Climate Change as an Excuse to Turn Government Against the People

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Kevin Mooney has picked up, for The Daily Signal, the story about an open-records-related lawsuit against Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin.  In brief, Kilmartin’s office has signed an agreement to work with other attorneys general and environmental activists to target companies and organizations on the other side of public debate about climate change and related public policy, with a further agreement to keep the larger agreement and correspondence secret.  One problem with that:

If Kilmartin and the other attorneys general prevail in the deal to keep select details secret, the ordinary citizen will be the loser, Chris Horner, a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy, said.

“It will mean that they can create privilege for what are otherwise public records, even when shared with ideological activists and donors, so long as everyone who wants to keep their scheming secret agrees in advance,” Horner told The Daily Signal.

That’s not the only way for government officials to keep things secret.  I’ve been writing about the efforts of the Employee Retirement System of Rhode Island (ERSRI) and General Treasurer Seth Magaziner to withhold from me the total amount of pension promises to which the state is committed, efforts in which the attorney general’s office is now involved.  In that case, the state government is making the ludicrous claim that, because a private actuary has the data, might have to perform a simple calculation, and might charge some price to produce the results, getting it would implicitly be an “undue burden,” thus creating an exemption from the law.  That is, even if the costs would be small and the people requesting the information were willing to pay the fees, public agencies do not have to release public information as long as they use an outside company to process it.

With that massive loophole in mind, turn to an essay from May by Hans Von Spakovsky and Tiger Joyce.  As part of this very same effort of state attorneys general to go after political opponents in the name of climate change alarmism:

Some state attorneys general are hiring profit-seeking, private-sector personal-injury lawyers to do their legal dirty work. Moreover, any contingency fees collected by these lawyers through settlements arising from these cases could be used, in part, to fund the campaigns of allied politicians who embrace the “one, true belief” of man-made global warming.

Unfortunately, the Department of Attorney General does not appear to be included in Rhode Island’s transparency portal, so there’s no immediate way to dig into Kilmartin’s expenditures with private firms, but even if the state has not yet reached the point of paying hired bounty hunters to track down those lawless climate change deniers, we can certainly include this whole corrupt effort on the list of ways in which government at the state and national levels has left the road along which the people can safely feel as if they are legitimately governed.

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The Inequality Narrative

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Not to pick on Ted Nesi, because he’s only trying to promote his work using a click-bait political narrative, but I had to ask him what the insinuation was when he tweeted that “just 5 of RI’s 27 best-funded politicians are women.”  Do people who attempt to buy Rhode Island politicians put sexism before corruption?  Or do fewer women run for office?  Or are the specific women who are currently politicians in Rhode Island not as effective at or interested in fundraising?

Nevermind.  Let’s all just assume sexism.

The problem is that such statements are part of what turns straight reporting of the news into another brick in the wall of a political narrative serving one side — in this case, the glass-ceiling-breaking Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (who will enter office with a large percentage of the population thinking she’s the archetype of corruption and thinking more of the cliché to “break glass in case of emergency”).  The entire inequality narrative, as Thomas Sowell argues, ought to be retired before it does anymore divisive harm:

People like Hillary Clinton can simply grab a statistic about male–female income differences and run with it, since her purpose is not truth but votes. The real question, however, is whether, or to what extent, those income differences are due to employers paying women and men different wages for doing the very same jobs, for the very same amount of time.

We do not need to guess about such things. Many studies have been done over many years — and they repeatedly show that women and men who work the very same hours in the very same jobs at the very same levels of skill and experience do not have the pay gaps that people like Hillary Clinton loudly denounce.

As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.

For the foreseeable future, I’m afraid, “equality” for women will continue to mean that women must have all the same positive outcomes as men, no matter what decisions they make.  If that doesn’t sound like “equality” to you, clearly you need to be reeducated.

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The Clinton Pay-to-Play and RI’s Mandatory Vaccine

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Sarah Westwood sketches in some of the details of what many see as the pay-to-play scheme involving the overlapping activities of the Clinton Foundation and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (via Stephen Green):

The confusing structure can make tracing the precise destination of donations to the foundation a difficult task. However, donor records show major pharmaceutical firms — including Pfizer, Merck & Co., and Sanofi — have written generous checks to the Clinton Foundation. …

During Clinton’s first year at the agency, Merck lobbied the State Department to ease regulations restricting the distribution of its drugs “in certain Latin American markets,” according to lobbying disclosure forms from 2009. That placed the drug company’s international interests squarely on Clinton’s desk. …

As a senator, Clinton had reportedly written a letter urging the Department of Health and Human Services to approve Merck’s human papillomavirus vaccine in 2005.

By 2011, under her purview at the State Department, the U.S. government had teamed up with Merck to provide that same HPV vaccine to women in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative was set to cost $75 million.

Merck, of course, is the company that produces Gardasil, the vaccine for HPV (which cannot be transmitted in any ordinary school activity) that the state of Rhode Island has mandated for all girls and boys entering seventh grade in a public or private school and for which the state’s Dept. of Health is actively advertising with mailers and robocalls.

