The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom
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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Obamacare was doomed to fail
Congress is known to make mistakes. And when it does, it is the duty of those senators and members of Congress who come after to try and fix those mistakes. In the last decade, no mistake has been greater than the one that gave us Obamacare. It was a mistake born of the same kind of blanket partisanship that the American people have come to deplore about Washington. This trillion dollar program and 1,000-page bill was rammed through Congress without being read, analyzed or fully debated. It did not receive a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate, a rare and remarkable thing even in today’s politically charged environment. The administration of this bill is now up over 10,000 pages.
It should surprise no one that we are discovering new problems with the law, seemingly every day. As then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi infamously said: “ We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” And find out we have – what’s in it kills jobs, raises the cost of health care, and limits choice when it comes to what insurance Americans can buy and what doctors they can visit.
Obamacare was sold to our nation under false pretenses. We were told that Obamacare would bring down premiums. They are going up. We were told Americans would be able to keep their insurance and their doctors. Millions are losing them. We were told that Obamacare would help create jobs. Instead, millions of Americans have given up looking for work and many of the jobs that are available are part-time. And the implementation of this massive new law has become, in the words of one of my Democratic colleagues, “a train wreck.”
Because Obamacare imposes significant costs on businesses that hire full-time workers – defined as more than 30 hours a week – we are already seeing employers cut back substantially on the hours their staff can work. It’s a story that is being repeated across the country, in businesses large and small.
And it’s not just unemployment that is expected to rise because of Obamacare. The cost of health care is likely to go up, as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that premiums could increase by as much as 436 percent.
Meanwhile, we are watching the implementation of Obamacare unravel before our very eyes. The health care exchanges that are at the heart of Obamacare are in trouble. Some of the exchanges, supposed to go online Oct. 1, are delayed because of unacceptably high failure rates. Recently, Health and Human Services announced that key components of the Small Business Health Options Program – or SHOP Exchange – will also be delayed until 2015. And another part of the legislation that was meant to insure long term care – the CLASS Act – has been abandoned altogether because it was financially unsustainable. If a commercial product had as many defects as Obamacare, it would have been yanked from the shelves long ago as dangerous to the public by the FTC.
For some companies at least, the White House has taken steps to alleviate these problems. Earlier this year, the administration announced – in the face of dire warnings from the business community – that the employer mandate would be delayed for a year. Meanwhile, thousands of corporations and some labor unions have received exemptions altogether from the health care law. And yet the individual mandate, the part of Obamacare that’s going to hit the average American, still looms over us all. There’s no relief for the American people. Some people point out that Obamacare is the law and ask why weI should continue to fight to repeal and replace it with better reforms.
The answer is simple. The people of sent men and women to Washington to support policies that are good for America and oppose those policies that hurt our country. Obamacare is bad for the economy and bad for family’s health care. This is why many support repealing the law and replacing it with a better way to lower health care costs, increase health care choices and improve the quality of care. And that is a cause worth fighting for.
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Morality is society’s first line of defense
Walter Williams
Every time there’s a shooting tragedy,
there are more calls for gun control. Let’s examine a few historical facts.
By 1910, the National Rifle Association had succeeded in establishing 73 NRA-affiliated high-school rifle clubs. The 1911 second edition of the Boy Scout Handbook made qualification in NRA’s junior marksmanship program a prerequisite for obtaining a merit badge in marksmanship. In 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. established its own Winchester Junior Rifle Corps. The program grew to 135,000 members by 1925. In New York City, gun clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. With so many guns in the hands of youngsters, did we see today’s level of youth violence?
What about gun availability? Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were full of gun advertisements directed to children and parents. For example, “What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun” was published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The 1902 Sears mail-order catalog had 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. For most of our history, a person could simply walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in our country, and buy a gun. Few states bothered to have even age restrictions on buying guns.
Those and other historical facts should force us to ask ourselves: Why – at a time in our history when guns were readily available, when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements – was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted? Guns are guns. If they were capable of behavior, as some people seem to suggest, they should have been doing then what they’re doing now.
Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not just laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society, not restraints on inanimate objects. These behavioral norms – transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings – represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The benefit of having customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody’s watching. In other words, it’s morality that is society’s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.
Moral standards of conduct, as well as strict and swift punishment for criminal behaviors, have been under siege in our country for more than a half-century. Moral absolutes have been abandoned as a guiding principle. We’ve been taught not to be judgmental, that one lifestyle or value is just as good as another. More often than not, the attack on moral standards has been orchestrated by the education establishment and progressives. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws are needed to regulate behavior.
