The Right Lane 1.15.13

In pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Workers making $30,000 will take a bigger hit on their pay than those earning $500,000 under new fiscal deal By Hayley Peterson

Middle-class workers will take a bigger hit to their income proportionately than those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 under the new fiscal cliff deal, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.  Earners in the latter group will pay an average 1.3 percent more - or an additional $2,711 - in taxes this year, while workers making between $30,000 and $200,000 will see their paychecks shrink by as much as 1.7 percent - or up to $1,784 - the D.C.-based think tank reported.  Overall, nearly 80 percent of households will pay more money to the federal government as a result of the fiscal cliff deal.

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U.S. Added 155,000 Jobs in December; Unemployment Rate at 7.8%

American employers added 155,000 jobs in December, about apace with job growth over the last year, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, consistent with a revised rate for November, previously reported as 7.7 percent. The biggest gains were in health care, food services, construction and manufacturing, and job losses in the government sector mostly tapered off, the report said.

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FBI: More People Killed with Hammers, Clubs Each Year than Rifles

According to the FBI annual crime statistics, the number of murders committed annually with hammers and clubs far outnumbers the number of murders committed with a rifle. This is an interesting fact, particularly amid the Democrats’ feverish push to ban many different rifles, ostensibly to keep us safe of course. However, it appears the zeal of Sens. like Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) is misdirected. For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle. Think about it: In 2005, the number of murders committed with a rifle was 445, while the number of murders committed with hammers and clubs was 605. In 2006, the number of murders committed with a rifle was 438, while the number of murders committed with hammers and clubs was 618. And so the list goes, with the actual numbers changing somewhat from year to year, yet the fact that more people are killed with blunt objects each year remains constant. For example, in 2011, there was 323 murders committed with a rifle but 496 murders committed with hammers and clubs. While the FBI makes is clear that some of the “murder by rifle” numbers could be adjusted up slightly, when you take into account murders with non-categorized types of guns, it does not change the fact that their annual reports consistently show more lives are taken each year with these blunt objects than are taken with Feinstein’s dreaded rifle. Another interesting fact: According to the FBI, nearly twice as many people are killed by hands and fists each year than are killed by murderers who use rifles.

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DAR: Reports on Religious Changes Untrue By: Todd Beamon

The Daughters of the American Revolution, one of the nation’s oldest patriotic organizations, said on Thursday that reports of it removing mentions of Jesus Christ in their official book — along with prayers and poems that reference Christian imagery — were false. The organization, founded in 1890, also said that reports directing members to refrain from praying in the name of Christ were untrue. The DAR was responding to a Fox News report earlier Thursday that these actions had been taken in its revised Ritual and Missal books, the primary guide for chaplains.

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Only fools claim to know the future By John Kay

There are few certainties about the future other than that it is uncertain. At this season it is customary to look back on the achievements of the year that is past and to consider what may unfold in the year to come. Nate Silver, the young statistician who became an unexpected hero of 2012, is relevant to both exercises. Many experts thought the American election too close to call but Mr Silver, though reviled by the Republicans, insisted that Barack Obama was likely to be comfortably re-elected. His prediction received attention because his forecasts of results four years earlier had proved very accurate. When Mr Silver was again proved right, his publisher cashed in and his book on prediction, The Signal and the Noise, became a bestseller.

There is no crystal ball behind Mr Silver’s success: just diligent work, obtaining disaggregated polling data, and assembling them with a sceptical mind that is well-informed about qualitative as well as quantitative factors relevant to the results. However, Mr Silver’s care, and his reliability, put popular pundits to shame. He exemplifies – and in his book reiterates – the distinction between hedgehog and fox made by the political scientist Philip Tetlock (following Isaiah Berlin, following Tolstoy, following Erasmus, following Archilochus). The hedgehog knows one big thing, the fox many little things. The hedgehog attracts public attention, but the fox is better at forecasting.

Predicting election results is relatively easy. The problem is well-defined – the candidates are known, the process of choice defined in legislation, the result a matter of public record. The issues lend themselves to probabilistic reasoning – the mathematical properties of sampling populations are well understood. Much the same is true of baseball statistics and poker, two other issues on which Mr Silver claims particular insight. Weather forecasting is harder, but we know whether it is raining or not, have extensive data sets, and some – if inadequate – understanding of the processes by which clouds form and winds blow. But most of the problems we face in business and finance are ill-defined and open-ended. We often do not really know the answers even after the event. We cannot envisage the full range of possible outcomes, or the options available. Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously characterised this world as populated by “black swans”, while Donald Rumsfeld mused on “unknown unknowns”.

