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Welfare-police state

• 03.18.08
  Hugo Chavez’s worst nightmare
  Welfare-police state (0)

  As a cost-cutting measure, we went without the Wall Street Journal for a few years. What I missed most during that time was Mary Anastasia O'Grady's column about the Americas. She writes about things that I don't know where to find elsewhere. I liked Monday's column about Hugo Chávez's worst nightmare. It's about a student leader, Yon Goicoechea: Mr. Goicoechea is the retiring secretary general of the university students' movement in Venezuela. Under his leadership, hundreds of thousands of young people have come together to confront the strongman's unchecked power. It is the first time in ...
  
  
• 03.09.08
  UK’s Czarist Justice
  Health care reform, Russia, Welfare-police state (0)

  I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's "Gulag : A history" (2003). In the introduction is a section about pre-Soviet times, which tells about an earlier version of Soviet justice. The practice of exiling people who simply didn't fit in continued throughout the nineteenth century. In his book, Siberia and the Exile System, George Kennan--uncle of the American statesman--described the system of "administrative process" that he observed in Russia in 1891: The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime...but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is 'prejudicial to public order' or ...
  
  
• 02.06.08
  A package to stimulate the growth of government
  Limits on government power, Tax policy, Welfare-police state (0)

  The WSJ editorializes on the "stimulus". President Bush and Congress are marching arm in arm to pass their economic "stimulus," but it's clear that at least one group of observers isn't impressed: investors. They blew right through all the Beltway happy talk yesterday, selling off the major stock indexes by some 3% or so on an ugly day. I suppose an alternative possibility is that investors are spooked by the prospect of a Clinton, Obama, or McCain becoming president and are bailing out while they can still cut their losses. But more likely they're spooked by the results of bipartisanship. I'm guessing the reason ...
  
  
• 12.07.07
  SCHIP causes environmental degradation
  Environment, Welfare-police state (0)

  This photo belongs in my Spokesrider blog, but it belongs here, too. It was taken at the end of the most unusual segment of a 3-day Labor Day weekend bike tour back in 1998. There is a connection to that article that Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu wrote about the "Environmental impacts of divorce." (I'll get around to explaining the bike tour part over at The Spokesrider.) I'm going to get started here WITHOUT explaining just yet how that photo fits. In their conclusions, Yu and Liu explain that their paper is about more ...
  
  
• 09.28.07
  SCHIP destroys families
  Health care reform, Welfare-police state (0)

  This photo is one of my father's 35mm slides from 1959. It was deteriorating badly, but I did what I could with it, along with a bunch of others I did for my parents' 60th wedding anniversary this summer. So what does it have to do with George Bush and SCHIP? Well, now that the Senate has passed the expansion of SCHIP, the script calls for George Bush to let some of his followers go out on a limb and support his threatened veto, then cut them down and stab them in the back by signing it anyway. ...
  
  
• 09.27.07
  School buses, again
  School decentralization, Welfare-police state (0)

  Buckle up on buses?  The Kalamazoo Gazette asks whether Michigan should require seat belts on school buses. A better question would be why we have such abominations as school buses in the first place?  Someday people are going to look back like we now do on child labor in factories, asking what kind of brutish people those were who could make their own children waste hundreds of hours of their childhoods on those things. I wish I had back all the time I spent on school buses during my high school days.  (For most of my elementary school, I usually walked to ...
  
  
• 09.24.07
  Elián González and Rudolf Nureyev
  Welfare-police state (0)

  One of the most despicable acts of the Clinton administration was the way it turned an innocent young boy over to the murderous dictator Fidel Castro.   A lot of people pretended to uphold parental discretion in this matter, saying it should be up to the father where the kid should go.    Of course, this is probably the only time in their lives that these people ever favored parental custody.  When it comes to abortion, or sex education, school choice, or health care -- they are usually in favor of the government's prerogative over parental control. There were also a few gullible ...
  
  
• 09.22.07
  One-handed fight against terrorism
  Checks and balances, Welfare-police state (0)

  From The Economist: To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism. Exactly so.  But we've spent many decades getting used to the idea that there really are no limits on what government can do.    The General Welfare clause tells us that anything goes, they say, no matter that the Constitution says no.   Interstate Commerce is defined to include much more than interstate commerce.   So how are we going to all of a sudden ask our government accept the ...
  
  
• 09.18.07
  At this point
  Welfare-police state (0)

  Is this supposed to be reassuring? AP Interview: Clinton on health care WASHINGTON - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system. "At this point, we don't have anything punitive that we have proposed," the presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "At this point"? That sounds ominous. If she wanted to be reassuring, she'd explain how she'd institute safeguards that would keep such punitive measures from ...
  
  
• 09.14.07
  Telling doctors how to practice medicine
  Brave New World, Health care reform, Welfare-police state (0)

  There's nothing like the opportunity to do some death and dismemberment to bring out all sorts of libertarian-sounding talk from people who ordinarily would be quite the opposite.   We got a lot of this during the embryonic stem cell debates. Here's a different instance from Thursday's WSJ, in an article titled, "New limits debated for organ donation: Transplant group proposes barring donors who have certain health problems; balancing risk vs. need." These two paragraphs are a decent summary of the conflict: The debate reflects a tension between the need for organ donors and concerns that doctors may be lowering standards for living ...
  
  

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