What’s worse is that instead of trying to return to what worked, progressives want to replace what worked with what sounds good or what seems plausible, such as more gun locks, longer waiting periods and stricter gun possession laws. Then there’s progressive mindlessness “cures,” such as “zero tolerance” for schoolyard recess games such as cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, shouting “bang bang,” drawing a picture of a pistol, making a gun out of Lego pieces, and biting the shape of a gun out of a Pop-Tart. This kind of unadulterated lunacy – which focuses on an inanimate object such as a gun instead of on morality, self discipline and character – will continue to produce disappointing results.
By 1910, the National Rifle Association had succeeded in establishing 73 NRA-affiliated high-school rifle clubs. The 1911 second edition of the Boy Scout Handbook made qualification in NRA’s junior marksmanship program a prerequisite for obtaining a merit badge in marksmanship. In 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. established its own Winchester Junior Rifle Corps. The program grew to 135,000 members by 1925. In New York City, gun clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. With so many guns in the hands of youngsters, did we see today’s level of youth violence?
What about gun availability? Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were full of gun advertisements directed to children and parents. For example, “What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun” was published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The 1902 Sears mail-order catalog had 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. For most of our history, a person could simply walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in our country, and buy a gun. Few states bothered to have even age restrictions on buying guns.
Those and other historical facts should force us to ask ourselves: Why – at a time in our history when guns were readily available, when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements – was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted? Guns are guns. If they were capable of behavior, as some people seem to suggest, they should have been doing then what they’re doing now.
Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not just laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society, not restraints on inanimate objects. These behavioral norms – transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings – represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The benefit of having customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody’s watching. In other words, it’s morality that is society’s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.
Moral standards of conduct, as well as strict and swift punishment for criminal behaviors, have been under siege in our country for more than a half-century. Moral absolutes have been abandoned as a guiding principle. We’ve been taught not to be judgmental, that one lifestyle or value is just as good as another. More often than not, the attack on moral standards has been orchestrated by the education establishment and progressives. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws are needed to regulate behavior.
What’s worse is that instead of trying to return to what worked, progressives want to replace what worked with what sounds good or what seems plausible, such as more gun locks, longer waiting periods and stricter gun possession laws. Then there’s progressive mindlessness “cures,” such as “zero tolerance” for schoolyard recess games such as cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, shouting “bang bang,” drawing a picture of a pistol, making a gun out of Lego pieces, and biting the shape of a gun out of a Pop-Tart. This kind of unadulterated lunacy – which focuses on an inanimate object such as a gun instead of on morality, self discipline and character – will continue to produce disappointing results.
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U.S. Falls to 17th in Economic Freedom
The
Cato Institute has released its latest annual report on the "Economic
Freedom of the World," and it shows that the United States ranks only
at No. 17 among 152 nations surveyed. According to Cato,
"The
cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange,
freedom to enter and compete in markets, and protection of persons and their
property from aggression by others. Economic freedom is present when individuals
are permitted to choose for themselves and engage in voluntary transactions as
long as they do not harm the person or property of others."
To
compile its report, Cato assesses the economic freedom within a nation based
on five areas: size of government, legal system and property rights, sound
money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation. From 1980 to 2000, the United States was
generally rated the third freest economy, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore,
and in 2000 it was ranked second. But the rating dropped to No. 8 in 2005, to No.
16 in 2010, and to No. 17 in 2011, the most recent year for which sufficient
data is available. "The United
States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom among large
industrial nations, has experienced a substantial decline in economic freedom
during the past decade," Cato observed.
Hong Kong earns the top
spot in the new
report, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius,
Finland, Bahrain, Canada, and Australia.
Among
large economies, the United Kingdom is at No. 12, ahead of Germany (19), Japan
(33), France (40), Russia (101), Brazil (102), India (111), and China (123). The 10 lowest-rated countries among
the 152 entities studied are Algeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi,
Central African Republic, Angola, Chad, Zimbabwe, Republic of Congo, Myanmar,
and in last place, Venezuela. Nations in the top quartile on economic freedom
had an average per-capita GDP of $36,446 in 2011, compared to $4,382 for
nations in the bottom quartile, according to Cato. Life expectancy is 79.2 years in nations in
the top quartile compared to 60.2 years in the bottom quartile. The poorest 10
percent of the population in nations in the bottom quartile had an average yearly
income of just $932 in 2011.
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