People crave specific knowledge of the evolution of complex systems, paying good money for the services of clairvoyants and economic forecasters. But such knowledge is rarely available. Nor, even if it were available, would it often be useful. Physicists studying sport have established that many fieldsmen are very good at catching balls, but bad at answering the question: “Where in the park will the ball land?” Good players don’t forecast the future, but adapt to it. That is the origin of the saying “keep your eye on the ball”. As complex systems go, the interaction between the ball in flight and the moving fieldsman is still relatively simple. In principle, most of the knowledge needed to compute trajectories and devise an optimal strategy is available: we just don’t have the instruments or the time for analysis and computation. More often, the relevant information is not even potentially knowable. The skill of the sports player is not the result of superior knowledge of the future, but of an ability to employ and execute good strategies for making decisions in a complex and changing world. The same qualities are characteristic of the successful executive. Managers who know the future are more often dangerous fools than great visionaries.

Most people who hire fortune tellers have the good sense to treat their prognostications lightly. The activity is casual fun, its value – if any – is as provocation to think carefully about the present rather than a measure of gaining knowledge about the future. Good predictions may be available in structured, well-ordered, situations – but, even then, forecasts are properly conditional or probabilistic. There are few certainties about the future: but one is that hedgehogs who make confident statements on the basis of some universal theory will be as persistently misleading counselors in the future as in the past. And that the foxes, like Mr. Silver, who scramble everywhere for scraps of information will provide better, if more nuanced, advice.

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"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." --Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

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Unemployment Rises for Women, African-Americans in December By Matt Cover

Government unemployment numbers for December showed that while the general unemployment rate remained flat at 7.8 percent, unemployment for women and African-Americans rose despite an economy that created 155,000 jobs. Unemployment for women rose to 7.3 percent in December from 7.0 percent while the rate for African-Americans rose sharply to 14.0 percent from 13.2 percent in November. Unemployment among African Americans has remained quite high throughout the sluggish economic recovery of the past several years, despite the steady decline in overall unemployment in the economy generally. The number of employed African Americans actually fell in December – a month that typically sees a spike in job creation as employers add temporary positions to handle the holiday shopping season.  The number of employed African Americans fell from nearly 16 million to 15.8 million in December. By contrast, the unemployment rate for Whites remained nearly a full point below the national average at 6.9 percent in December.

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Pelosi: ‘Many Members of the Republican Caucus Don’t Believe in Government’ By Penny Starr

In an interview on Thursday with National Public Radio, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that many Republicans do not “believe in government.” "There are many members in the Republican caucus who do not believe in government,” Pelosi said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. “And bless their hearts, they act upon their beliefs. “So day to day, we vote here on issues that eliminate government initiatives for clean air, clean water, food safety, public safety, public education, public transportation, public housing, public health, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

"They don't believe in a public role,” Pelosi said. “And if you don't believe in a public role, then why do you even have to have taxes to pay for it? ... They're anti-government ideologues, and that's what the speaker has to deal with." Pelosi also had praise for the “Grand Old Party,” which she said has made “enormous contributions to the success of our country,” but that the party has changed to be one that wants to destroy government. [What Pelosi fails to understand is the Grand Old Party believes in limited government rather than an all consuming one that limits liberty]

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Ann Coulter: Why Can’t We Publish List Of Women Who Get Abortions?

Ann Coulter criticizes the recent publication of gun owner’s names in New York and asks why we can’t do the same for mothers of abortion victims because they ‘might be willing to murder a child.’

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Obama's Family Vacations to Cost Taxpayers More Than $20 Million - while you and others do without!

