Freedom Line Blog

Whatever shred of credibility Fareed Zakaria retained as a conservative pundit from his celebrated book The Future of Freedom has now been officially lost thanks to follow-ups like The Post-American World and today’s essay “Does America Need a Prime Minister?”

In the essay, Zakaria uses the recent S&P downgrade of American sovereign debt to note that “no country with a presidential system has a triple-A rating from all three major ratings agencies.”  He then uses this to support his thesis that the United States would be better served by chucking separation-of-powers and moving to a British-style parliamentary system where the executive and legislative branches are the same.  After all, Britain still has a triune triple-A rating!

How wonderfully anti-American of the Harvard PhD.  Throughout the essay one realizes that Zakaria has wandered so far from the insights of the Founding generation that he now endorses the very system – and possibility for tyranny – that the American Revolution fought to end.  So too did another PhD-turned-constitutional-scold: Woodrow Wilson, the godfather of America’s progressive movement.

Wilson believed that government needed to be professionalized and removed from popular control so that it could act quickly and decisively to cure whatever ailed the populace.  He favored the parliamentary system because it gave enormous power to one man: the Prime Minister.

To appreciate how far Zakaria has wandered from core American principles about the proper way to construct a government, consider this passage from today’s essay:

In the American presidential system, in contrast, you have the presidency and the legislature, both of which claim to speak for the people. As a result, you always have a contest over basic legitimacy. Who is actually speaking for and representing the people?

In America today, we take this struggle to an extreme. We have one party in one house of the legislature claiming to speak for the people because theirs was the most recent electoral victory.  And you have the president who claims a broader mandate as the only person elected by all the people.  These irresolvable claims invite struggle.

There are, of course, advantages to the American system – the checks and balances have been very useful on occasion. But we’re living in a world where you need governments that are able to respond decisively and quickly.  In a fast-moving world, paralysis is dangerous. Other countries are catching up – if not overtaking – America.

Who are these other countries?  Members of the European Union with a currency and debt crisis several times worse than our own?  China with its unsustainable population demographics and monetary policy?  Arab dictatorships that are being toppled by the month?  Latin American oligarchies that nationalize industries to buy off the masses with the wealth of entrepreneurs?

The problem we are experiencing in Washington, D.C. is not America’s constitutional design of checks-and-balances and separation-of-powers.  If anything, the ability of the House GOP to slow down the liberal agenda to tax-and-spend the nation into bankruptcy is due solely to the very “paralysis” intended by our constitutional framework.

If Zakaria wants to end the paralysis in D.C., he should vote for pro-growth fiscal conservatives in 2012 and urge all of his readers to do the same.

In a brilliantly written refutation of the Obama-as-Genius argument, Mortimer Zuckerman explains why even taking all the money from “rich” people and corporations won’t solve the deficit problem:

Even if the government instituted a 100% tax on both corporate profits and personal incomes above $250,000 per year, it would yield enough revenue to run the government for only six months. Why? Because under Mr. Obama’s presidency, government spending has swelled to 24% of GDP from 18%.

Spending is Obama’s original sin as president.  Unless he’s willing to repent of that folly and ratchet back on the flow of money, the American economy will stay mired in a recession.

A man shot a grizzly bear in self-defense. A real grizzly, not Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin. If it had been the latter, I have no doubt Eric Holder wouldn’t be too concerned. As it is, though, the Justice Department is prosecuting the man to the full extent of the law (or, one could argue, far beyond what the law can reasonably be interpreted to mean).  This is, in a word, sick. Demented. Twisted beyond all recognition. The DoJ’s Wendy Olson should be the one on trial for prosecutorial abuse, not the one putting the Idaho rancher on trial for protecting his own children. She also should be permanently ostracized from polite society. Sneered at, scorned, ignored, isolated, publicly disdained. And, when she no longer has Holder and President Obama around to give her a job, she should be professionally scorned as well. Maybe even asked to go live with the grizzlies — as long as she might last.

Peter Kirsanow catches Barack Obama calling himself irresponsible and unpatriotic.  Heh, heh.

Of course, it really galls me when the left yells and screams about conservatives accusing them of being unpatriotic, even when we’ve done no such thing, while they actually use that very word to describe us again and again. Oh, well…. Let them be hoist by their own petard.

Recently, I wrote about the Social Security Trust Fund being a piggy bank for other federal spending programs.  In return, federal spenders put worthless IOUs back in piggy with an implied promise to pay back the debt with higher taxes in future years.

Now, there is word that Social Security Disability Insurance – yet another expense drawn from the empty retirement Trust Fund – will go bankrupt by 2017.  The reason for the rapid insolvency of disability insurance is simple: eligibility for disability can begin before reaching retirement age.  Per the Associated Press:

Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can’t find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs.

The more President Obama’s Washington dithers on enacting policies to spur economic growth, the more unemployed people will be forced to find money wherever they can.  The vast majority of Americans want to work, but Obama’s job-killing policies just aren’t giving them the chance.

It would be an unnecessary irony if a liberal like Obama presided over an austerity government that not only raised taxes, but also cut services like Social Security that liberals love.  Yet that is the path we’re on as a recessed economy lurches from market plunges to debt downgrades to a contracting job market.

