RedStateEclectic

The Right To Show Paint Samples, Fabric Swatches, and Finials Upheld in Connecticut

The Institute for Justice has won another victory for economic freedom.

    A federal judge today struck down a state law that unconstitutionally censored the free speech of interior designers in Connecticut. 
    In a thorough, clearly worded 23-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Mark Kravitz systematically considered and rejected each of the state's arguments in support of the challenged law, a so-called "title act" for interior designers.  Title acts are laws that regulate only the speech, but not the work associated with a given occupation.  Thus, in Connecticut-as in 46 other states around the country including New York, Massachusetts, and California-anyone may work as an interior designer with no license or other special government oversight of any kind.  But since 1983, Connecticut law has prohibited anyone not registered as an interior designer with the Department of Consumer Protection from referring to himself as an "interior designer," even when that term accurately describes what he does.

Are you paying attention, Senator DeMint? We're nearing the end of the ride when it comes to the "slide" into socialism.

I remember a conversation I had about a year ago with a lady who works in a furniture store. Somehow, this subject came up, and every argument I made was countered by her with the simple notion that people who spend their the time and money to get their license are deserving of it. That's all. For all I know, you show up, pay your money into the collection plate held out by the typical government revenue goon, then you pick a cot and sleep for for four days straight; only to wake up with a little plastic-coated badge laying next to you with your name on it.

The utter nonsense of it all. Am I to be victimized by the wrong shade of beige painted on my walls? Maybe the throw pillows on the bed were just too much for my senses? Oh! How I wished she would have put that dresser on the wall next to the Ficus plant! How absurd.

The Institute for Justice sent me an email containing part of their argument for striking down this particular law:

IJ’s strategic research has shown such regulations result in higher prices, less variety, and fewer employment opportunities, especially for minorities and older mid-career switchers, without any benefit to public health or safety (the standard by which all such regulations should be judged). 

I don't agree with it entirely since benefits to public health or safety are subjective. I'd have the government out of licensing entirely for the reasons above, yet others would call for doctors and nurses to have licenses. Rather than licenses, I would rather they have the ability to do their jobs with a certain level of competence as well as come up with ways for this impatient patient to not have to perform the 90 minute, room-shifting ritual required to have a brief chat with the doctor. The economic side of the equation mandates that competition is needed in health care. Licensing reduces that.

Still, it's a good victory. Surely, the licensed interior decorators in the state are upset that they spent that time and money getting their license. No doubt that's been offset by their higher prices for the proper placement of candles and other quality knick-knacks which are a pain to dust. Designers of the world, unite!

Republicans Up To Their Old Tricks

The GOP machine rumbles on in its big government ways.

Seems the hypocritical conservatives are at it again in Kentucky.  On Friday night [6/19/09] many of those tea party attending conservatives will be forking over the big bucks for Trey Grayson, who will likely be Rand Paul’s main opponent in the Republican senate primary.  When Rand came to this area to speak, not one local member of the Republican county committee showed up.  Yet when Grayson (a former Democratic delegate for Bill Clinton) shows up, these supposed champions of small government line up to meet him.

Yup. They're moving  left.

The Great Peter Bauer

While reading some of his work this morning, I came across this snippet:

The misery in Ethiopia, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa is not the result simply of unfavorable weather, external causes, or population pressure. It is the result of enforced reversion to subsistence conditions under the impact of the breakdown of public security, suppression of private trade, or forced collectivization. There is a core of truth in the jibe that the weather tends to be bad in centrally controlled economies.

It's looking rather cloudy around here these days as well.

"Saving Freedom"

That's the title of a new book by Senator Jim DeMint. I didn't know he had written a book (I bet Laura did - she's much more wired in than I). HE certainly didn't tell me at our last meeting. That is, I didn't know about the book until I was stopped at a light on Whiskey Road and opposite me was this garishly decked out charter bus with the title of the book plastered all over it along with patriotic symbols - not to mention DeMint's giant head.

The complete title is Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism. Using the handy-dandy internet to investigate, I found this over at U.S. News & World Report (they have a picture of the bus if interested):

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, armed with his new book, Saving Freedom, and a Toby Keith-like song, is hitting the nation on a bus wrapped in patriotic colors to pitch his claim that the administration and congressional Democrats are pushing the nation into socialism.

"We've got to stop the slide to socialism," he tells Whispers. "Freedom is dissolving. We don't even teach what it is anymore."

