Some Of Us Are Agnostic You Insensitive Clod!

Tags

health-care

In this ongoing battle over ObamaCare’s contraception coverage mandate, most opponents are coming from the Establishment Clause, which in my opinion is fighting it the wrong way.

What if the government were to declare that all religious organizations would be exempted from the mandate if birth-control is fundamentally against their beliefs? (In fact, that seems to be what the White House just announced according to the latest news.)

Are we all happy now? Is it good enough now? Of course not, it’s not even close to being good enough. What about secular businesses? They shouldn’t have to be forced to pay for their employees’ birth-control cost, which is completely a personal and private matter.

The mandate glossly overlooks decisions by free will on not one but several levels. First of all obviously whether to provide help for birth-control is entirely a decision of the employer’s, and theirs alone. Secondly, so is the form of such help, which doesn’t necessarily have to be part of an insurance policy.

Less obvious but equally real, on the flip side, the employee’s choices are taken away as well. The extra cost to provide such coverage must eventually be reflected on the employer’s balance sheet, and adversely affect the employee’s overall compensation one way or another. The employee ought to have the opportunity to decide for whatever reason (fiscal, religious, etc.) that she does not care about this contraception coverage at all, and wishes to opt out in exchange for a higher pay or even a better bargaining position at a higher pay.

The essence of the issue is not separation of church and state. It is not about the 1st amendment rights of some Catholic groups. In deed, at stake is the right of every citizen in this country to engage freely in contract.

What Moral Enterprise?

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10th-amendment, abraham-lincoln, civil-war, morality, secession, state-rights

RE: Santorum: “States Do Not Have the Right to Do Wrong”

According to Mr. Santorum:

“Our country is based on a moral enterprise. Gay marriage is wrong. As Abraham Lincoln said, states do not have the right to do wrong. And so there are folks, here who said states can do this and I won’t get involved in that.”

My question for Mr. Santorum would be: what exact moral enterprise is this country based on? I sure hope that his answer won’t be “whatever belief that judges gay marriage to be wrong”, because then Mr. Santorum would be not only disagreeing with the 10th Amendment, but in fact the spiritual foundation of the entire Constitution, which I happen to think is what our country is based on.

Taking it a step further, I even hope that it is not the moral enterprise supporting Abraham Lincoln’s assertion that states do no have the right to do wrong, because I consider the mindset behind that assertion the same as the one that eventually led Lincoln to, and justified, his militaristically preserving a union which was not otherwise preservable. It essentially accepted the legitimacy of achieving moral goals with physically intrusive force. Such acceptance opened a huge can of worms in later history of the US – if what is considered “right” by whoever happens to have the power at the moment can be justifiably and forcefully imposed upon the rest with that power, what part of any moral enterprise can prevent people like President Santorum from banning gay marriage or anything else he considers “wrong”?

To me, no amount of good or “right” the preservation of the Union did could possibly be good enough for that kind of damage. In this sense, Lincoln’s words were a spiritual coup over the original intention of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

On United States v. Jones

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4th-amendment, constitution

In United States v. Jones, the government’s argument mostly centers around that there is no reasonably expected privacy when one’s driving on public roads. According to the government, there is nothing a GPS tracking device can do that a surveilence team can’t, so if government doesn’t need a warrant to tail somebody, nor would it need one to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s car.

Let’s forget for a moment hair-splitting arguments like “humans go to sleep but robots won’t!” It would seem to me that there is a small yet logically clear-cut hole in that line of reasoning. It is based on the assumption that as long as the person being monitored is driving, they are driving on public roads, which is obviously not necessarily true. What if they were to decide to get on a private race track and have some fun? What if they were to be invited to some private party where the estate compound is entirely not visible to anyone observing from any public area? Under such circumstances, it would certainly be reasonale to expect some privacy.

Some might argue that those are just corner cases and most of the time when we drive we do drive on public roads. Of course they are, and we do, but that doesn’t mean that they are ignorable. While the idea and scope of constitutionally protected rights are broad, what really needs protection is precisely the “corner cases.” For instance, of all kinds of speeches, the one kind that really could use constitutional protection, the political and controversial kind, only takes up some tiny percentage of all the speeches people ever make, yet we don’t dismiss those as corner cases.