We need an “opportunity president,” and this one surely isn’t it.

Howard Portnoy at Hot Air offers to help redirect the frustration Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) vented recently against the Tea Party to a more appropriate target:

The situation creates a catch-22 for Waters and other black politicians. They can continue to rail out helplessly at forces they have no control over. Or they can accept the bitter reality that the messiah they thought they were electing is either mythical or yet to come. Is it possible that the calls to primary Obama will come from, of all places, the black community? It would certainly represent a healthy first step toward a post-racial America.

In a major speech last night at the Reagan Library, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) spoke with clarity about “the proper role of government.”

Saying that the United States must always aspire to compassion and prosperity, Rubio argued that an ever-expanding federal government will doom the nation to failure.   “Americans in the 20th century built here the richest most prosperous nation in the history of the world. And yet today we have built for ourselves a government that not even the richest and most prosperous nation on the face of the earth can fund or afford to pay for.”

At a time when high-sounding but often empty shoot-from-the-hip sound bites dominate the national dialogue, the understanding and vision with which the Florida Senator spoke is a breath of fresh air.

Watch the must-see speech below.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

CFIF readers in the San Francisco metro area (come on, we know you exist) be warned: I’ll be coming to a radio dial near you tomorrow morning.

I’ll be guesting on Brian Sussman’s morning show on KSFO AM 560 to discuss California state legislators’ refusal to make their official budgets available for public review.

No word on timing yet, but I’ll update the post once I know. Feel free to throw the car into park on the Golden Gate Bridge and wait in anticipation though.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Vice President Biden was at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, yesterday for an address on U.S.–Chinese relations. Looking over his remarks, one gets to thinking that the Taiwan Strait is nowhere near as dangerous a space as the distance between Biden and a hot microphone.

Biden, remember, is a scholar of everything, prone to confusing the ridiculous with the sublime, and loquacious in inverse correlation to his erudition. So it should come as no surprise that the Vice President felt free to weigh in on the dynamics of Chinese society. The particular angle he chose, however, may surprise. From the remarks:

You have no safety net.  Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.  The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.  Not sustainable.

Leave it to Biden, the court jester of an administration that has shown no regard whatsoever for fiscal prudence, to reduce what has been called “the biggest single holocaust in human history” to an accounting problem.

In that conceit, Biden is not so different from the Communist Chinese who created the one-child policy. Their rationale, after all, was to reduce the burden on Chinese society that would stem from population growth. In essence, it is a tyranny of the living over the unborn — an ideal that could not be further removed from the Declaration of Independence’s promise of rights given by God. In China, the most basic right of all — the right to life, which has pride of place in the Declaration’s enumeration — is a function of one’s perceived worth to society.

That, Mr. Vice President, is worth ‘second-guessing’. As for your glib dismissal of the moral stain imposed by China’s macabre exercise in totalitarianism? “Not sustainable.”

Well, Paul Ryan is out of the presidential race without having entered it.  For those of us who value limited government and want to see fiscal discipline in Washington, and who desperately want a candidate who can articulate the need for and details of reforms, it is a disappointment that Rep. Ryan will not enter the race.

It does occur to me that of the candidates who are in the race, the one whose record and platform both match most closely with Ryan’s is former Sen. Rick Santorum. Far be it from me to issue any endorsement, especially considering that candidate selection involves political considerations in addition to mere analysis of records and platforms, but my prediction — as an analyst — is that Santorum will at least attempt to make a big move to attract activists who had been waiting on the sidelines to see what Ryan would do. Santorum remains a long shot, but he’s steadily creeping up in terms of public consciousness and support.

Of course, both Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann also would claim the mantle of Ryan-esque conservative reformers (although, frankly, Bachmann doesn’t fit because Ryan is an institutionalist and legislator whereas she is consciously an outsider and back-bencher), and the immediate benefit may flow to Perry as the most Ryan-like front-runner (the bandwagon effect is alive and well).  But in terms of persona, geography, personal backgrounds, style, and mastery of the substance of national issues, Santorum and Ryan are indeed a close fit.

It will be interesting to see if any other boomlet starts to try to recruit yet another candidate into the race (other than Sarah Palin, who has always been a possibility) — or, if, finally, the field (other than Palin) starts to settle down and the attention at last turns to those actually in the race rather than to those on the outside that some people wish would get in.

From a must-read profile in the New Yorker on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

The implications of Thomas’s leadership for the Court, and for the country, are profound. Thomas is probably the most conservative Justice to serve on the Court since the nineteen-thirties. More than virtually any of his colleagues, he has a fully wrought judicial philosophy that, if realized, would transform much of American government and society. Thomas’s views both reflect and inspire the Tea Party movement, which his wife has helped lead almost since its inception. The Tea Party is a diffuse operation, and it can be difficult to pin down its stand on any given issue. Still, the Tea Party is unusual among American political movements in its commitment to a specific view of the Constitution—one that accords, with great precision, with Thomas’s own approach. For decades, various branches of the conservative movement have called for a reduction in the size of the federal government, but for the Tea Party, and for Thomas, small government is a constitutional command.