Like Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds, however, these connections and the strange enthusiasm of government officials for specific drugs that push the boundaries of their purview are not high on the list of mainstream journalists.  We all might chuckle that the federal government has apparently been pushing dental floss for over 30 years without any scientific basis (but much corporate enthusiasm, no doubt), but it isn’t enough simply to shrug and assume that this is how things work.  It shouldn’t be.

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Mark Zaccaria: Advice to Senator Whitehouse

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Mark Zaccaria suggests that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse should back away from his attacks on Constitutional rights and focus on making a positive difference in people’s lives.

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For Electoral Trust, Keep the Paper

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I’ll admit that in darker moments I wonder whether the General Assembly agreed to get rid of the Master Lever (which allows a voter to pick everybody in a party with one mark the ballot) — delaying implementation for one election — because leadership knew that digital electoral equipment would be coming online with its own advantages for insiders.

To be sure, the changes actually planned for the election in November aren’t as bad as they might be.  We’ll still be voting on paper, but the machine will transmit the data wirelessly rather than through dial-up.  (Dial what?)  On the other hand, people will now be able to register to vote online, and the state will be testing out an “e-poll book” system that will handle check-in through tablets and (presumably) the Internet, rather than using an actual book that voters have to sign.

The process is important here.  A cynic might wonder whether somebody in state government will be able to keep an eye on votes in real time (with the new ballot scanners) and also watch the list of who has voted across the state, enabling them to drop hints to political friends who needs to be prodded to the polls where.

In the long run, though, I’m still with Glenn Reynolds on the value of paper:

Voting systems rely on trust. Voters have to trust that their own vote is recorded and counted accurately; they also have to trust that the overall count is accurate, and that only eligible voters are allowed to vote. …

The problem is that electronic systems — much less the Internet-based systems that some people are talking about moving to — can’t possibly provide that degree of reliability. They’re too easy to hack, and alterations are too easy to conceal. If the powers-that-be can’t protect confidential emails, or government employees’ security information, then they can’t guarantee the sanctity of voting systems.

Yeah, folks in the news media and those really invested in the out come of elections (like me) are addicted to watching results in as near-real-time as possible, but we shouldn’t be the top priority on election day.  If it takes a whole day, week, or more to produce an election outcome around which everybody is absolutely confident that the process of voting (at least) was fair, accurate, and traceable, then we’ve got the time.

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For Equal Treatment of Political Activity

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The July 27 Providence Journal might as well be a deliberate example of the hypocrisy of progressives when it comes to advancing partisan ends.

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When Government Secretly Coordinate, That’s a Conspiracy

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There’s a certain irony, here.  Rhode Island’s far-left Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is leading the charge to criminalize research and expression of views that don’t fit his extreme ideological and political view and a gang of thuggish attorney generals have been coordinating legal attacks on fossil-fuel companies and conservative think tanks on the claim that they’re engaged in an anti-environmentalist conspiracy, and yet the attorneys general are hiding their coordination from the public.

A press release from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (for which I work) notes its participation in an effort to ensure a little bit of transparency into this actual conspiracy:

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (Center) announced that it assisted a national nonprofit organization in a lawsuit, filed today, demanding that the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General (OAG) release documents they have refused to make public. The legal complaint calls for the release of documents related to AG’s United for Clean Power, a group comprised of politically-motivated AGs from about a dozen states, including Rhode Island, who have secretly teamed up with anti-fossil fuel activists to investigate dozens of organizations that have exercised their free speech by challenging the global warming policy agenda. …

In a series of April emails obtained by E & E Legal, the RI OAG consented to sign-on to an “agreement” among the larger AG cabal that is colluding to investigate if RICO statutes may have been violated. However, the Rhode Island AG now refuses to make public the group’s ‘Secrecy Pact’ documents related to that taxpayer funded activity.

That is, the attorney general will not release the terms of his office’s agreement or even the text of the documents pledging to keep that agreement hidden.

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What’s Really In Your Best Interests? Aimee Gardiner On The No HPV Mandate Movement

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On this episode of “What’s Really In Your Best Interest?” I interview Aimee Gardiner, director of Rhode Islanders Against Mandated HPV Vaccinations, on the movement against the HPV Mandate in the Ocean State. Rhode Island parents deserve the freedom to make private family choices without government involvement. The mandate on the HPV vaccine for Rhode Island students is an important and symbolic violation of our rights.

Recently, the RI DOH undertook a marketing campaign directed at the children of our state. Do you think this is a proper use of taxpayer dollars? The government should include parents in the discussion when dealing with minors, not bypassing our families! This is a very disturbing trend. The #NOHPVmandateRI movement stands to reverse the HPV vaccine mandate in RI. Please watch the new videos of our interview now.

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Trees in Warren and Government from a Distance

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The man-made conflict between trees and federal disability law is a fine example of why most government should be done locally (to the extent it has to be done at all):

Town officials say they are facing a painful dilemma: They can’t make the sidewalks accessible to the handicapped and save the trees.

