleague;

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political it is being selfish.”

Therefore, climate change is an unproven hypothesis – an experiment waiting for corroborating data. Mr. Jones is too generous in calling this science. This is a belief system.

Let your mind imagine an estimate of the opportunity costs incurred the world over from all of the unproven hypotheticals that have been translated into public policy without any corroborating evidence. Imagine what could have been done with all those resources, all those man-hours, and all that energy, had the work been available to accomplish necessary objectives, rather than hyped-up political fantasies. Imagine all of the real problem solutions foregone while men chased rainbows.

A man can only do so much in a lifetime. We should cull out the unproven hypotheticals from our public policies, no matter how sexy they sound. Translation – government has no business getting involved with 90% of what it attempts to do.

A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9

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A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9, by Daniel Greenfield

Progressives don’t particularly care about the woman in Aisle 9. They eat up hard luck stories on NPR and CNN the way that their great-grandparents marveled at hunger in Africa because of the way that it makes them feel, not because they understand how those people live or care about them. They use them to feel charitable and to win elections. Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but they never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven’t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.

Supernatural progressive planning

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Among the following choices, what would you rather have:

  1. A business that employs 40 people, or
  2. The potential for county tax revenues from a non-existent business.

How about:

  1. A business that employs 40 people in a plain looking industrial building, or
  2. A planning-approved nicely-landscaped and harmoniously-designed business building, that does not exist.

Or perhaps:

  1. A business that employs 400 people in an industrial activity, or
  2. A planning-approved industrial park with various support businesses built to serve a local working population, that does not exist.

Or how about:

  1. A residential community of starter homes and apartments, or
  2. A planning-approved planned unit development that protects rodent habitat, contains various support businesses to serve those residents, includes improvements to roads and schools for the expected demographic impacts from the full residential community, and none of it exists.

Elbert County’s Master Plan is built for a progressive community. A progressive community is a community in and of the future where everything harmoniously works in a sustainable balance forever after. A progressive community is relatively easy to visualize. Visualizations happen in the imagination, and the imagination has no limits.

The idea of a progressive community is easy to sell. Who wouldn’t want to live in such an idyllic place?  And sell it they did.  Planners built extensive laws and regulations to enforce a progressive outcome on us.

Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work the way planners visualize. Progress is an incremental process that incorporates unpredictable human adaptations that happen in the future and change how real things and places are used to maximize benefit to the humans living in that future.

Planners are not clairvoyant. They have no special gift for seeing future adaptations. But rather than recognize this human limitation, they build legal structures that limit options. These legal structures – zoning regulations – don’t enable the progressive outcome that planners intend.

They front-load progressive outcomes with a script of forced harmonious visualizations that must be satisfied, and that no one can afford.

Planners fail to see how the sustainable, working, efficient, human communities that already exist, came about through many years of trial and error – in a free environment that enabled men and women to try different things and discover the solutions that worked.

You can’t take that evolutionary element out of human development and jump to the finish. No one knows what our future communities will look like. No one knows how those future humans will use the space and resources available to them to maximize benefit to themselves and their children. No one can see an optimization 10 or 20 years from now. If such a human talent existed, there would be no war, no losses in the market, and no winners. It’s not in our nature to see those things. It’s not in the nature of any real being to see such things.

So what does this mean? Planners are trafficking in the supernatural, vainly writing legal fictions out of a fear of the unknown, and a presumption that free humans will produce the worst possible outcomes.  Ironically, the same freedom that enabled humans to build the communities that planners think they can mandate into existence, is the freedom they fear most.

Planners fear freedom because it puts them out of a job.  There is no higher principle at work here.  Planning is no more than a rice-bowl protection racket for petty bureaucrats.

We need to stop enabling planners. We need to change zoning laws so that all of the #1s above happen, and the #2s, which today are the norm, become a bad memory.

It’s time we traded the progressive basket of expensive unrealistic visions for a functioning reality.

Zoning produced an economic dead zone in Elbert County.  The experiment failed.

The Elbert County Free Press

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It’s always a challenge to excerpt from Daniel Greenfield’s Sultan Knish writings because he rarely includes a sentence one could consider less meaningful than the rest.  With that caveat, he writes today;

The voters who most depend on government vote to break it far more thoroughly than any Tea Party politicians could.  No Republicans could have done to Detroit what Detroit did to Detroit.  Not even the most extreme Tea Party politician could have done as much damage to the Federal government as Obama did.