Later on, the profiler notes that Thomas – along with other conservatives on the Supreme Court – is poised to overturn the clearest expression of government overreach in a generation: ObamaCare.  If that happens, Thomas’ judicial philosophy, and the Tea Party’s importance, will be vindicated.

The liberal obituaries for the mostly-dead Huntsman for President campaign get an interesting addition from Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast:

The Huntsman strategy here is obvious: position himself as the moderate and reasonable guy on the off chance Republicans decide to be moderate and reasonable. We must assume he is aware that his odds on this are rather long, so what he’s really hoping for is to be the consensus candidate of 2016. Maybe the party just has to go through this purge, this Reign of Terror; so just let it do that, and once it does and nominates an extremist who can’t beat a weak incumbent during a time of 9 percent unemployment rates, and the heads are piled high enough in the tumbrels and enough people finally have returned to their senses, he will ride the Thermidorian wave to victory after Obama leaves town.

So, the Tea Party in particular and the conservative movement in general is creating a “Reign of Terror” that is depriving liberals of the most progressive member of the GOP presidential pack from facing Obama next year?

There’s a frightful reality fast-approaching, but it isn’t a 2012 match-up seeing who’s less conservative.  It’s the fiscal and cultural time-bomb that is ticking ever closer to exploding if Barack Obama or Jon Huntsman’s views are put into practice.

H/T: Political Wire

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

–  4:00 p.m. CST/5:00 p.m. EST:  George Landrith, President of Frontiers of Freedom – End of the Space Shuttle Age;

–  4:30 p.m. CST/5:30 p.m. EST:  Anna Rittgers, Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum – Obamacare; and

–  5:00 p.m. CST/6:00 p.m. EST:  Greg Brown, Santa Rosa County Property Appraiser – TRIM Notices and Navarre Beach Lawsuit.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

After a barrage of base-hating tweets, even the liberal website Talking Points Memo thinks former Utah Governor and Obama China Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s GOP presidential campaign is headed for failure.

TPM’s headline says it all: “Is He Even Trying?  Huntsman Seems Determined to Alienate the GOP Base

CFIF and others have been all over Huntsman’s record, noting how deliberately incompatible it is with almost any slice of the Republican electorate, let alone conservatives.

If voters want a former governor with corporate ties and moderate-to-liberal positions, they’ll vote for Mitt Romney.  If they want someone else, it won’t be Huntsman.

Though Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) hasn’t exactly been the reincarnation of John Adams, some Bay State Tea Party leaders are weighing whether helping reelect the moderate Brown is better than sitting back and letting him duke it out with Harvard professor and Obama protégé Elizabeth Warren next year:

“Elizabeth Warren is a game-changer,” Varley said. “Elizabeth Warren is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive. We can say we may not be thrilled with Sen. Brown, but we certainly don’t want Elizabeth Warren.”

Unlike other GOP moderates like Senators Olympia Snowe (ME), Orrin Hatch (UT), and Richard Lugar (IN), Brown will likely get a pass in the primary, and have uber-liberal Warren to show as a much worse alternative.  Between now and November 2012, hopefully Brown gives Tea Party voters something to vote for.

H/T: FoxNews

In case you missed it, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal explains “Why Americans Hate Economics” with two wonderfully clear paragraphs.

The first explains where economics as a discipline went wrong:

How did modern economics fly off the rails? The answer is that the “invisible hand” of the free enterprise system, first explained in 1776 by Adam Smith, got tossed aside for the new “macroeconomics,” a witchcraft that began to flourish in the 1930s during the rise of Keynes. Macroeconomics simply took basic laws of economics we know to be true for the firm or family—i.e., that demand curves are downward sloping; that when you tax something, you get less of it; that debts have to be repaid—and turned them on their head as national policy.

The second shows where Keynesians err:

The grand pursuit of economics is to overcome scarcity and increase the production of goods and services. Keynesians believe that the economic problem is abundance: too much production and goods on the shelf and too few consumers. Consumers lined up for blocks to buy things in empty stores in communist Russia, but that never sparked production. In macroeconomics today, there is a fatal disregard for the heroes of the economy: the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the one who innovates and creates the things we want to buy. “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” Arthur Laffer reminds us.

Knowledge becomes inaccessible only when an influential group decides that reality doesn’t fit their ideal.  The Keynesians have had their day.  It’s time for the proponents of sound money and economic growth to have their turn.

Here’s an update from the New York Times about how the Obama Administration is implementing the DREAM Act without waiting for Congress to actually pass the measure into law.

The decision would, through administrative action, help many intended beneficiaries of legislation that has been stalled in Congress for a decade. The sponsor of the legislation, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, has argued that “these young people should not be punished for their parents’ mistakes.”

The next paragraph explains the motivation:

The action would also bolster President Obama’s reputation with Latino voters as he heads into the 2012 election. Just a week ago the leaders of major Hispanic organizations criticized his record, saying in a report that Mr. Obama and Congress had “overpromised and underdelivered” on immigration and other issues of concern to Latino voters, a major force in some swing states.

At least the Times is honest.  We’re still waiting for the White House.