]Nearly 80 years after the Works Progress Administration installed the curbing and sidewalks during the Great Depression, the thick trunks and roots of the trees planted along the road are blocking and buckling the pedestrian way.

The situation came to a head recently when the town began reconstructing King Street, a quiet road one block east of Main Street and just south of the downtown. Once the town undertook substantial repairs to the road, it triggered federal requirements that the sidewalks comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to Public Works Director John Massed.

For a before-and-after picture, click the link above and watch the related video.  The camera shot at the 20-second marker shows the street with one side de-treed and the other not.

As communities, we do have a responsibility to accommodate those with the misfortune of being disabled, but dictating minute policies from Washington, D.C., is lunacy bordering on tyranny.  If the responsibility were local, neighbors could figure out solutions that work best for everybody involved, answering questions like, “What are the odds that a disabled person is going to go down this street so often that both sides have to be cleared of trees?”

We’ve reached the point of the absurd.  When the Tiverton Yacht Club reopened this year (after a fire and years of legal battles), members could not use the second floor.   Hefty barriers blocked the stairs, not because the upstairs was unfinished or otherwise unsafe, but because there had been a delay in installing the elevator required for people with disabilities.  A private club, using the property mainly for a children’s camp, a swimming pool, and the occasional social gathering, could not let members upstairs because some hypothetical disabled person wouldn’t be able to get up there for a couple of months.

Now apply this observation to the thousands and thousands of pages of laws and regulations passed at the national level that affect our lives in ways we can’t so obviously see.

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Is Climate Change Persecution Fading Already?

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With one of our U.S. Senators’, Mr. Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat, naturally), being a key figure in the fascist effort to pursue legal persecution of people who have a contrary opinion to him on the politically charged issue of global climate change, Rhode Islanders might be interested to hear that some of his allies are backing away from his level of aggression, as the Wall Street Journal notes (text here):

Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker recently withdrew his subpoena of Exxon Mobil. He was a leader among the 17 AGs charging that the oil giant defrauded shareholders by hiding the truth about global warming. That’s hard to prove when the company’s climate-change research was published in peer-reviewed journals.

Mr. Walker also targeted some 90 think tanks and other groups in an attempt to punish climate dissent. These groups and others, including these columns, pushed back on First Amendment grounds, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute counter-sued Mr. Walker and demanded sanctions. He pulled his subpoena against CEI last month.

The real shame, and the real warning sign, is that those AGs, and fellow travelers like Whitehouse, weren’t instantly lambasted by people across America’s political spectrum for even initiating such patently offensive-to-freedom steps .

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RI Foundation’s Sneak-Attack on Free-Speech

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Should Rhode Islanders silently accept the corrupt political climate that has failed so many of us? Or should we, as free citizens in our uniquely American democracy, be encouraged to freely speak-out and engage in a battle of ideas so as to help make our state a safer and more prosperous place to live, to raise a family, and to build a career?

It is the Center’s primary mission to stimulate such rigorous public debate about important policy issues. However, the most powerful and wealthy nonprofit organization in our state is asking you to shut up.

As part of its own 100th year celebration, the Rhode Island Foundation this week published and promoted a video, which, in essence, encourages people to remain silent and to accept that the political elite know best about what’s in your and my best interests.

In what initially seems to be a video for kids, it is shameful that the Foundation hides its adult message behind children. With the frequent backdrop of our State House, it is obvious that the video is intended to be political. Under the pretense of “be nice or be quiet”, the Foundation is clear in its message that is directed to all of us – that we should just “stop complaining”.

Stop complaining about Rhode Island’s 48th place ranking on the national Family Prosperity Index?
Stop complaining that so many of our neighbors cannot find or have given up looking for meaningful work?
Stop complaining about the political corruption that continues to embarrass our state?
Stop complaining about the lack of bold and decisive action to do anything significant about it?

I don’t think so.

It is also despicable that the Foundation forces these children to read text that has to be bleeped.

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“Tolerance” Means You Have to Do What They Want

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This is not the sort of thing the government does in a free society:

A California court ruled last week that ChristianMingle and it’s affiliate faith-based dating websites must allow LGBT singles to search and be matched with people of the same gender.

The ruling comes at the end of a 2.5 year legal battle after two gay men noticed in 2013 that new members to the popular dating site, which boasts over 15 million users, could only search for dates of the opposite sex.

In brief, this means that it is illegal for a company in California to set up a business that seeks explicitly to provide services to people with Christian values.  I almost made that a more-generic “particular values,” but it would be counterproductive to pretend that the progressive government in California has any intention of applying this principle equally.

When it comes to the government’s demands on Christians, the call of “tolerance” is not answered simply by letting other people live their lives as they see fit.  No, we have to facilitate and serve behaviors that we find immoral — now not only through government, but through our own private businesses, too.  This isn’t even a matter of our seeking to exclude a class of people; if we wish to provide services that we want but progressives’ favored classes do not, we must provide their closest comparable service, as well.

One cannot avoid the conclusion that all Christians should leave California unless they see themselves as missionaries in a hostile land.  More and more, of course, that describes the view we have to take within the United States as a whole, now that progressives have abandoned any pretense of valuing real diversity or true civil rights, which means we are unlike missionaries in that we’ll have no home base to which to return in a land that actively supports our beliefs.