Presidential candidate, perhaps? Well, he slam-dunked McCain. He can't be all bad.

The Bidding of the Leaders

Quotes are neat. They emphasize a point you make or help you to understand that things like you are experiencing have happened before. They can be inspirational as well as educational. There is one quote that I seem to come back to time and again; not for its inspiration, but for its sheer practicality. It was uttered by none other than Hermann Goering:

Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

The simple truth of that statement (made by one who caused so much death and was nearing his own) is profound. How much of our ideas are our own? We have so many wars going on against things like terror, drugs, poverty, climate change (war against humanity) - all of which come about by ceaseless propaganda by our government and the media. Who questions these things?

I wonder what it must have been like living, way back when, as the first socialist plea was codified into law ... the ripples it has made. Imagine the pleasure of thinking how just a little of your money was going to help some cause or another. The poor and indigent, perhaps? Who knows, really? At some point it began innocently enough and now we work half of our lives to satiate the omniscient and omnipotent state. The good we thought we were doing for ourselves has finally coalesced into ourselves being the problem.

Like the proverbial man who digs his own grave, we have built a government that no longer wishes to protect us, but sees us as the problem. It now protects Mother Earth. There can be no other conclusion when one considers the implications that man is the cause of Gaia's woebegone state. We have spent eons getting to the point where we have conquered nature, only to hear the leaders of the world tell us that we must recede. We must go back to the times of hardship to satisfy those in power whose perception of a perfect world means unadulterated nature (or maybe they simply mean to rule over us) and far fewer humans to disturb it.

From the innocent socialist beginnings to the now militaristic cries for overwhelming force, we have never once failed Goering's words which can now only be described as an axiom. Just once, I would like to see the people of this country decide to look elsewhere than the government's guns when solving an issue - proving the existence of the autodetermination that must flourish if we are to remain free. How I would love to prove this axiom to be false.

British Health Care Woes

The state of national health care in Britain is in a bad way. Shockingly, it seems that even more money is needed to right the badly listing ship. How much? According to Andrew Haldenby, who runs a think tank called Reform, the numbers are pretty high:

Apparently, the NHS needs another £10 billion from the taxpayer to survive in three years' time (put another way, just less than the cost of paying for the entire police service).

No doubt the agency was severely under-funded these many years? Hardly:

After a decade of historic spending increases, the NHS budget has more than doubled, from around £45 billion to £105 billion. The service has 41,800 more doctors and 84,700 more nurses. To say the NHS has never had more resources is an understatement: it is in a wonderland of extra money, on a scale that its leaders never expected. Quite amazing, then, that it is coming back to the taxpayer cap in hand.

The mystery deepened when Andrew Lansley, the Conservative health spokesman, appeared on the show at ten past seven. He said that there wouldn't be this problem under a Conservative government because they would spend more – in fact, they would spend more on health after inflation for ever, no matter what, not even if the recession worsened and tax revenues plummeted.

Conservatives ... spendthrifts to the end. The whole thing is quite amazing indeed. But fear not! Our boy Andrew Haldenby has pinpointed the problem:

The reason for the hole in the budget is that the NHS has spent its extra money in the wrong way. In another piece of evidence yesterday, the Office for National Statistics reported that NHS productivity had fallen by 4.3 per cent over the 10 years to 2007. In other words, the NHS actually destroyed some of the value of the money that it was given, just like a company making a loss. It has improved – in particular, very long waits for hospital treatment are now a memory – but those improvements could have been achieved at lower cost.

The reason is that the NHS just spent money on getting bigger, not smarter.

My dear Andrew, you have broken a cardinal rule. Never … NEVER compare a government-run program to a business. You might as well toss a rock into the water and reason that its sinking action is due to it not taking on the characteristics of a piece of wood.

Having found the problem, Andrew can now offer his solution (something we all have, eh?). He points to various pockets of effectiveness in his and other countries which, if applied, could better the situation of this nationalized medical malady. They all sounded nice: placing patients in four-star hotels, secure electronic records, and so forth. One hospital group hasn't had any MRSA or C.difficile at all in its 60 hospitals for several years (they're a private company).

Getting to the gist of things, our man, Andrew, has figured out that the improvements needed within the entire scheme revolve around yet another cardinal rule being broken as he calls for politicians to be something other than what they are ... politicians:

What is lacking is the leadership – and this brings us back to politicians. Leadership doesn't mean ministers actually running the NHS – that has been part of the problem. It means politicians daring to make the case for change. It means explaining to the public (and to the service itself) that a better service will look and feel very different.

