Yearly Archives: 2008
OSTA would prevent monstrosities like the Big Bailout bill
Quote of the Day: “The practice of combining into one Bill Subjects diverse in their nature and having no necessary connection, thereby to secure the passage of several measures, no one of which could succeed on its own merits, both corrupts Congress and endangers the American constitutional republic.” — One Subject At A Time Act, Section 2(f)
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Subject: OSTA would prevent monstrosities like the Big Bailout bill
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Last week we described how the bailout bill (H.R. 1424) empowered the IRS to do undercover entrapments and reveal your tax information.
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What does that have to do with “rescuing the economy?” Nothing.
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The bailout bill was stuffed with unrelated provisions to win the votes of pork-minded Congresspeople, and passed quickly before anyone could read it. This made it easy to add provisions that couldn’t have passed by themselves in the full light of day.
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The original bailout bill was bad. The final bill was worse. This wouldn’t have happened had the “One Subject At A Time Act” (OSTA) been in force. Here are three examples of how OSTA would have stopped the Big Bailout bill . . .
Should You Pay Autoworkers to Do Nothing?
Quote of the Day: “The Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” — Joseph Sobran
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Subject: Should you pay autoworkers to do nothing?
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If the history of the current era is ever written properly it may be called “The Age of the Government Sponsored Scam.” The examples are piling up. Here’s the latest . . .
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Did you know that GM and other automakers with UAW contracts have to pay many of their employees to do nothing! It’s called a Job Bank. Laid-off workers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler are paid 90% of their previous wages to sit in a room at the factory doing nothing!
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Think of what this will mean if the politicians pass a bill to bailout GM, or Chrysler, or Ford. When you go to work you’ll be laboring part of the day to pay some members of the United Auto Workers union to sit and produce nothing.
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Doesn’t that sound like a scam to you, and wouldn’t a bailout represent government sponsorship of this scam?
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Do you think, perhaps, the Detroit automakers might not need a bailout if they didn’t sign such stupid contracts with the UAW union?
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Do you think, perhaps, that no bailout should even be considered as long as such contracts are in place?
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Do you think,
How to Cure Political Loneliness
Quote of the Day: “In the long run men hit only what they aim at.” — Henry David Thoreau
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Subject: How to cure political loneliness
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* How many Americans want smaller government?
:::* How many Americans would support the “Read the Bills Act” and the “One Subject at a Time Act,” if they were introduced to them?
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In today’s Dispatch we’ll answer the first question, and explain how we can use $50,000 in pledges made by two generous donors to answer the second question. We’ll also tell you how you can see and receive our new “I Am Not Afraid” t-shirt.
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We start by tipping our hat to David Boaz at the Cato Institute for constantly calling attention to the kind of data we’re going to share below, and to Ramesh Ponnuru for providing a good recent summary of this information.
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CBS pollsters have been asking the following question for decades, “Would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with many services?”
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From 1996 through Jan. 2001 the smaller-government side had an average lead of
Mark Twain was right
Quote of the Day: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” — Mark Twain
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Subject: Educate the Powerful!
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Mark Twain was right. History doesn’t repeat itself, exactly, but often the present does rhyme with the past.
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Sadly, the evidence for this is now all around us.
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Too much of what the politicians are currently doing rhymes too well with what the politicians did during the Great Depression.
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Then, as now, the politicians blamed the economic downturn on the free market. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.
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The government caused the Great Depression. Even Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, agrees.
Will There be Change?
Quote of the Day: “If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.” — William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) Source: “The Forgotten Man and Other Essays,” 1919
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Subject: Will seven years of damage to civil liberties be reversed?
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We heard it repeatedly: “Change we can believe in.” That’s what the President-elect promised. Do you expect it?
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Well, we’re going to demand it.
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Our civil liberties were trashed during the last seven years.
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Habeas Corpus. Torture. Warrantless spying. And more. Where do we begin? For one thing . . .
We favor the strongest business regulation
Quote of the Day: “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
:::– James Bovard, Source: Lost Rights. The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1994), p. 333
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Subject: We favor the strongest possible form of business regulation
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Free market advocates must speak in favor of business regulation. This may sound strange, but that’s only because the politicians have conditioned us to think about things in the wrong way.
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The politicians are busy blaming DE-regulation for the current financial crisis. This is partly self-serving, but it’s also due to a defect in the way politicians think.
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The politicians think government regulations are the ONLY regulations that exist. Therefore, in their mind, to repeal a government regulation is to DE-regulate.
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They are very wrong.
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Often, the repeal of a government regulation will result in the restoration of free market regulations that are far stronger.
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Free market regulation comes in several forms…
Guess what else is in the bailout bill
Quote of the Day: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” — John Perry Barlow
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Subject: Bailout bill contains buried provisions to invade your privacy
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Do you think the IRS should set up undercover operations to entrap unsuspecting taxpayers?
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Do you think the IRS should release your confidential tax returns to law enforcement and intelligence agencies upon request?
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If you answered “No!” to either question, you’re out of luck. Before its October recess, Congress passed a bill giving the IRS these powers.
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You may ask, “Why didn’t Downsize DC oppose this bill?”
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As a matter of fact, we wrote against it virtually non-stop for two weeks!
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Don’t remember?
$61 billion stimulus package failed in the Senate
Media Alert: Jim Babka will be on the radio today and Sunday. See the P.S. below the signature.
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Quote of the Day: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power.” — Benjamin Franklin
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Subject: $61 billion stimulus package failed in the Senate
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Lost in the noise of the election was the good news that the Senate rejected a $61 billion stimulus package that the House had passed earlier.
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But House Democrats are still pushing for another stimulus package that they will try to pass in a lame duck session. The details are constantly shifting, but this proposal would add another $150 billion to $165 billion to a national debt that has grown by nearly a trillion dollars in the space of about a month.
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The good news on this front is that a new stimulus package will once again meet resistance in the Senate, and the Bush White House has signaled that it will not support the package.
Jim Babka on March of Liberty Radio
Downsize DC President Jim Babka will be appearing on the March of Liberty internet radio show this Sunday, November 9. The show airs at 7:00 pm Eastern, and Jim is expected to appear around 7:30. If you miss the live broadcast, archives are available on the March of Liberty site.
Not your usual post-election commentary
Quote of the Day: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — William Shakespeare
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Subject: Not your usual post-election commentary
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The media describes every election as historic, the most important in a generation, etc. When the voting is done they tell us a new era has dawned, that things will change, that nothing will ever be the same, blah, blah, blah.
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One aspect of these claims is true, this time. It is both historic and meaningful that the United States has elected its first African-American president. We applaud and celebrate this. We think the significance of this event transcends mere symbolism. Otherwise, the election was what all other elections have been . . .
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” . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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Can we support this harsh assessment? Consider . . .
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The election thoroughly repudiated the Republican Party. They lost the White House in a landslide, and got clobbered in Congressional races. We might assume from this, if elections really produced change, that many Republican policies of the last eight years will be reversed. We predict that almost none of them will be.
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The Republicans were responsible for . . .
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* Enacting the largest new entitlement in decades — the prescription drug program
:::* Passing social engineering schemes like “No Child Left Behind”
:::* Starting an un-provoked war
:::* Gutting constitutional liberties
:::* Running-up vast deficits
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Will the Democrats reverse any of these actions? Sadly, we think the answer is “No.” What, then, was the point of the election?