Private and Public Character and the Endurance of the Republic

By David Limbaugh

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The sexting scandal of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman and current New York mayoral candidate, puts into focus the importance of character to public service.

Weiner's texts, tweets and photos show not just a tawdry person but a risk-taking, deceitful individual who continued his serial texting and lied about it even as he prepared to run again for office.

His wife, Huma Abedin, is standing by her man and expects the public to defer to her judgment as to his fitness for office.

It is Abedin's personal business as to whether she will forgive and support Weiner, but it is presumptuous and wrongheaded for her or Weiner's supporters to lecture voters about how they should exercise their prerogative in assessing his suitability.

This bizarre notion that we should separate our public officials' private behavior from their public lives gained alarming credibility during the Clinton years, when the president's enablers adamantly insisted that all of his improper behavior was private and of no concern to the public.

"It's a private matter involving sex," they chanted, attempting to immunize even Clinton's felonious perjury from investigation because the underlying facts about which he testified and lied "concerned a private matter about sex."

They used the same mantra to paint as private, irrelevant and innocuous his episodes of oral sex in the Oval Office with a young intern -- a textbook example of sexual harassment because of the power disparities between those involved.

In this postmodern age, many -- especially secular liberals and partisan Democrats -- are all too eager to demand that private and public character be separated. All that should matter is whether a public official's policies, especially economic policies, are successful.

Common sense, experience and fundamental ethics tell us it's folly to believe we can separate a politician's private character from his public performance -- that the success of an official's policies is all that should matter.

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias observed: "We know that the premise of privatization is flawed because who we are in public is determined by what we have learned and cherished in private. ... One cannot help but wonder what would have happened to the United States if a man of Lincoln's character had not been president at her most painful time of internal strife as brother fought against brother. ... It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? One of the most dangerous and terrifying trends in America today is the disregard for character as a central necessity in a leader's credentials. The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil."

Indeed, the Framers understood the vital importance of our leaders' virtue and character to the success of the Constitution and the very endurance of the republic. John Adams famously said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Author Joseph Ellis, in his book "Founding Brothers," makes the same point poignantly in discussing Alexander Hamilton's relationship with Aaron Burr: "The problem ... was that the putative barrier between personal and political criticism, or private and public behavior, kept getting overwhelmed by real choices. Personal character was essential in order to resist public temptations." And: "Character mattered because the fate of the American experiment with republican government still required virtuous leaders to survive. Eventually, the United States might develop into a nation of laws and established institutions capable of surviving corrupt or incompetent public officials. But it was not there yet. It still required honorable and virtuous leaders to endure."

Ellis' observations are profound, except that he seems to fail to understand what the Framers grasped: that no matter how brilliant the Constitution, no matter how developed we become as "a nation of laws and established institutions," we could not permanently survive a ruling class that is bereft of respect for its founding principles and the rule of law or is of consistently dubious character.

The private behavior of our public officials matters because it is a reflection of their character, and their character will strongly influence their public actions. And their obedience to the Constitution and rule of law matters; indeed, it is essential for the endurance of the republic.

Anthony Weiner aside, when we have a president of the United States who daily demonstrates his disrespect for our founding principles and routinely flouts the rule of law, it is devastating to our liberties.

When Barack Obama acts unilaterally outside the scope of his constitutional authority to issue executive orders to implement provisions of the DREAM Act or environmental rules over Congress' objection or to delay implementation of Obamacare and then scoffs dismissively when asked whether he consulted lawyers on his authority to do so, he is out of control.

If we care about the republic, we have to care about the character of its public officials.

Do not get lost in the sordid aspects of the Weiner affair and allow them to obscure your focus on the larger issues of character and respect threatening our republic today.

The LA Times Goes Full Crazy; Gives Five Reasons Not To Move To Texas

By Tony Katz

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

So there I was, texting with fellow columnist and Bon Vivant Kurt Schlichter (who, at the time, was referring to himself, in the third person, as K-Dawg. True story.) We were discussing the subject of my next column when an LA Times story appeared on my Facebook wall. "Five reasons to stay away from Texas right now." Excuse me, K-Dawg. I found my subject.