That service will have fewer big hospitals and many more smaller units, both general (like GP surgeries) and specialist (like stroke units). It will almost certainly have a smaller staff, in which the big pay rises go only to the best performers. It will be different in different places, as local leaders start spending local money better.

Put very simply, the NHS is a collection of organisations that buy healthcare on our behalf and then provide it in the form of operations, GP appointments and so on. We need to let new people take over these various organisations and run them better. And then we, as citizens, need to make greater effort to choose between them and put pressure on them.

Tell me, dear reader, did you have any idea that you were going to be treated to such a fine display of comedy this Sunday morning?

Government is not a business and has no incentive to act like one. For example, with so many more doctors and nurses added, has there been a reduction in pay due to the lessening of scarcity in that regard? Highly doubtful. What about all of the new facilities and equipment for those news doctors and nurses? Pretty expensive stuff, that. Also, there’s the never-mentioned ditty concerning the bureaucracy that consumes gobs of money to run it all. That’s just for starters. Anything run by the government is going to cost more and more. It matters very little if new people replace the old. It’s that same tired “if only” argument that perpetuates replacing political parties every ten years.

We have been taught (and warned) by Austrian economists and like-minded others concerning the folly of removing economic calculation through a pricing mechanism. We’ve seen the deleterious effects of such action played out over and over again. When will people finally refuse the politicians the ability to spend other people’s money in a vain and doomed attempt to fix things that are described as broken? For all of the talk of market failures, we never stop to consider the failures of government due to the infinite hope that, some day, the politicians will make the “right” changes.

Pull this lever … turn that knob … just find competent people qualified to run the complex machine, right? Here’s an idea, why not simply pull the plug?

Oh No! My Governor is Missing!

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/836552.html

 

Whatever will I do?

I think I'll go have some breakfast and then get ready for my eye doctor's appointment. Hopefully, the traffic lights downtown are still working.

Surprise Performance at Antwerp Central Station

With no warning, a recording of Sound of Music star, Julie Andrews, singing Do - Re - Mi rang out on the public address system at 8am. Passengers passing through the station then watched in amazement the dancers appeared from nowhere and started strutting.

Spontaneity ... what a wonderful thing.

Maybe we could train the Homeland Security Guards to do a number at our airport terminals every few hours. Nah, they're too busy doing a number on the passengers.

Killing in War

David Gordon reviews the book, Killing in War, by Jeff McMahan which raises questions about just war theory and whether it is permissible to kill another even within the purview of war. According to Mr. McMahan, just wars are far and few between, leaving the imperial antics of our nation looking rather violent and irresponsible when seen through a morally philosophical lens.

The article is very well done, especially when the question turns to whether a soldier's personal views on a war he is fighting should be considered since his government has declared war for him:

Among democratic countries, the US stands out in two respects: it has carefully designed and robust democratic institutions and also goes to war more often than any other democratic country. What procedural guarantees are there that the wars it fights will be just? The answer is: none. The only constraint is a requirement of Congressional authorization — a requirement that can be fudged… (p. 69)

McMahan is an appropriately severe critic of American foreign policy:

The Pentagon Papers revealed an assortment of lies told to rally support for the war in Vietnam; Reagan lied about the nature of the Contras and the sources of their funding in order to make war against Nicaragua; and members of the George W. Bush administration lied repeatedly about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify the invasion and occupation of that country to the UN, the Congress, and the American public. (p. 152)

Reading this article got me thinking about the significance of a well-placed comma. For instance, instead of saying this:

"I was just following orders"

... a soldier was to say this:

"I was just, following orders."

What difference could such an act of introspective consideration make? I wonder.

History shows that we are a belligerent people. It is the way of imperial culture throughout history. No empire ever became an empire without horrific and constant warfare. "Well, what about Pax Romana or Pax Americana?" you ask. Nice words but hardly peaceful. Maybe relative peace prevailed for a time but, there was still fighting, which hardly justifies the large-scale killing before or after such a period.

Maybe we should try Pax for its own sake some day.

2009 Obama Agenda Survey

Did anyone else receive theirs in the mail? Such humor is a welcome respite from the bills and shopping flyers. I wish I had a fireplace. It would be so much more gratifying than simply tossing these things into the trash.