Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
Could just be bullshit, given that the new Attorney General is a repug and might just decline to investigate.
Could be they’re just piling on a loser they never liked anyway.
But it could be a sign that some repug legislators are willing to turn on a trump wannabe once he stops being useful.
From Tommy Christopher:
Host David Gura asked Dr. Biden how she feels about her family being placed at the center of the impeachment story by virtue of Trump’s pursuit of political investigations into Hunter and Joe Biden.
Dr. Biden replied that while she expected the campaign to be tough, “we never could have imagined it would turn into Donald Trump would be asking a foreign government to get involved in our elections.”
She said that “Donald Trump has shown us who he is,” and that “I think it just proves that he’s afraid to run against my husband Joe Biden.”
We recently linked to a piece written by Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara. Michael’s article included this:
Society doesn’t “do” anything. “Society” is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals. Only individuals think, learn, work, and trade. The premise behind catchphrases like “paying back to society” is that some people must be forced to hand their money over to the state, so that some politically connected others can use the gun-backed machinery of government to legally force their values on unwilling individuals.
You can review the entire article here, as did readers Trey and Ryan.
Trey quotes liberally (which is to say accurately) from Mr. LaFerrara’s piece.
From Trey:
Why should I, a construction tradesman, subsidize a professional who works out of the same office day after day? Why does he rate a lower fare at my expense?”
– Old Man with Enfeebled Morals
Here! Here!
As a rail user, why should my tax dollars go to subsidize the building and maintenance of roads?
Why should my taxes pay for firefighters and their equipment when they just go and waste those resources not directly helping me and my own? My house isn’t burning down.
And water, right? I drink nothing but Culligan water and Well Water. Why do I have to pay money toward the public water everyone else uses?
Don’t get me started on the United States Postal Service and the waste of resources they have setting up post offices in the middle of no where towns. I don’t know anyone in those places and I will never go there, so obviously they shouldn’t have postal services AND if they need them, do it themselves like INDIVIDUALS.
Okay, I’m of course being facetious. Reading Grandpa Simpson’s diatribes and broken pretzel logic really gets to me. Society is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals? Right, maybe in the simplest of terms. A society is no different than a gaggle of geese, since a gaggle is just denoting a number of geese. Hey wait, maybe that is an apt comparison… A gaggle of geese band together for their collective good. It’s easier for the gaggle of geese to have and raise baby geese and thrive under the umbrella and watchful eye of a group of like-minded geese rather than just a single goose or a pair of selfish goose parents. Kind of like how a society of people band together to do things for their collective good and succeed far more frequently than a pair of selfish parents… or a selfish, I’ve Got Mine After a Career Working For the Government Grandpa.
When I read diatribes like this, I’m always brought back to an often mischaracterized speech President Obama made. “You didn’t make that” is often lifted out of context to label Obama some sort of socialist/communist. The point and context of the speech was that people don’t create, innovate, manufacture, and/or succeed in a vacuum. Without the security, access to resources, infrastructure, and health of society an individual cannot do anything. That Libertarian’s Governmentless Utopia that is Somalia should be overflowing with gajillionaires, right?
State schools are not a feature of a free society.
– Mr. Went to Public School and Never Learned About what Education Was Like Before Public School
No, a feature of a Free Society… which, hey we’re talking about that abstract concept of society again, but this time it’s important because it’s ‘Free’… anyways, a feature of a Free Society allows a parent to decide if they want to send their kid to the public school. Home Schooling is a thing. Private Schools exist. Unfortunately there’s a whole Haves vs Have Nots situation that Mr. LaFerrara conveniently ignores.
In a just society, parents pay for educating their own minor children.
– Mr. I Hate the Abstract Concept of Society Unless It is Preceded By An Adjective
You know, some would say or argue that our taxes are paying for educating our own minor children…
I pay for the education of the doctor, the engineer, the plumber only indirectly as and when I need a doctor’s or an engineer’s or a plumber’s service, through the fees, salaries, or wages of the doctor, engineer, or plumber, when and as I choose.
– Old Man Who Doesn’t Know How Education Works
Oh, I get it now. Mr. LaFerrara is confused. He thinks paying his Medicare Co-Pay at the Doctor retroactively pays for that person’s medical schooling. Or when he calls 1-800-PLUMBERS, that’s paying for a person’s trade school education.
To justify the moral abomination through collectivist sloganeering—like “paying back to society” or “That is what a society does”—just adds an unhealthy dose of dishonesty to the moral abomination.
– Grandpa Hater of Non-Randian Buzzwords
I doubt he sees the irony in his screeds.
From Ryan:
As usual, an incredibly short-sighted piece, as befits a non-consequentialist. He underestimates not only the benefits that these social features provide, but the extent of the cost/benefit analysis that other people have conducted on them. It can’t all be easily quantified in dollar signs, though, so I can understand why he struggles.
Furthermore, whatever poor arguments or programs he accurately skewers, he does not begin to make a case for abandoning subsidization or taxation altogether in favor of his own system (or lack thereof), nor can he explain why a libertarian system would not inevitably gravitate back toward what we have. Most of us (including Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, whom he claims to admire) have and recognize that we have more values than simply maximizing legal freedom and keeping as much of our present personal property as possible. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise or advocating for something that would utterly fail to promote those other values.
I do not pretend to know exactly how the US would look if it became the libertarian paradise he imagines, but it’s not at all difficult to imagine one in which most of us are only educated as necessary to fulfill our occupational roles, according to what best makes money, or according to what our religious region of the country actually offers in the absence of any secular state mandate. Between that and trying to improve our current system so that it *can* be a better value for its cost, I’ll take the latter any day.