Them Damned ATM’s!

Tags

economy, redistribution

REF: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-new-data-center-north-carolina-created-50-jobs-2011-11

While some certain executive might find Mr. Blodget’s position agreeable, that is the type of analysis that makes me want to bang my head against the wall, as it seems that, in Mr. Blodget’s world, job creation has to be quid pro quo – a company has to be directly issuing a paycheck to have created a job.

All these successful companies like Apple of course create more jobs than what their payrolls show directly. To begin with, being a member of S&P 500 and several other highly visible indices, Apple’s stock shares are held in a great number of investment accounts (please, try and find me one pension or 401(k) account in this country that does not hold at least some S&P companies). So all the profit generated will go to these people, most of whom are your average hard-working American middle class. Guess where all that money is going? That’s right, it’ll get spent or reinvested and create more jobs.

In order to generate all the profit, it doesn’t take only Apple’s own employees, but also employees from other American companies – IT, advertising, marketing, retail, etc. In a sense, Apple even helped creating Mr. Blodget’s own job. Without these successful companies, there wouldn’t be this vibrant investment market which Business Insider is all about.

More indirectly yet non-negligibly, the products of Apple and all the other companies produced will also help others improve their productivities, and in turn create more positive effect on the economy. Case in point, this new Apple data center will drive down the cost of cloud computing for that much, and will likely encourage more people into developing related technologies, products, and services, and doing so create more jobs.

The fundamental issue of Mr. Blodget’s analysis is not that it’s economically unsound, nor is it that it’s blindsided, but that it inevitably leads to the dangerous conclusion that, since only direct paychecks are counted as “jobs”, the job to create more jobs cannot be trusted upon the private sector whose entire purpose is chasing more profits, but rather we will have to rely on government which is the only entity with sufficient power and  motivation, to keep on creating jobs, by Mr. Blodget’s standard at least, just for the sake of “creating jobs”.

Oh The Dreaded Wickard

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commerce-clause, constitution, health-care

Ref: http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/11/big-boost-for-health-care/

“Wickard,” the opinion said, “comes very close to authorizing a mandate similar to” the one in the health care law. The effect of the federal law at issue in that case, the opinion said, was to force any farmer into the wheat market — in the same way that the new insurance mandate forces some private individuals into the health coverage market even if they don’t want to be there. Congress, the panel commented, “is merely imposing the [insurance] mandate in reasonable anticipation of virtually inevitable future transactions in interstate commerce.”

Even not considering the absurdity of Wickard itself, I still see some logical gaps here. For Wickard to be a precedent to follow, not to expand upon, it would have had to force all the farmers who didn’t plant wheat to plant wheat and participate in the wheat market, which it didn’t.

“It is enough, for this case,” the panel said, “to recognize…that the health insurance market is a rather unique one, both because virtually everyone will enter or affect it, and because the uninsured inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market as a result of their later consumption of health care services.”

The assertion that participation in the health insurance market is inevitable for everyone is obviously confused between the participation in the health-care market and the participation in the health insurance market. The former is inevitable, while the latter isn’t. Many Americans have chosen not to purchase any medical insurance for one reason or another, and for extended periods in their lives. So clearly that is not inevitable. The only reason that these people could “inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market” (note that the “market” here is actually the health-care market) is the not-so-odd notion that we as human beings cannot sit there and watch another fellow human being die, combined with the odd notion that in order not to sit there and watch another fellow human being die we somehow have the right to force others, regardless of their individual situations or free will, to pay for the rescue effort. So the majority’s reasoning here, to me, sounds almost like running in circles – because it’s virtually inevitable for everyone, we are making it so for everyone.

Equal Means Just That – Equal

Tags

clarence-thomas, equality, racism

Ref: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/11/141246695/clarence-thomas-influence-on-the-court

I can relate to Justice Thomas’ view on racial issues. His attitude is basically that “I don’t want to be treated specially, nor do I need to be,” because special treatment on racial basis is, as Justice Thomas often points out, a stereotypical underestimate on the target group, and is racist to begin with, when the problem domain on which the special treatment is to be applied has nothing to do with race.