Corruption and ineptitude are far more of a threat to the progressive vision than any number of people waving Gadsden flags.  Republicans can shut down or slow a progressive program, but only progressives can discredit it from the inside[.]

Surely much of what I’ve held forth about the effect of Elbert County zoning falls neatly into this paradigm.

In a preface to Chapter 2 of Inventing Freedom, Daniel Hannan included a quote by Roger Scruton,

The English law existed not to control the individual but to free him.

Scruton has written books about environmentalism from a conservative approach, pointing out both the failures of statist solutions along with examples of successful environmental protection by vested owners of natural resources.  He reminds us of the futility of dispossessing individuals of environmental ownership – call it regulation in America – along with an expectation that those same individuals will carefully husband that which they no longer control – a restatement of the tragedy of the commons.

Which brings us to New-Plains poster-boy Chris Bailey explaining, in effect, his view of law as the polar opposite of Scruton’s.  He laments that the county laws and MOU passed this week were not what he wished for in “minor” facility O&G property control;

  • He wanted the planning commission to retain approval authority for O&G development, despite their over 3 years of endless deliberations to get to square one of a passable law.
  • He wanted the CDS director to have no authority to administrate O&G zoning, despite New-Plains’ love of former planning director Richard Miller.
  • He wanted the dozen anti-O&G activists in Elbert County to retain the ability to stage public procedural delays, er, opportunities to scrutinize, O&G zoning administration.
  • He wanted an un-flawed MOU, notwithstanding other regulatory conflicts and litigation such a document would have initiated.
  • He wanted to make the O&G industry pay for the right to exploit their property.

In his zeal to uphold the collective Bailey doesn’t show much concern for individual property holders.

And let’s not forget the delusional Bishops at the Prairie Times this week.  Susan and Jerry apparently told SOS Scott Gessler that,

Many conservatives were delighted by this judge’s ruling,

.  .  .in reference to the heavily Democrat partisan decision against Commissioner Rowland published last month.

Really?  On what planet?  Oh, that’s right, this one–the planet where Leftist Susan Bishop is still a Republican PCP.

One hopes that Republican caucus attendees take the opportunity afforded them in a couple weeks (March 4th) to relieve people like Susan of their conflict of interest, and excuse them from the ranks of the ECRCC.

As for the progressive tidal wave awash in America, with so many self-referential enforcement devices available to them, light at the end of the tunnel looks dim.

The Sultan’s Laws

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“The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war[.]”

“Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward.”

“[U]nplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned.”

“Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.”

“[T]he flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity[.]”

“The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.”

“The progressive movement .  .  .  depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism[.]”

“Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need.”

“Progressives equate progress to redistribution.”

“[U]topia becomes an economic police state.”

“The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone’s worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.”

“[T]he utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.”

“Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls.”

“Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.”

From:  Sultan Knish: Progressives Without Progress

The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind

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The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind

Posted By Bruce Thornton On January 20, 2014 @ 12:24 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

The attacks on Lone Survivor, the movie about 4 Navy Seals caught in an operation gone lethally wrong in Afghanistan, illustrate once again the fossilized orthodoxy of the left. The L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson called the movie a “jingoistic snuff film” that “bleeds blood red, bone-fracture white, and bruise blue” and assumes “brown people bad, American people good.” Similarly, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir called it a “jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda.” Such rhetoric reveals the anti-military, anti-American biases typical of progressives, a form of bigotry as stale as disco king Tony Manero’s white leisure suit. continue

science and democracy

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New Plains advertised a webcast about fracking from the Union of Concerned Scientists.  See below.

Science.  Scientific method.  Hypothesis, experiment, evidence, contingent proof, repeatability.

Democracy.  Majority rule, the common good, enforced equality, regulatory bureaucratic control.

There’s nothing scientific about democracy.  Democracy is about controlling people.  Science is about understanding nature.  Why link the two?

Because you want to enforce specific outcomes under the pretense of scientific authority.   And what outcomes do the Union of Concerned Scientists want to enforce?  Look at their web site . . .

The list goes on.  No nukes, sustainable this and that, one Pollyanna “solution” after another.  I respect that we all have free speech and we can say whatever we want in America, for the most part.  But the left is just so fundamentally unserious on so many of these issues.

Imagine what problems could be solved in the world if the half of humanity with their heads up their democratic collectives were actually engaged in real solutions.

Imagine what politically correct effluvia they’ll issue about fracking on Thursday.