The era of comfortable Christianity is ending, and we should not expect Christian charity and tolerance from people who have explicitly rejected our values.

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Arthur Christopher Schaper: Checking in with Congressional Sympathy from the West Coast

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Arthur Chrsitopher Schaper commiserates with Rhode Islanders as a California conservative represented by an anti-2nd Amendment sit-in progressive.

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On the Razor’s Edge Between Citizen and Subject

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I’m actually surprised, sometimes, how directly lessons from local politics apply even at the national level.

A few years ago, a friend of mine submitted a charter complaint, as allowed by Tiverton’s Home Rule Charter, against a school employee for disseminating political material in a school.  In contravention of the clear process for such complaints, the Town Clerk conducted an investigation, including being party to the discarding of evidence, and dismissed the complaint.

Now, I happen to like the Town Clerk, but thinking it vital that the process for complaints be clear, strictly followed, and universal in their application, I filed a complaint against her for this activity.  Ultimately, the Town Council let her off by finding that she didn’t “knowingly” violate the charter.  The ruling was ridiculous.  In general, “knowing” action means the person knows he or she took the action, not that he or she knows it was illegal, and the clerk didn’t accidentally conduct an investigation.  Making matters even clearer, section 1211(d)(2) provides for distinct additional penalties when a town employee knows his or her action is a violation.  There is simply no ambiguity, here.

But the council members liked the clerk, and most of them had a political interest in protecting the school employee and the political group whose material she promoted (Tiverton 1st).  So, they simply declared the law to be something different than what it clearly was for this one case.

Now, at the national level, despite what could accurately be described as “gross negligence”… a week after her husband met with the nation’s top law-enforcement agent in a clearly inappropriate, nearly clandestine meeting… the same day the President of the United States takes to the campaign trail with her, Hillary Clinton has dodged prosecution for sending classified information using a private email server because, in the words of FBI Director James Comey, the investigators did not find “some combination of clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct or indications of disloyalty to the United States or efforts to obstruct justice.”  She didn’t know, despite having been warned against the server, so that’s that.

As in Tiverton, the reality is that the people whom we have entrusted to enforce our laws simply don’t want to do it, in this case, so we’re stuck.  And that means the only thing keeping us as citizens, rather than subjects of a ruling oligarchy, is our behavior.  If we accept this new reality, we’re serfs.  On that count, I’m with Kurt Schlichter:

They don’t realize that by rejecting the rule of law, they have set us free. We are independent. We owe them nothing – not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. But with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we will still mutually pledge those who have earned our loyalty with their adherence to the rule of law, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

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Government Contracts to Infringe on Rights

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Here’s an interesting bill — H7736 — on the Freedom Index (having passed both chambers) that raises some interesting political questions.  Basically, it forbids state and local government agencies from contracting with any company that is engaged in a boycott, unless the contract is very small or the company is much cheaper than competing bids.

Inasmuch as boycotting is more a thing for progressives than conservatives, particularly corporate boycotting, my gut reaction isn’t entirely negative.  I mean, boycotting Israel or North Carolina for political reasons doesn’t tend to endear a company to me and, in fact, tends to encourage me to direct my business elsewhere.

Even if every corporate boycott were a creature of the Left, though, such legislation gets dangerously close to using government’s economic clout to infringe on the speech and association rights of the individuals who band together for corporate purposes.  As government expands into more and more activities, increasing its role in our society, it approaches the point at which being blocked from government contracts would be a killer in more and more industries.

According to the Family Prosperity Index, using a metric that the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity also uses for its competitiveness report card, Rhode Island ranks near the back of the pack when it comes to the private sector’s portion of the economy.  That means companies can be locked out of a disproportionately large part of our local economy if they don’t wrap themselves in these sorts of strings, just like the federal government’s increasing role in funding the states has given it power in direct contravention of our Constitution.

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IRS Scandal and Fragile Commitment to Rights

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Reading Eliana Johnson’s NRO article, “New Documents Suggest IRS’s Lerner Likely Broke the Law,” it occurs to me just how fragile our rights are.  Ten years ago, I would have thought this sort of thing would be a cause of universal outrage, across the political spectrum.  The American Left and news media haven’t proven to have as much integrity as I’d thought, back then:

It is likely the largest unauthorized disclosure of tax-return information in history: the transfer of some 1.25 million pages of confidential tax returns from the IRS to the Department of Justice in October of 2010. And it was almost certainly illegal.

The documents, which consisted chiefly of non-profit tax returns, were transferred to the DOJ’s criminal division from the IRS at the request of Lois Lerner, who wanted to get the information to the DOJ in advance of a meeting where she and several of the attorneys in the public integrity section of the department’s criminal division discussed their concerns about the increasing political activity of non-profit groups.

Speaking with people, in a social setting, who are likely to find their way to voting for Hillary Clinton, I’ve wondered if it’s all a function of long-term narrative propaganda and raw audacity.  That is to say that the Left has spent decades making themselves the heroes and their opposition the villains in every story, such that a sufficient number of people would be inclined to interpret real transgressions as well-meaning indiscretions or overzealous errors.