I have always thought that the concept of “hate crime” is absurd and really falls into the category of thought crimes. If I were killed, sure, I’d very much like to see justice done on the guy who did it, but only because he murdered me as another fellow human being, not because I am Chinese.

To quote Chief Justice Roberts, in one of the court opinions he authored,

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

And I wholeheartedly agree.

The Way It’s Been

Tags

health-care

One popular argument the proponents of ObamaCare like to make is that, considering that auto insurances are mandated in most states, the individual mandate wouldn’t be the first time in the US history a government forces citizens to purchase insurance policies.

Of course the flaws in that analogy have been refuted by many, and I don’t really want to beat the dead horse again here.  What actually sends chills up my spine is the very scenario where the auto insurance mandat is cited as a precedent for the individual mandate on medical insurances. I haven’t gone and read the old papers yet but I’m willing to wager that back when the auto insurance mandate was made into law, most people must have thought that it could only be a good thing, being told how it would make sure that an innocent party would not suffer from somebody else being irresponsible. Few people would likely have thought that one day in the near future, another generation, who are used to being forced to purchase insurance policies if they want to drive on public roads, would be subject to another more expansive mandate with the auto insurance mandate being some kind of mental stepping stone.

Furthermore, I’m also willing to wager that, in 30, 50 years, when my daughter or her children have gotten used to the ObamaCare individual mandate, there will be another round of “mandates” or in general government impositions on whatever happen to be deemed as “the good things to have” then. And people would point at the ObamaCare mandate and say “see, it’s just how it has been.”

Wealth is Never Given

Tags

redistribution, taxation

Ref: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-kennedy-view-of-wealth/

As David Boaz points out in the essay above, Ms. Townsend’s premise, that the wealthy are obligated to give more back because they (somehow) have been given more, is obviously flawed, because not every wealthy person inherited their money as Ms. Townsend did. Indeed for every Kathleen Townsend there is a Warren Buffett, and then some.

Further more, I do not think that even Ms. Townsend’s wealth was “given” to her, at least not in the sense that would obligate her to “give back” more. She inherited her wealth from her ancestors, who earned it fair and square. I know the “fair and square” part is an assumption, but it is one that can be taken in general as long as we assume that most people make honest livings.

Once we start looking at the issue from the wealth’s standpoint instead of its master’s, we start realize that a change of masters does not change the fact that the wealth has been earned fair and square. Thus Ms. Townsend is merely enjoying the remnants of her ancestors earnings, in other words, the remnants of what the society has already decided to be a fair share of compensation for what her ancestors contributed to the society. So if Ms. Townsend decides to give some of it back, that’d be very generous of her, and should she happen to feel otherwise, I for one wouldn’t cast a stone.

Non-Contentious, Really?

Tags

debt, taxation

Ref: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-debt-ceiling-crisis-america-at-its-worst-2011-7

Out of the entire article above, the one phrase that enrages me the most (other than the endless string of parentheses and SHOUTING CAPITALS OF COURSE) is “this traditionally non-contentious process”, by which the author refers to budget/debt ceiling legislation.

I mean, has the American public education system failed so miserably as to have produced a whole generation of “citizens” who would not even contend how their government is collecting and using their money? When you send your car to a shop for services, wouldn’t you at least take a look at the bill and question what exactly that repair that you are paying hundreds of dollars for is about? How come, when it’s the government and trillions of dollars, it suddenly becomes “non-contentious”?

Or maybe, we are where we are today, precisely because there have been too many Americans who are just like the author and think that it should be “traditionally non-contentious” to just blindly let the government tax and spend.

Rearguing Texas v. White

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civil-war, constitution, secession

This should be interesting: Rearguing Texas v. White.

I agree with some of the commenters. It is almost pointless to debate whether secession is constitutional. The right to secede is by nature revolutionary and extra-constitutional.