The hardest part about being a conservative is the constant challenge of countering seductive fantasies with the “opportunity cost” of real accomplishments that could have been made, had they not been crowded out by bovine scatology.

Science and Democracy

hyperbolic times

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Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]

progressive zoning

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Don’t shoot the messenger, but Mr. Crisan, you don’t represent the citizens of Elbert County — not even the ones who agree with you who attend your planning commission meetings. In our system of government, representation requires consent, and no citizen consented to your representation, let alone your admittedly progressive urge to put Elbert County at the forefront of litigation between Colorado counties and the State of Colorado over your conception of county rights.

My guess would be that the majority of Elbert County citizens don’t want you picking a fight with the State of Colorado over oil & gas or anything else for that matter. My guess would be that the majority of Elbert County citizens don’t even know you exist, let alone the fact that you’re out crusading on a progressive mission in their name.

The above excerpt can be seen in the original at  http://youtu.be/1z-FlAGB2GY?t=1h56m29s

first principles

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“The notion of collective rights is wholly the invention of the Progressive founders of the administrative state, who were engaged in a self-conscious effort to supplant the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution. For these Progressives, what Madison and other Founders called the “rights of human nature” were merely a delusion characteristic of the 18th century. Science, they held, has proven that there is no permanent human nature—that there are only evolving social conditions. As a result, they regarded what the Founders called the “rights of human nature” as an enemy of collective welfare, which should always take precedence over the rights of individuals. For Progressives then and now, the welfare of the people—not liberty—is the primary object of government, and government should always be in the hands of experts. This is the real origin of today’s gun control hysteria—the idea that professional police forces and the military have rendered the armed citizen superfluous; that no individual should be responsible for the defense of himself and his family, but should leave it to the experts. The idea of individual responsibilities, along with that of individual rights, is in fact incompatible with the Progressive vision of the common welfare.

This way of thinking was wholly alien to America’s founding generation, for whom government existed for the purpose of securing individual rights.”

From:

Edward J. Erler, California State University, San Bernardino

The Second Amendment as an Expression of First Principles

winners and losers

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When the Democrat-controlled Colorado Legislature gets through imposing restrictive gun laws upon law-abiding citizens, will we be any safer?  No, we won’t, because none of the prescriptions contained in any of these new bills address any element of the crimes committed with guns that will have motivated the bills’ passage.

In the instant case, losers will be law-abiding citizens.  Winners will be Democrat politicians, their adoring liberal media, their captive voters, and the criminals who will have an easier time of it going up against a less-armed law abiding citizenry.  But that’s only in the instant case.  There’s also winners and losers in the larger scheme of things.

The country’s Founders designed a system they hoped would protect minority rights under the governance of a majority.  They contemplated that with all the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the 4th estate of the press, and the people, that enough pauses to consider would exist in the public discourse over new law, that the best argument, the best philosophy, the best solution, the mostly soundly reasoned answer, would tend to carry the day.

They did not anticipate ruthless progressivism with its will to win at all costs, and notwithstanding the soundness of their argument.  They did not expect that all of the checks and balances in our country would fail in their primary function and become the captive organs of a single cult mythology.

Wherever progressives get a political majority, they ram through their agenda.  Sound arguments to the contrary are not rebutted, nor debated.  Opposed parties are procedurally silenced, crowded out, shouted down, ridiculed, overwhelmed, and ignored.

Sure, we have instant winners and losers as each issue comes up under the progressive agenda.  But the bigger loser is our system, the one that brought us to this point of social evolution, the one responsible for our success.

And perhaps the biggest losers of all are the progressives themselves.  The ones who have no idea what they’ve lost by damaging their fellow American minorities, whom they take such joy in suppressing.  The ones dancing in the streets after each victory, the ones shouting in the streets when they’re not dancing.

They’ve lost their minds.

B_Imperial

Socialism’s all about the money.

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Uncle Sam Now Wants Your 401(k) And IRA

Investors Business Daily Editorial, Posted 03/01/2013 06:44 PM ET

 President Obama stands with Sen. Chris Dodd Rep. Barney Frankafter signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection financial...

President Obama stands with Sen. Chris Dodd Rep. Barney Frankafter signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection financial… 

Dodd-Frank’s new “consumer protection” agency wants to “help” Americans manage their nearly $20 trillion in retirement savings, and President Obama has tax loopholes in his sights.

It’s mattress-stuffing time.

You probably thought the Dodd-Frank Act was all about reining in greedy big banks and Wall Street predators.

Well then, what is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it established doing planning to “help” people manage the $19.4 trillion they’ve managed to save for their retirement?