With that sense established, an incentive begins to form to be audacious in the lies.  Get people invested in the interpretation that Hillary Clinton and President Obama were working from faulty intelligence when they lied about the nature of the Benghazi attack and that Clinton’s private server was mainly used for sharing recipes with friends and the like.  Purposefully slip the admission of illegal activity from the IRS into an obscure Q&A session.

The initial benefit of the doubt given on the basis of decades of propaganda then gains the general sense that the culprits wouldn’t have gotten away with it for so long if it were really bad.  But the prerequisite is, again, that the American Left and its partisans in the media really don’t believe the things they claim to believe about rights.

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Getting Specific on Election Law and Carnevale

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Although Rep. John Carnevale’s case is an extreme one, his eligibility to register to vote in Providence hinges on his “intention,” and we shouldn’t give government agents and judges authority over that.

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The Rhode Island ACLU Works Against Civil Liberties

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My thought on allowing women to be full members of yacht clubs:  of course.  The reasonable reaction upon hearing that some private yacht club somewhere else does not do so:  that doesn’t make sense; I wonder what mix of personalities and traditions keeps that going.  The Rhode Island ACLU’s reaction: let’s use our access to activists’ donations and free lawyers (and the lack of consequences for legal bullying) to force the private club to conform to our worldview.

The organization’s reasoning makes it even worse:

In his statement, [RI ACLU lead bully Steven] Brown said, “The ACLU fully appreciates that private clubs have a general First Amendment right to associate without government interference – a right that we support. However, that right is not absolute. In this case, it is our understanding that the Club opens some of its facilities to non-members, serves as an important networking opportunity for business people in the community, and has benefited from state and federal funds over the years.

“It also seems clear that the ban on women members is not because the Club seeks to express some sort of political view about the role of women, but is instead simply an archaic vestige from another era when women were treated as second-class citizens in a wide variety of settings…”

To progressives, Americans lose their rights the moment they leave carefully protected enclaves.  That’s why they can pretend to support rights that they really only support for people who agree with them.  Ever let anybody who’s not in your club use its facilities?  You lose your right “to associate without government interference.”  Derive some social benefit from your club?  You lose your rights.  Ever received any public funds for anything, even if those funds went to other groups that might have practices with which not every American agrees?  You got it: rights are gone.

And then as the perfect cherry on this ideological cow pie, the ACLU insinuates that it would be fine if the policy were an overt expression of an objectionable political view.  If it’s limited to being a less-objectionable expression of deference to tradition, to be changed gradually over time at a pace suiting its members and befitting a social club?  Ain’t got no rights.

By all means, speak against the policy, if you’re so inclined, but the ACLU repeatedly crosses the line into seeking to disenfranchise Americans and undermine our ability to accommodate each other as much as possible.  In other words, the organization proves time and again that its claim to support civil liberties is cover for imposing a narrow view on the country through lawfare.

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When the People Aren’t Represented

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This Peter Hitchens essay about the reordering of politics visible in the Brexit vote is worth reading for a variety of reasons.  The crux is that Great Britain’s politics (like those of the United States) have developed such that the elites of the two major parties have more in common with each other than with sizable portions of their bases, which therefore have more in common with each other than with their own elites.  One particularly notable part comes toward the end:

Thursday’s vote shows that the House of Commons is hopelessly unrepresentative. The concerns and hopes of those who voted to leave the EU – 51.9 per cent of the highest poll since 1992 – are reliably supported by fewer than a quarter of MPs, if that. Ludicrously, neither of the big parties agrees with a proven majority of the electorate – and neither shows any sign of changing its policies as a result.

Hitchens rightly calls this a scandal.  How can a majority not be represented?  I can’t find it just now, but not long ago, I noted the strong traditionalist sentiment in a foreign country (Great Britain again, I think) when it came to marriage.  It wasn’t quite a majority, but it struck me that some sizable percentage of the electorate (around one-third or more, as I recall) was entirely without representation in the government.  That can’t go on long, particularly in societies that still have some vestige of their independent past.

It’s very easy to see how the transgender-bathroom issue is a pre-planned next step in the Left’s attack on our culture, now that the Supreme Court has amended the U.S. Constitution to impose same-sex marriage on the country, but Brexit is probably a related phenomenon, as well.  Whatever the issue, what’s stunning is that Western elites are simply refusing to adjust, as if they’re sick of having to bide their time, as if their attitude is, “We run the country, damn it, not you backwards morons.”

The American Interest makes much the same point, as quoted on Instapundit:

Failure to control immigration? Amnesty? Social benefits for non-citizens when citizens are suffering? Nation-building wars abroad instead of nation-building at home? Massive debt? Failures to confront terrorism effectively? Businesses moving jobs overseas? Recession in the countryside while the capital prospers? Rapid changes in gender politics? Bizarre contortions of politically correct speech, which shout down what many see as common sense? It has left many in the electorate angry and disenfranchised. And when those in the public who feel this way have objected or resisted, elites have doubled-down, rather than listen and adjust.