It wasn't a list of reasons not to move to Texas. Rather, it's like the LA Times copy editor and writer Paul Whitefield wanted desperately to do a hit piece on the Lone Star state, but reserved the right to change his mind, especially if he gets that manuscript sold! Fingers crossed, Paul!

The article is embarrassing; as if the LA Times just saw Buzzfeed for the first time and proclaimed, "Quick! Somebody make a .gif before anyone else realizes this stuff is out there!" (Unfortunately, there is no one at the LA Times who can make a .gif, nor who knows what a .gif is.)

The first reason is that Texas still doesn't allow abortion on demand, notwithstanding Democrat Wendy Davis' antics. Davis, you may recall, is a liberal state Senator who for 13 hours filibustered a bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks and encouraged abortion advocates to bring jars of feces and urine to the statehouse. The bill passed a few weeks later and Governor Perry signed it into law. Davis is now a quasi-celebrity looking to make a run at Governor herself.

If she wins the governorship, then the article is dead on. Stay in California, or Illinois, or whichever pro-abortion, anti-business state you live in. But she won't, so don't let a smack down of pro-abortion forces keep you from moving.

The second reason is Governor Rick Perry himself - the three-term governor and former (current?) presidential candidate. The line the article uses:

Is Rick Perry the worst governor in America? Is this a trick question?

Fastest growth in the nation, far lower-than-average unemployment, elected three times and shot a coyote while out for a jog! Compare that to Governor Moonbeam (aka Jerry Brown) He wants a high speed rail to nowhere, unemployment is at 9%, and California has lost 3.4 million residents since 1990. Texas, however, has 8 of the 15 fastest growing cities in America!

You want a trick question? Try this - Is there any sexual deviant that Democrats won't run for public office?

Reason three in the LA Times list of whining and nonsense is executions. Yes, Texas has and utilizes the death penalty. Yes, honest people can have a conversation about its efficacy. But, you know who else has the death penalty? CALIFORNIA! In 2012, voters refused to end it. They voted for Obama, AND to keep the death penalty!! Now that's sick!

The list ends with nonsense, and joy in human suffering. Fourth on their list is weather. Weather, by the way, is the only thing that keeps people in California (specifically Southern California) and suffering through the ignorance of high taxation and state-sponsored citizen hate. Fifth on the list is "Things that go boom," a nauseating reference to an explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed 14.

The author doesn't want you to move to Texas because government oversight of such a plant is horrible (even though it's not the reason for the explosion.) For "proof" of the oversight issue, he points to another explosion that took place in 1947. That's 66 years ago.

The LA Times (and Paul Whitefield) wants more abortions, and less financial freedom. The real reason Whitefield doesn't want you to go to Texas is that there isn't enough government, which is why people go there in the first place.

The Tragedy of Isolation

By Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

In the 20th century, Western intellectuals' two most dominant explanations of disparities in economic, educational and other achievements were innate racial differences in ability (in the early decades) and racial discrimination (in the later decades).

In neither era were the intelligentsia receptive to other explanations. In each era, they were convinced that they had the answer -- and dismissed and disparaged those who offered other answers.

Differences in mental test scores among different racial and ethnic groups were taken as proof of genetic differences in innate mental ability during the Progressive era in the early 20th century. Progressives regarded the fact that the average IQ test score among whites was higher than the average among blacks as conclusive proof of genetic determinism.

A closer look at mental test data, however, shows that there were not only individual blacks with higher IQs than most whites, but also whole categories of whites who scored at or below the mental test scores of blacks.

Among American soldiers given mental tests during the First World War, for example, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Among other groups of whites, those with average mental test scores no higher than the average mental test scores among blacks included those in various isolated mountain communities in the United States, those living in the Hebrides Islands off Scotland and those in isolated canal boat communities in Britain.

Looking at achievements in general, people living in geographically isolated environments around the world have long lagged behind the progress of people with a wider cultural universe, regardless of the race of the people in these isolated places. When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level.

Many mountain communities around the world have also been isolated, especially during the centuries before modern transportation and communications.

