Chafee’s Record

Put aside the long list of ideological, questionable, and unnecessarily divisive things that Governor Lincoln Chafee has done while in office.  How has his stewardship of the actual government been?

According to state budget documents, the first budget over which Chafee fully presided (fiscal year 2012, starting July 2011) produced a 5% increase in state spending over the prior year.  The next budget brought another 5% increase, and the upcoming one will be 4% (unless it goes up or down when revised midyear).  Add in restricted receipts, which differ only in that they are dedicated to specific items, and the percentage increases are 6%, 7% and 3%.

While those first two budgets were in place, the inflation rate was less than 2% each year.  Rhode Island’s economy, as measured by GDP, barely outpaced that — coming in under 2% the first year and at 3% the second year.  Over that period, Rhode Island was the only state in the country to lose population for two years in a row, and the improvement in the unemployment rate has largely occurred because so many people just gave up looking for work.  Rhode Island’s total employment remains the second worst in the country, related to its pre-crash peak.

So, the state government’s chief executive has ensured that his own organization has grown at a healthy pace even as his fellow Rhode Islanders have languished in arguably the nation’s worst economy.  Put aside the poll numbers; that should have been enough to convince him to hand over the reins.

(Whether his replacement will do any better, of course, remains to be seen.)

A Nation Asleep (And Watched in Its Sleep)

The hits just keep coming on the federal government’s abusive domestic spying.  Think some encryption will protect you from the curious eyes of the National Security Agency (NSA)? Not so much:

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Or how about changing your cell phone from time to time?  Yeah, not really:

Through its Hemisphere Project, the [Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)] partners with AT&T to trawl through 26 years (and counting) of stored phone data to identify repeating patterns of calls that can identify people even if they frequently change anonymous “burner” phones. That call you make to your bookie every Saturday? Yeah. That’s a give-away, no matter if you make it from different numbers. As Reason’s Matt Welch  remarked after the report’s publication, it “should put to rest the debate over whether we live in a free country. We don’t.” He’s right, though after the headlines of recent months (and the years before) it’s not clear that the matter should still be a subject of debate.

This ought to be front-page stuff every single day. The American people ought to be demanding whole agencies to be shut down and government to be scoured clean from top to bottom.

They’re not.

It’s a scary thought, but maybe we’ve just been too beaten down by scandals, the punch-drunk economy, and the promise of free stuff.  We used to joke about the potential for abuse of power by people in government and the difficulty of changing the bureaucracy even in small ways.  Maybe the full truth of what it’s become is just too daunting to face, so we’re on to our own versions of soma.

Government Spying as Free Data Back-Up

Leave it to Scott Adams to manage to use Dilbert’s cynicism to find a silver lining in the mess.

Yeah, What He Said

Wednesday, I wrote about the danger of throwing civic process to the wind.  The Constitution and the legal processes of the United States of America are what protect the people — the ordinary, relatively powerless people — of the country.

I obviously have access to modern context that Aldous Huxley lacked when writing Brave New World Revisited in the middle of the last century, but to some extent, I could have just quoted the following:

A democratic constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is concentrated in too few hands.  Such a constitution works pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there is a traditional respect for constitutional procedures.  Where the republican or limited monarchical tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians from succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptation of power.

We all have an interest in insisting that civic processes are followed because we cannot know when the ebbs and flows of public sentiment will leave our treasured values exposed to destruction.  Even more dangerous is the removal of more-structural principles like the freedoms described in the Bill of Rights.

The other day, in the midst of a variety of Twitter spats related to Governor Chafee’s statement that he would not seek a second term of office, Zack Mezera (bio-lined only as “practicing democrat”) told me that careers in government are more noble than other options because of an “assumed desire to better the state.”  I replied to ask why we wouldn’t assume a desire for power over other people.

All things being equal, I’d wager on the latter in any given case, but the more important point is this:  The bigger the government, the more of a draw it will have for those who desire power, and such people seem likely to be more enthusiastic in working the system for their own advantage than those whose motivations are altruistic.

So When’s That Debate Coming, Mr. Finance Chairman?

I was skimming my liveblog from House budget night during the General Assembly’s 2013 session for some other detail and happened upon this, at time stamp 5:26 p.m.:

There’s actually some debate going on, now, over an amendment from Patricia Morgan to require the health benefits exchange to offer plans that don’t include abortion.

Finance Chairman Melo is arguing: “This is the budget, it is not the vehicle to have this discussion.” He says the exchange does “not even have rules and regulations, yet,” and the money is all federal, and just to set up the exchange. “We haven’t even set up programs, yet. We will have the opportunity to voice our opinions about what programs should be available when that time comes.”

Even though legislation with this effect passed the Senate (never even appearing in a House committee), the conversation on budget night pivoted on a plan to move RIte Care recipients into health benefits exchange plans.  Speaker of the House Gordon Fox then ruled the amendment “not germane” to the budget, especially since there were no programs, yet.

Well, here we are, with the exchange poised to open in less than a month, and the plans that it will offer are sufficiently settled that the government has released prices.  Which makes me wonder: Where’s that opportunity to voice opinions, Mr. Melo?

Progressives’ Assault on “Natural Rights”

As he periodically does around here, commenter Russ quoted Thomas Jefferson in response to Arthur Christopher Schaper’s musings on Progressivism, yesterday:

“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed.”

How perfect an illustration of the Left’s removal of context to push conclusions that are harmful in their excess.  What self-respecting progressive would be satisfied with a system satisfied with providing land to the poor so that they might cultivate it and thereby have sufficient food to survive?  These days, we’re in the realm of demanding phones and Internet connections, where a conservative might be roundly attacked for suggesting that a poor man should be out there laboring in the fields.

So high has the threshold for progressive fairness risen that its believers would scoff — as at something absurd — at the suggestion that minimum wages exacerbate the problem of “unemployed poor.”  They do so by pricing jobs beyond what the employees’ labor is worth in the marketplace.  And they do that because progressives do not consider it adequate that people should be able to make enough money simply to subsist.

Personally, I do not consider that adequate, either, but in the intractable world in which we actually live, experience shows that better results derive from a population accustomed to working for what it gets.  That’s true for the reason of personal and cultural habits and skills, but it’s also true for the reason of simply being out in the economically active world.  A hard-working person gainfully employed each day, whose life circumstances provide their own incentive to advance, is more likely to spot paths forward than somebody receiving aid and mandated pay to maintain progressives’ idea of a baseline for acceptable lifestyles, with an inferred “natural right” to leisure and comfort.