As Glenn Reynolds appends, “They see us as, at best, livestock to be managed,” which gets right back to my observation, locally, that people in government and the media seem to believe it’s their job to force us to give government more money than we want to give (see here and here for elaboration).  Brexit was a signal that the battle isn’t over.

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A Different (Old) Approach to Living Wages

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Reconciling libertarian and Catholic views of work and labor might bring us to a better perspective on wages and employment.

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Brexit for All of Us

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Today, as Roger Kimball writes, “perhaps for the last time in a generation, the British voters have a choice” about how they will be governed.  I have not followed the matter with sufficient attention to have anything more than hope about the outcome, and I hope our fellow Anglospherians will put the brakes on progressive internationalism before it falls to hard reality to stop it.

Last week, I noted a similarity of the “government town” concept I’ve described multiple times in this space on either side of the Atlantic.  Kimball brings forward another disconcerting echo:

A couple of years ago when an earlier chapter in this saga was unfolding, I was chatting with an Italian friend, a former Italian senator, who employed the word to describe the ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian premiership in 2012. “Super Mario” was technically appointed by the Italian president; in reality, he was foisted upon Italy by the European Union. As it happens, that same day Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Greece’s prime minister.

How did that happen? Well might you ask. That day, we received a plaintive email from a journalist friend in London:

Today, two modern European democracies installed prime ministers who had been elected by nobody. This is what we have come to. It is roughly the equivalent of the federal government stepping in to appoint an unelected governor of California when the state went broke — which is beyond inconceivable. Pray for us.

I’m not sure whether Kimball’s friend was serious or sarcastic with that “beyond inconceivable,” but it clearly is an accurate description.  We’ve seen this in Rhode Island, for example, with our quick resort to municipal dictators when communities began driving themselves off the financial road.

As states find it increasingly difficult to continue the gambit of putting people (often imported) on government-service rolls and under generous government contracts in order to demand that others pay for the government’s activities, they’ll turn to the federal government to extract more wealth from areas of the country that are still doing well.  In some state, somewhere, the strategy will not work, whether because of reckless pension promises or a demographic balance that tips the scales.  As Rhode Island municipalities have done, the ruling classes of that state will gladly hand over their people’s sovereignty for a federal bailout.

Maybe we’ll call that person a “receiver” rather than a “governor,” but it will amount to the same thing.

Human beings have always wanted the power to tell others what to do (especially when the command is to give them money and power), and a certain faction of humanity is relentlessly consolidating into a movement meant to cover the entire planet.  The sooner we shatter the movement, the less painful it will be.

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Curious How “Revitalization” Requires “Longevity” for Officials

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One thing conspicuously missing from Kate Bramson’s article today, titled, “GrowSmartRI summit: Speakers share revitalization success stories,” is any statistical evidence that the stories are, indeed, about successes.  Oh, sure, when government agents and activists push hard enough, they manage to fund projects and (eventually) bring them to completion, but when most people hear the phrase “revitalization success stories,” they are likely to expect that the areas were revitalized.  The fact that three “relatively new” restaurants open their doors each night in Attleboro doesn’t tell us much.

This lack of substantial evidence relates to another giant omission in the article — namely, further explanation of this disturbing opening:

Patterns emerged Tuesday as government leaders from three smaller, northeastern cities shared success stories about their revitalization efforts.

Longevity — of elected leaders and employees working for them — was one of several themes that arose before an audience of about 200 business and civic leaders at a summit hosted by the nonprofit GrowSmartRI.

So, “revitalization” requires that voters elect the same officials repeatedly and that the bureaucrats keep their jobs, too?  Well, how convenient.

It’s also obvious.  The entire motivating philosophy of GrowSmartRI, the Brookings Institution, the RI Foundation, the Raimondo administration, and the broader society of progressive elites is that one of government’s central functions (probably the central function) is to plan out the future and enforce that plan so the grimy masses aren’t really free to shape their communities.

When your organizational motivation is to tell other people what to do and how to live, you can’t really abide such disruptive things as individual freedom or the inevitable change inherent in representative democracy.  The goal is to take the permanence that we used to apply very narrowly in a Constitution and Bill of Rights and apply it expansively to minute details of how all we should live.

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The Speech About Which the Governor Cares

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All things considered, I’d probably have to side with Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo in concluding that the “revenge porn” legislation that she just vetoed is too broad and ought to be much more explicit in protecting free speech.  That said, this line from her veto message contributes to my cynicism:

“The breadth and lack of clarity may have a chilling effect on free speech,” she wrote.

The reason I smirk at that is that other legislation that would most certainly have a chilling effect on free speech has passed both chambers of the General Assembly, and I suspect the governor won’t find it quite so objectionable.  Specifically, I’m referring to H7147, which would subject any individual, or any kind of organization at all, who spends more than $100 advocating on local ballot questions to campaign regulations, including reporting requirements.  (The legislation is championed by Tiverton Democrat John “Jay” Edwards and is obviously aimed at my friends in town.)