These mountain communities were often not only isolated from the outside world but also from each other, even when they were not very far apart as the crow flies, but were separated by rugged mountain terrain.

As distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel put it, "Mountain life persistently lagged behind the plain." A pattern of poverty and backwardness could be found from the Appalachian Mountains in the United States to the Rif Mountains of Morocco, the Pindus Mountains of Greece and the mountains and uplands of Ceylon, Taiwan, Albania and Scotland.

Cultural isolation due to geographic factors afflicts not only peoples isolated in mountains or on islands far from the nearest mainland, but also peoples isolated by deserts or in places isolated by a lack of navigable waterways -- or even by a lack of animal transport, as was the situation in the Western Hemisphere when Europeans arrived and brought horses that were unknown to the indigenous peoples.

Cultural isolation can also be due to government decisions, as when the governments of 15th century China and 17th century Japan deliberately isolated their peoples from the outside world. At that time, China was the leading nation in the world. But it lost that lead during centuries of isolation.

Sometimes isolation is due to a culture that resists learning from other cultures. The Arab Middle East was once more advanced than Europe but, while Europe learned much from the Middle East, the Arab Middle East has not translated as many books from other languages into Arabic in a thousand years as Spain alone translates into Spanish annually.

Against this background, racial and ethnic leaders around the world who promote a separate cultural "identity" are inflicting a handicap on their own people. Isolation has held back many peoples in many lands, for centuries. But such social and cultural isolation serves the interests of today's ethnic leaders.

They have every incentive to promote a breast-beating isolation. It is a sweet-tasting poison.

Government, Not Globalization, Destroyed Detroit

By Michael Tanner

Monday, July 29, 2013

Free markets and limited government are to blame for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. That is the new meme to explain Detroit’s plight.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm blames “free trade” for the decline of Detroit’s auto industry and thus the city itself.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman suggests that “for the most part the city was just an innocent victim of market forces.”

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry claims that “this is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub,” referring to conservative Grover Norquist’s famous nostrum about the ideal political system.

Another MSNBC contributor, Michael Eric Dyson, suggests that “racial animus” was the real culprit.

Detroit has indeed had its share of racial problems. A long history of discrimination exploded in riots in 1967, followed by white flight to the suburbs. And as an almost-single-industry town, Detroit was hit hard by the decline of General Motors Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC.

Yet other cities, such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland, that have struggled with the same challenges have managed to bounce back or at least stay afloat. And auto manufacturing continues to thrive in states such as Alabama and Tennessee.

As for “small government” being to blame, one has to go back 52 years to find Republicans in control of Detroit’s government. Even then, one would not mistake Louis Miriani, the city’s last Republican mayor, for Norquist.

No, one has to look elsewhere for the reasons Detroit hasn’t been able to recover from its troubles.

Unfunded Obligations

The most obvious candidate is the city’s vast unfunded pension programs, which have been running deficits for years. Fully 99.6 percent of the city’s retiree health-care liabilities are unfunded, and the program generally pays 80 percent to 100 percent of retirees’ medical costs. From 2007 to 2012, the city’s two biggest pension programs paid out $3.3 billion more in benefits than they took in through contributions or investment income. Unfunded obligations account for $9.2 billion of Detroit’s $18 billion debt: $3.5 billion comes from the pension part and $5.7 billion comes from the retiree health-care liability.

The individual pensions for public employees are fairly modest, averaging some $18,000 a year, but they are spread over a huge past and present workforce. Detroit’s political establishment has long been based on patronage. Although the public workforce has shrunk in recent years, almost 1 in 15 residents still works for the city. Salaries and benefits for current employees consume 36 percent of the city’s revenue. Legacy obligations, which include pension contributions and benefit payments, take an additional 39 percent of revenue. That leaves little to invest in the failing infrastructure.

Pensions are hardly Detroit’s only hurdle. The city throws plenty of money at its schools, which are beholden to the powerful Detroit Federation of Teachers, spending more than $14,000 a student annually. Yet little value is received in return: In 2009, Detroit public-school students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math-proficiency test. More than a third of students fail to graduate.