Continue reading “Missing Offenses, Charity Fraud, Jury Tamper, He’s Melting, Trump Timed”
From Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:
Letter published in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, March 26, 2018, page 6 (not available online as of this writing):
It’s called paying back to society
To the letter writer who wants to know why he should have to pay for NJ transit upgrades when he doesn’t use mass transit (“Murphy’s taxes will eat up federal tax cuts,” March 23): All the people who do use mass transit could be in their own cars, which would make everyone’s lives more miserable because of the massive increase in traffic and pollution. And why should you pay school taxes even though you don’t have kids in school? Because the kids in school today will be the health care providers and scientists and engineers, etc., who will be running the world that you live in tomorrow. That is what a society does.
Barbara Egger, Lakewood
This is one of the most devious arguments for forced redistribution of wealth.
Society doesn’t “do” anything. “Society” is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals. Only individuals think, learn, work, and trade. The premise behind catchphrases like “paying back to society” is that some people must be forced to hand their money over to the state, so that some politically connected others can use the gun-backed machinery of government to legally force their values on unwilling individuals.
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:
A Presidency That Will Live in Infamy!
The event was termed a “day of infamy” by our visionary then-president Frnklin Roosevelt. Much has changed since then. In 1941, the country was solidly Democratic in the House, Senate, presidency, and in most state legislatures. The nation believed in its leaders with good reason. Labor unions had mushroomed into being, providing our laborers with a strong vehicle to negotiate higher wages and fairer pay standards, which would soon usher in an unprecedented era of worldwide prosperity. Our current president, Donald Trump, was not even born yet. It was a problematic era, and no nirvana by any stretch. However, the thought that we would someday elect a defiant, immature, ignorant,spoiled-rotten little brat to the presidency was nowhere in the public psyche, and no one alive back then could have predicted such a horrible thing. My, how low our standards have fallen!
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:
Cory’s treading water in the Presidential primary, unfortunately. But there’s another Booker in Kentucky who’s making a play to unseat Moscow Mitch.
It’s been about four months since Charles Booker, the Democratic state representative from Louisville who has formed an exploratory committee for a U.S. Senate run, drove to Harlan County to throw his support behind protesting coal miners camped out along a set of railroad tracks.
The experience, he said, was transformative.
From Helen Philpot of Margaret and Helen:
Conservative Christian Republicans really, really, really don’t like to abort babies. Interestingly enough, aborting a baby isn’t a thing. Neither is Baron Barron. #BeBest
Margaret, I don’t suffer fools gladly. Nor do I gladly suffer today’s Conservative Christian Republicans. And now that I’ve read those first two lines, I realize I’m being repetitive.
To be clear there are some of each I can tolerate and some I even love. Not all conservatives are racists, but many are without even knowing it. Not all Christians are hypocrites and I would venture to say most aren’t. And not all Republicans are asshats although I’m beginning to think most are. But every Conservative Christian Republican I have met has very definitely been a racist, hypocritical asshat. Every. Single. One. By definition.
By definition a conservative is a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes. The problem with that is traditionally we have created a country that values some and discriminates against others. America has a real problem with racism and other-ism and it’s not going to be solved by clinging to traditional values.
By definition a Christian is a person who has received Christian baptism and is a believer in Christianity. Christianity is the religion based on the person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Interestingly enough Jesus was born into a family of refugees fleeing violence in their homeland. You know, they were… well… they were immigrants and not the fair-skinned ones from Europe.
By definition a Republican is a person who is a member or supporter of the Republican Party. The Republican Party has chosen Donald Trump to be its leader. Most Republicans are conservative but it’s not necessarily a requirement. Donald Trump is a racist but he is not a conservative. He is also not a Christian. He is, however, an asshat.
In case you are missing my point, let me spell it out for you.
From Tommy Christopher:
Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m no expert on the mind of the average voter, or even the average Democratic voter, but my first two reactions to this interaction were “Jesus, Biden is going to get killed for this!”, followed immediately by “Eff that guy!”
The more I saw it, the more I loved it, because this guy wasn’t just some voter with an honest disagreement with Biden, he was a supporter of another campaign (Elizabeth Warren’s) who got up and mocked the former VP’s age, then lied about him. As Biden would say later, he just needed to “shut this down.”
The scene also reminded me, almost immediately, of former President Barack Obama’s run-in with another midwestern jackass named Joe the Plumber, whose name was not Joe (it was Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) and who was not a plumber (he was a contractor).
Obama met up with Joe while on the campaign trail as a candidate in 008, and spent a good five minutes humoring the guy as he just made stuff up about how an Obama tax proposal would hurt his imaginary business.
For his trouble, Obama managed to create a right-wing superstar, and was attacked every time he or his campaign tried to refute the dumb stuff Joe the Plumber would go around saying. I don’t think there’s an Obama supporter alive who doesn’t watch that video and headdesk themselves comatose watching Obama be so nice to the guy.
I probably would have out-Bidened Biden in that spot, and told him “Why don’t you go vote for McCain, then come crying to me when you can’t afford health care, I’ll still be here.”
But there is a conventional media wisdom that any slight of any voter ever is necessarily a bad and damaging thing for a candidate, best exemplified by the media freakout when Hillary Clinton called racists “deplorable,” and was dead accurate in assessing their numbers.
There are some indications that that wisdom may be somewhat obsolete in a post-Trump world.