There’s no question but that adding such burdens to political activity has a “chilling effect,” and there’s no question that electoral speech ought to be the most sacrosanct when it comes to the law.  Yet, under the current progressive understanding of free speech, it seems publishing naked pictures of people without telling them is a more fundamental right than expressing opinions on local issues without telling your vicious rumor-mongering opposition who your friends are.

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Residence and Eligibility to Vote and Hold Office

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A variety of laws are likely to be implicated when an elected official endeavors to make it appear that he or she lives somewhere that he or she does not live, as appears to have been the case with Democrat Representative John Carnevale (Providence, Johnston), according to a WPRI report.  However, having looked into the law surrounding a person’s status as an elector pretty closely in the context of a local Tiverton controversy, I thought I’d chime in on that particular, narrow matter.

The state constitution requires that elected officials be “qualified elector[s]” for their positions (basically, that they would be eligible to vote for somebody to fill that office), and “elector” isn’t quite the same thing as “resident.”  Indeed, the status of one’s residence can have many different standards depending on whether we’re talking about the right to vote, driver’s licenses, federal taxes, and so on.

My conclusion was that, when it comes to being an elector in a particular town, once one has established an address for the purposes of voting, that address remains the person’s “domicile” until he or she registers to vote elsewhere or affirmatively states that it is not his or her “domicile.”  General Assembly districts are not drawn according to city and town lines, but that does not appear to alter the underlying law.

Although it seems obvious that an elected official should actually live in the area that he or she represents, in a dynamic society, we have good reason to allow some flexibility.  Suppose Representative Q has some reason to sleep more often than not at some location other than his primary residence for a time.  As this state of affairs continues, he chooses to rent his home out for the income, but still considers it his home and intends to return there.

Our right to vote should not be like a game of Twister in which political opponents need only catch the slip of a finger to disenfranchise us.  The standard is:  “If you would choose one place as your home, to shape government there, where is it?”

To be sure, this principle allows for what most of us would consider to be corrupt deception, but I’m describing eligibility.  It would be very reasonable for voters to choose electors for office who actually live in their districts.  Trying to offload that power and responsibility to some underlying law or regulation simply papers over the problem.

In my view, Rep. Carnevale’s details are mostly a sideshow to the most important question:  How did Rhode Island’s political system not produce anybody able to run on the platform of actually living in the district?  For three out of his four elections, Carnevale hasn’t had an opponent in either the primary or the general election.

Something is severely broken, in Rhode Island, when nobody is interested in running, or maybe willing to run, against a guy who is pretending to live at a particular address. We need to figure out what that something is.

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14 Paragraphs to ISIS

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Really, what can one say about politicians who rush out of the gate to use a terrorist atrocity to advance their partisan political agenda?  Democrat Congressman David Cicilline and Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo do just that in an article by Ian Donnis, which gets around to mentioning the ISIS connection in the 14th paragraph.

Folks, it’s becoming an existential necessity for us to identify real enemies and real reasons for these events.  Anybody who doubts that should consider this statement from Raimondo:

The governor said she always attends the gay Pride parade and considers it more important to take part this week to let the LGBT community know “we’re with them, to let them know we’re not going to tolerate this. We’re going to stand together. We’re going to fight for their freedom and security.”

Oh?  And what does it mean not “to tolerate this”?  What exactly is the governor proposing to do to “fight for their freedom and security”?  Take guns away from the potential victims and from those among their countrymen and -women who literally would fight for their freedom?

Maybe “fighting” is more like a term of art for remembrance ribbons and rainbow flags at half mast.  More likely, judging by Donnis’s article and Raimondo’s statement on the flag lowering, the actual “fight” is against those among these politicians’ fellow Rhode Islanders and fellow Americans whom they declare to be “intolerant.”  It’s not exactly news that the Islamists who consider themselves at war with our nation hate homosexuals, and yet Cicilline doesn’t skip a beat in insisting that the attack is evidence that homosexuals do not have “full equality in this country.”

In the congressman’s view, is it ISIS that’s withholding that equality in the United States?  No.  It’s people with whom he disagrees on politics and culture.  We’re the target of his fight.

Let’s put our differences aside for one moment.  This was a terrorist attack on Americans.  In its circumstances, it arguably most resembles the recent attack on a rock concert in Paris (France being a nation with about one-third the number of guns per person as the United States).  As we take stock and decide how we should move forward, let’s also consider how we should respond to politicians who are so obviously angling to use this attack as a means of dividing us.

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The Agenda Behind the Dept. of Education’s Transgender “Guidance”

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“Guidance” from the state Dept. of Education claims to be voluntary suggestions for handling the rare and difficult situation of transgender students, but it’s really a mandatory reshaping of government schools’ role in shaping children.

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The Impossibility of Big Government You Can Trust

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The impossibility of holding government accountable illustrates a fatal flaw in the progressive approach to society.

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Designing Welfare Policy as If We’re Designing the World

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In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher goes through the exercise of designing a society from the ground up.  Nowadays, that very theme defines a genre of videogame, in which the gamer must make decisions about investments, exploration, and undertakings to help a society, business, or theme park grow.  Of course, such games are subject to the same boundary as real life (although much restrained, naturally): the limits imposed by the imagination of the designer.