In many ways, Detroit is a model of tax-and-spend liberalism. The city’s per-capita tax burden is the highest in Michigan. Detroit has the country’s highest property taxes on homes, the top commercial property tax and the second-highest industrial property tax.

The city’s income tax — 2.4 percent for residents, 1.2 percent for nonresidents and 2 percent for businesses — is the highest in Michigan. The income tax burden on residents is significantly higher than that for those who live in the surrounding area, which helps drive more affluent and successful residents out of the city. And Detroit is the only city in Michigan that has an excise tax on utility users.

Crushing Business

Besides the anti-business taxes, there are the anti-business regulations. The city imposes a “living wage” of $11.03 an hour ($13.78 an hour if other benefits aren’t provided) for public employees, as well as on businesses that contract with the city. This year, Detroit started a campaign against businesses that don’t meet the city’s voluminous licensing requirements, promising to shut some 1,500 “illegal” ventures such as tire shops and secondhand appliance stores operating out of abandoned warehouses. This sector makes up almost a 10th of businesses operating in the city and serves almost 70 percent of residents. The official policy is to crush these operations.

A few years ago, the nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research rated Detroit as the most liberal city in America. The city’s own choices, not free markets and limited government, are really responsible for Detroit’s failure.

Restore The Spirit of Capitalism

By Star Parker

Monday, July 29, 2013

Barack Obama went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, this past week to re-articulate his vision for the American economy and to reassure the American people that, yes, he knows what he is doing.

The President’s prodigious political skills are always on display, even in the most challenging circumstances.

He can take dismal reality and spin a positive and optimistic picture that will inspire his supporters.

And no matter how much the facts may contradict the President's claims, his vision never changes, and he never seems to doubt that he is right.

The President reminded the audience that he first spoke there eight years ago as a new senator.

He noted the changes that have taken place. He’s now president. He now has gray hair.

But what has not changed is the inside of the man. His views have not budged an inch from those of the young senator of eight years earlier.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the current economic recovery “is one of the weakest on record, averaging 2 percent. Growth in the fourth quarter of 2012 was .4 percent. It rose to a still anemic 1.8 percent in the first quarter, but most economists are predicting even slower growth in the second quarter.”

Yet the president has no doubt that his policies are right. He ticks off the litany of big government programs that allegedly saved us from economic depression. And, with a slight nod that economic reality is not as rosy as he paints it, he concedes, “We’re not there yet.”

Perhaps it’s again worth recalling the $831 billion stimulus package in 2009 that supposedly would keep unemployment below 8 percent. As unemployment galloped past 10 percent, never was there a hint of doubt from the President that his policies were right.

We’re just “not there yet.”

Now the President tells us we have to keep big, activist government going in order to save America’s languishing middle class.

But the facts are that the middle class has fared poorly under big government.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, median household income today -- $51,761 -- remains way below where it was before the recession started -- $56,289 -- and where it was when the recession began -- $54, 218.

But perhaps most notable in the President’s remarks is what he did not say.

A magnificent economic miracle has occurred during this presidency. But the president did not find it worth mentioning because it has nothing to do with government.

Breakthroughs in technology have produced a boom in American energy production. American oil production is up 37 percent over the last two years, reversing 20 years of decline.

As of last March, the United States has become the largest oil producer in the world. Oil imports have dropped to 36 percent of our total oil consumption, down from 60 percent in 2006 and the lowest level since 1987.

No government planner could have ever dreamed of this type of miracle. It was not many years ago we were hearing about the world running out of oil.

According to Mr. Obama we are really dealing with different visions of how the world works. And he’s right.

One is driven by government planning. The other is driven by freedom and private ownership.

Our president seems to be hardwired to the big government view. And his portrayal of capitalism is harsh.

But as the new American oil boom attests, it is freedom and capitalism that releases the human spirit, taps human creativity, and produces prosperity that could never come from any government planner.

Few things are harsher than a stalled economy. People wanting to work and can’t.

Even Barack Obama’s charisma is failing to mask the fact that, if America is to recover, we need to restore the spirit of capitalism.