President Barack Obama’s four vacations to Hawaii since becoming president may cost taxpayers “in excess of $20 million, and possibly much, much more,’’ the White House Dossier reports. A breakdown by the Hawaii Reporter shows his trips in 2009, 2010, and 2011 cost about $4 million, much of it for Air Force One. But that doesn’t include costs like flying in advance teams and separate flights Michelle Obama twice took. When Obama returned from Hawaii to work on the fiscal cliff deal last week and then jetted back to Honolulu, the second roundtrip flight added about $3.24 million to the tab, bringing the 2012-2013 vacation to over $7 million, the Reporter said. “If we assume the estimates are probably quite low, then it’s likely to the bill for the combined vacations is more than $20 million,’’ said the Dossier’s Keith Koffler.
“Given that much of the cost involves transporting the First Family and its retinue, the Obamas could have saved taxpayers millions by doing what the vast majority of Americans do: taking either one trip a year, or none.’’ Koffler said while some argued the president is justified in returning to Hawaii because that is where he was born and grew up, “how many of us get to go visit our roots for a two week vacation every year? “The Obamas probably also feel they must go to Hawaii because they are creatures of habit . . . But their allegiance to routine is costing the taxpayers – including those in the middle class Obama claims to care so much about – millions of dollars.’’

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Obama’s Hug Now ‘Broken Promise’

After President Obama wrapped her in a well-publicized embrace, Donna Vanzant became the face of a promise of “immediate” assistance from the federal government in the days after superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast. But as Vanzant battled with her insurance company for the funds to rebuild her Jersey Shore marina, she had another brush with the commander-in-chief that left her feeling less confident in Washington’s efforts. After sending an email to the White House asking for the federal government to make good on its promise to help, Vanzant received a form letter that never answered her questions. “It had nothing to do with what I was asking him. It was a form letter. It thanked me for supporting the troops,” Vanzant said in an interview The Philly Post blog on Friday. “He made a promise to rebuild on national television, and I can’t even get this money. It’s heartbreaking, really.”

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Note To Conservatives: Never Stop Fighting For Individual Liberty by David L. Goetsch

Liberty is what individuals have when they are able to peacefully pursue, nurture, and make independent decisions about personal, family, voluntary, and commercial interests and relationships. In defining individual liberty, Benjamin Constant, the French classical liberal, said: “…it is the right…to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations and whims.” In America we are slowly but surely losing our individual liberty as big government controls more and more aspects of our lives. This is a dangerous trend because without individual liberty there is no freedom., which is why my co-author, Archie Jones, and I made fighting for individual liberty Rule #4 in our new book, The statist and socialist policies advocated by Barack Obama and his fellow liberals are antithetical to individual liberty. In a socialist environment the individual’s liberty is subjugated to the state and his status, standing, and stature are all determined by his relative position within the political order. In other words, in a socialist system the individual has only as much liberty as the state allows him. A nation cannot have a civil society without individual liberty. Because leftwing policies and practices continue to move America inexorably toward socialism and the corresponding loss of individual liberty, it is important for conservatives to fight to maintain individual liberty in America and to be able to articulate the benefits of individual liberty.  Writing for FREEDOM DAILY, Richard Ebeling lists the following benefits of individual liberty:

Allows people to shape their own destinies, manage their own lives, and pursue their own dreams unencumbered by government interference. Allows people to enter into contracts, exchanges, and interactions of their own free will and to set the parameters of those interactions so that both benefit. Exchanges between individuals who have the benefit of liberty can be win-win exchanges, whereas exchanges directed, controlled, or manipulated by the government tend to be win-lose or lose-lose exchanges. Allows people to freely and voluntarily enter into associations and relationships of mutual interest such as religious and church activities, cultural associations, clubs, professional organizations, and charitable groups without requiring the approval of government. Allows what Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek called the “spontaneous social order” to develop. The social order in a free society is spontaneous because people form their associations—whether in church, professional organizations, cultural groups, clubs, or charitable groups—voluntarily rather than by government coercion. Socialism does not allow for the development of a spontaneous social order. Rather, the ways in which people form associations are designed, planned, and controlled by the government. For example, after Hitler’s National Socialist Party (Nazis) took control in Germany prior to World War II, membership in the Nazi Party was a prerequisite to securing a good job, decent housing, and other amenities of life. It is the antithesis of the collective tyranny associated with statism and socialism where the state, not the individual, is paramount.

With individual liberty, we—individual Americans—make our own decisions about our lives. With socialism—the antithesis of individual liberty—government makes our decisions for us. Take a moment and review your daily life. How many of your decisions are dictated or at least influenced by the coercive power of government?  As Americans, we have already lost much of our individual liberty.