In the world of public policy, writers sometimes fall into a strange trap, designing policies that accord with the artificial rules of their theoretical worlds, but that do not accord with the real world.  That is, they sound plausible within careful boundaries, but they fall apart once the various “if” clauses come into contact with the outside universe.

Charles Murray provides a good example, writing in support of a universal basic income (UBI) in the Wall Street Journal:

First, my big caveat: A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them. If the guaranteed income is an add-on to the existing system, it will be as destructive as its critics fear.

Well, there you go.  Upon reading that paragraph, we can put aside the discussion.  We can barely… sometimes… maybe get government bureaucracies to slow down the rate at which they increase the harm they do to our lives.  Any public policy that requires the elimination of bureaucracy for the good of the people is simply not going to happen.

Of course, UBI continues to strike me as having additional layers of unreality.  Because it would be a policy set by government, it would be subject to the incentives for politicians.  If the policy is small relative to the economy, then the incentive will be for politicians to continue growing it as a campaign pledge; by the time it gets big enough to build up constituencies for restraining it, the program would ipso facto already be having an effect on the economy.  A hidden cost, then, is that a UBI requires a centralized power sufficient to squash political incentives.

What our civilization really needs is an economy that creates a natural UBI based simply on the fact that the basics are sufficiently inexpensive to produce at prices that almost anybody can be sufficiently employed to afford, or that others will supply simply by the greater weight of their sense of moral obligation.  This economy doesn’t require big government programs.  It requires advancing technology, a baseline education (not saturated with fluff and false ideology), the proliferation of prosperity, and broad freedom to determine our own sets of values and experiment.

Any other approach is, ultimately, just a way to work around the artificial rule that we can’t expect to be able to trust in people’s goodness and good sense.

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Overtime Rules and Government by People Who Think They Know Better

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Kevin Williamson adds two excellent points to the federal government’s meddling in overtime rules.  Jobs can have benefits that aren’t tangible and for which rational (even very intelligent) people will trade increased money, and work can have motivation beyond filling out a standard workweek

I once tried to hire a very smart young woman graduating from a reasonably good college to work at a small newspaper I edited, where she’d been an intern. She turned me down to work for less money at a big book publisher in Manhattan, where the cost of living is about four times what it is in the Philadelphia suburbs. But her reasoning was solid: She didn’t want to work at small-town newspapers for the rest of her life — she wanted to work for a big-time publishing company, and if that meant being poor for a few years in her middle 20s, she’d rather be poor at 26 than regretful at 35.

This is, you’ll note, a behavior that takes roughly the same shape as saving and investing: forgoing present comforts for the hope of large, meaningful returns in the future. …

… does it occur to no one that an extra ten hours at ordinary pay might be very welcome indeed for a person in an hourly job who isn’t there because he grew up wanting to work in a warehouse outside of Lubbock, Texas, but because he is in desperate need of money? Or that development and advancement are things that happen in jobs that do not require college degrees, too? Or that there are people in this world who cannot distinguish themselves by being cleverer or more creative than the rest of their colleagues but who can distinguish themselves simply by outworking everyone else?

The problem is that we have a political/governing class that really and truly lack imagination and empathy (and that thinks it can sell handouts to people who aren’t inclined to work through the economics).  They want to — and feel they implicitly have the authority to — step into all of our lives and tell us what criteria we can use to negotiate our time and work and every human interaction.

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Fighting Poverty and Doing Everything Upside Down

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On the whole (to the surprise of nobody, I’m sure), I generally agree with Gary Sasse’s thoughts, in GoLocalProv, concerning a rethinking of the way in which our country addresses poverty:

Conservatives have been advancing reforms to help needy American families achieve self-sufficiency and upward mobility. The foundation to implement these reforms must include policies encouraging two- parent households valuing personal responsibility, good schools and fiscally sound government.

Economic opportunity is a mirage if children are held captive in failing schools. An education agenda based on accountability, student performance and choice is a precondition for economic and social mobility.

Safety net programs are placed in harm’s way when government is not fiscally responsible. Wasteful spending and crony capitalism may give public officials no option but to shred the safety net. Efficient government provides a firewall to protect the social safety net.

It’s difficult to argue with any of that, but I wonder if Sasse and other conservatives of like mind accept too many of the assumptions of the Left.  Why, most of all, must we continue with the top-down, federal-to-state-to-local model of government, particularly that part of government that redistributes wealth?  Sure, doing so moves money from wealthy areas of the country to less-wealthy areas.  On the other hand, people locally are better-positioned to offer their neighbors the help that they need; additionally, the top-down approach doesn’t do well addressing the possibility that people shouldn’t continue to live in a particular place, given current opportunity.

Not only does the reliance on nationalized hand-outs give the federal government unavoidable leverage (making broader reforms impossible across a wide array of policy areas), but it creates areas in which the provision and receipt of government benefits pretty much constitute the local economy.

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