CFPB director and longtime Democratic politician Richard Cordray earlier this month told Bloomberg News that managing retirement savings is “one of the things we’ve been exploring … in terms of whether and what authority we have.”

Every such new creature legislated into existence by our elected officials wastes little time before seeking to expand its power — always with the best intentions, of course.

There always ends up being an excuse to do things the law doesn’t give you any authority for, and the CFPB’s Office for Older Americans being headed by another big government Democrat, Hubert H. Humphrey III, is further cause for worry.

What business, exactly, does a U.S. government that has rung up over $16.6 trillion in red ink have giving consumers advice on how to save money?

Americans Pay Record Taxes

Uncle Sam, Spendthrift

What can a consumer learn about frugality and responsibility from a corrupt, insatiable Washington leviathan that screams about the sky falling when just 2% in automatic spending cuts kick in?

In this context comes the release of a report from the liberal Brookings Institution last week suggesting a 28% cap on “the rate at which deductions and exclusions related to retirement saving reduce a taxpayer’s income tax liability.”

Don’t worry, Brookings says, because “the (mostly high-income) individuals that do alter contributions in response to changes in the return on these investments tend to simply offset these adjustments with changes in other forms of saving.”

And “the available evidence from studies of 401(k)-type programs with automatic enrollment suggests that many would stay with the program and, in turn, increase their saving.”

Elsewhere, the think tank recently argued that “New research suggests that the tax subsidy for contributions to retirement accounts only affects the behavior of certain financially sophisticated households and does not raise overall saving significantly.”

Savings Tax?

As American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries CEO Brian H. Graff charged last week, such a cash grab “would more accurately be described as double taxation” in which “a small-business owner in the 39.6% bracket would pay an 11.6% tax on contributions made to the 401(k) plan today, and pay tax again at the full rate when they retire.”

But 401(k)s come behind only the mortgage interest deduction and the employer health insurance exclusion as federal tax breaks go, amounting to “$429 billion in foregone revenue from 2013 through 2017,” as Employee Benefit News points out.

It was inevitable that these popular retirement nest eggs would be targeted for raiding.

We even have the unreal spectacle of the mutual fund industry frantically justifying its existence in the wake of President Obama talking up the closing of tax loopholes.

Investment Company Institute President Paul Schott Stevens said, “we’re trying to counter all of the doom and gloom about the 401(k) system being a failure and that it doesn’t work.”

Doesn’t work?

Mutual funds, especially when shielded from taxes, have, like discount brokerages, opened the door of successful investing to millions of ordinary Americans.

They have brought the American Dream to new heights.

What doesn’t work is the government, which should be told to stuff its offer of help at managing people’s money. Better to have Typhoid Mary run the Centers for Disease Control.

It’s all about the money, boys. . .

doublethink

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“In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good[.]”

James Madison, Federalist No. 51

In the name of justice, the Left pursue social justice.  In the name of the general good, the Left pursue entitlements.

Much like Islamists hide behind English translations to mask their jihad, the Left hide behind un-mutated original concepts to deceive those who can refute their substituted deceptions.

The Left took what began as universal principles for all Americans, principles essential to the American order protected by our Constitution and responsible for America’s success, and turned them into narrow principles for the benefit of only those Americans in their voting block, and to the detriment of the rest of Americans with whom they disagree.

Madison was correct, but he did not anticipate the subversion of language that the Left now routinely practices.  He did not anticipate the level of malice that would make the corruption of language routine in America–that would take away our ability to speak a common language and understand each others real differences.

Now ask yourself, “Who does this imposed confusion benefit?”  It’s certainly not the people, whatever their economic condition.  So who does that leave?  Government.

And who runs government?  The schools?  The bureaucracies?   The regulatory agencies?  The planning agencies?  In every case, it’s the Left.

B_Imperial

Drowning in good intentions

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“1. The NHS provides a comprehensive service, available to all irrespective of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief. It has a duty to each and every individual that it serves and must respect their human rights. At the same time, it has a wider social duty to promote equality through the services it provides and to pay particular attention to groups or sections of society where improvements in health and life expectancy are not keeping pace with the rest of the population.”

The National Health Service Constitution

“The Constitution also contains pledges that the NHS is committed to achieve. Pledges go above and beyond legal rights. This means that pledges are not legally binding but represent a commitment by the NHS …”

The Handbook to the NHS Constitution

one way street of progress

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Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches, 2012.

From the Introduction:

“One small example: During the recent debate over reforming Medicare, many liberals insisted that any backsliding amounted to a sacrilegious violation of a fundamental “covenant.” Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn, a leading health care expert, quotes LBJ’s Medicare law signing statement:

“No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years.”

“Read those quotes carefully,” Cohn advises us, “because they spell out the covenant that Johnson made with the American people on that day: A promise that the elderly and (certain groups) of the poor would get comprehensive medical insurance, no matter what.”  Now I cannot and will not criticize Cohn for believing that the government should ensure that the truly needy and elderly receive medical care.  That is an honorable, intellectually defensible position.  Though I should at least mention that wanting the needy to receive health care does not necessarily require a vast expansion of the federal government.  But my point isn’t to debate the means to a desirable end.

No, the reason why I find Cohn’s argument so useful is that it illustrates the progressive mind-set so perfectly. [Read more…]

condolences

By

Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard.  Ha!  The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law.  Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary.  Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.

Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals.  I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.

We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes.  We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse.  We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame.  We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County.  We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.

I never wrote for the sake of the old guard.  I wrote for the sake of limited sound government.  A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government.  They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it.  That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.

The left has won.  You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.

B_Imperial

to zone or not to zone

By

ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY
RESOLUTIONS FOR PLATFORM
2012

(partial list  –  all passed at Assembly 5/24/2012)

12. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party support and encourage responsible growth, respecting the rights of all county residents consistent with the goal of preserving the unique rural and natural character of Elbert County.

15. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party requests that the elected Board of County Commissioners implement the noxious weed control plan as directed by State Law.

16. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt, implement and enforce a 300 year water supply plan based on actual water usage.

17. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt responsible planning and development measures to ensure that growth pay its own way and ensure that new infrastructure demanded by new development is not subsidized by the taxpayer without a vote of said taxpayer.

– OR –

21. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party object to the expansion of Elbert County zoning laws.

~

Which will it be?  You can’t have it both ways.

This schizophrenic disconnect in the Republican Party Platform, approved yesterday at the 2012 County Assembly, is another symptom of our Elbert County uni-party implementation of the Republican Party.

Now, you could say the Resolutions Committee for the assembly failed in their mission to provide an internally consistent set of resolutions for the platform, however, it’s not really their responsibility to resolve this political question.

And, you could say that the Executive Committee of the Party is responsible because they suspended debate on the resolutions by assembly delegates, and thereby precluded the assembled body of Republicans from reaching a compromise.  But after tolerating season after electoral season of mixed-use Republicanism, it would have been highly contentious, perhaps even violent, for a bunch of lefties and conservatives to work their substantive differences out in the space of a few minutes of polite assembly “dialoging.”

Besides, these issues cannot be legitimately resolved by a set of self-selected delegates numbering less than 1 hundredth of 1 percent of the population.  Without a causal connection between voters and voting objects, be it candidate or issue, consent of the voters is cut off.

Enfranchised voters are the only interest group who can legitimately resolve this political question.

The Founders labored and argued for years to conceive constitutional methods to enfranchise voters and permit them to be governed legitimately.  Sadly, our caucus assembly system which disenfranchises voters at large does not meet that standard.  And muddying the preliminary waters by empowering a single party to clear both left and conservative candidates is a giant step further away from voter enfranchisement.

The way to fix this conundrum is to return Elbert County to a two-party system.  Would the Democrat Party tolerate a bunch of conservatives diluting their precious social and entitlement agendas?  Absolutely not!  Why then do conservatives around here allow the left to tromp all over their Republican Party?

The way to fix this problem is to nip it in the bud.  Make the change here:

ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN CENTRAL COMMITTEE BYLAWS

Article III. POLICY

Section 4. Endorsements. The ECR acting as an entity, or the ECR elected officers shall not publicly support or endorse any Republican candidate that is involved in a primary who could represent Elbert County residents in a partisan race.

Change it to read something like the following:

ECR elected officers shall substantively analyze all Republican candidates with respect to information publicly available in local history as it relates to each candidates alignment with the Republican Oath and the Elbert County Republican Party Platform.  Officers shall report their findings to Precinct Committeepeople in a timely manner as the findings become known.

As things currently stand, ECR elected officers must withhold a relevant body of knowledge from the rest of the caucus and assembly process.  While done in the interest of fairness, the left games that good intention and turns it against the Republican Party from the inside.

Playing fair only works in an ethical environment.  The left have never played fair and Republicans should stop fooling themselves about it.

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”