Wednesday's interesting reads

"Obama Denounces Ex-Pastor For 'Rants'" WSJ by Nick Timiraos and Jackie Calmes:

"Yet after weeks in which Mr. Wright's racially incendiary comments have roiled the Obama campaign, the minister's defense of himself in recent days -- and his dismissal of Sen. Obama's remarks as political calculations -- forced the candidate's action."

What Obama is thinking:

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

What Obama is saying:

"I am outraged by the comments that were made [by Wright] and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday. You know, I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992. I have known Reverend Wright for almost 20 years. The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either."

The whole Pastor Wright issues has had zero impact on my decision of who to vote for. I'm just surprised that, as a politician, it's taken Obama so long to actually and formally denounce the things Wright has said.

On another Obama note...

"Religion issue hurting Obama with Indiana cafe patrons" Reuters "Tales from the Trail" blog:

"Barack Obama can talk about his childhood years in Kansas and upbringing by his white Midwestern grandparents, but if voters at one small-town Indiana cafe are any indication, he has a long way to go to convince them he represents heartland America."

The post talks about how people are uncomfortable with Obama because his religious affiliations, either with Islam or with Christianity as taught by Jeremiah Wright, don't "sit well" with them, or, rather, don't represent them. This raises two problems for me. First, why do we feel the president needs to "represent" us in this way? Who is going to represent those Americans who are Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu? As soon as we begin to feel that a politician needs to represent us, we become a special interest of that politician. Isn't that kind of the problem with W. Bush and the neoconservatives? Because they played a large role in electing him, they also played a role in policymaking. This is also manifest in congressmen and women representing the interests of their home states and passing legislation that benefits the people of those states to the detriment of the other states (farm subsidies passed for the benefit of states like Iowa and my own Georgia come to mind; earmarks in general is another example).

"The New York Times Should Take Credit Where It’s Due" by Indur Goklany at Cato:

"In a piece by Jad Mouawad, Tuesday’s NY Times reports that Oil Price Rise Fails to Open Tap. He identifies a number of reasons for the lack of responsiveness on the supply side...

Surprisingly, in an otherwise decent article, absent from this report is the credit that is due to the New York Times itself (and like-minded entities) in their long-standing efforts decrying the search for oil and gas within the US. A search of the Times site for the words “editorial drilling oil gas”(sans quotes) over the past few years reveals a constant stream of editorials in the Times decrying efforts to drill for oil and gas...

And of course the NY Times has been in the forefront of opposition to any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge based on the logic that it would supply only six months of US oil consumption while forever sullying the Wildlife Refuge (an arguable claim).

Using this logic we could shut down every farm in the U.S. — and the world — since no single farm provides more than a few hours’ worth of food, and food production is the single greatest threat to terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity worldwide.

This is not to say that drilling – or farming, for that matter — is acceptable everywhere, but reflexive opposition to energy production is not."

"A lawmaker is not a researcher" by Coby Loup at Flypaper (HT: Neal McCluskey with Cato):

"What’s surprising is that so many people continue to believe that these embarrassments stem from a failure of political will, rather than the inherent obstacles posed by, as the Post puts it, the “turbulent forces of politics, policy and public opinion.” We always think we’ll do better next time around, when our guys or gals are in office.

But lawmakers have proven again and again (and it’s only natural, given the dynamics of representative government) that the voices of constituents and interest groups are louder than the voice of science. For another great example of this, see Michael Pollan’s wildly-popular New York Times essay on how the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition was hijacked by the meat and dairy lobbies and consequently released “scientifically-based” nutrition guidelines that have proven remarkably wrong-headed and disastrously influential on our eating habits."

Again, special interests and the inherent structure of our representative government create all the wrong incentives for politicians. The answer is better politicians but fewer opportunities for politicians to exert influence (ie, smaller government).

"Cigarette Smuggling" by Walter Williams at Townhall (HT: Club for Growth):

"Tell me what's wrong in people wanting to wear a Swiss watch, having a drink, purchasing tea from a Dutch seller rather than an English seller, or cheap cigarettes from North Carolina rather than expensive ones from New York. People in government or those in pursuit of a do-good agenda think they know better and think they have a right to use government's brute force to hinder peaceable voluntary exchange...

The easy solution to cigarette smuggling, and its attendant activities, is to eliminate the confiscatory taxes. Unfortunately, for politicians and do-gooders, the attack on smokers is a moral crusade that sees only benefits and costs are irrelevant. Or as novelist C.S. Lewis put it, 'Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.' "

This is where I begin to feel conflicted. As a Mormon, I'm opposed to several activies he mentioned (smoking, drinking, etc) that are being taxed or have been taxed or made illegal. However, the government trying to enforce these morals, again because a majority voted for them, to me at least, contradicts our doctrines of agency and choice and accountability. Instead of going to government and asking them to impose our morals on others, we should go to others directly and try to convince them directly ourselves. Mormons have an example of this in the Book of Mormon when chief judge (government official) and high priest (church official) Alma resigned from his position of chief judge so we could teach the people full-time (so to speak) in his position of high priest. It isn't inconceivable that he could have, in his position as chief judge, enacted laws that enforced the morals of the church.

Speaking of Mormons and government intervention, I saw this yesterday, though it's an older post...

"Faith of Our Fathers" by Timothy Egan on a NY Times opinion blog:

"And when the church set up a huge polygamous theocracy in the West, President James Buchanan was forced in the 1850s to send an army of 2,500 – nearly one-sixth of American forces – to uphold the law." [Emphasis added.]

I've obviously been thinking quite a bit about the ability of the majority to impose its will on a minority. I was recently debating the premise of limiting immigration here. My argument, which they refused to answer, came back to the question of whether a majority has the right to limit the freedoms of a minority. They kept coming back to the "illegality" of undocumented foreign workers, but to me that misses the point. I brought up instances from our history when discrimination and worse was made legal, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, or gave a "what if" and asked what they would do if a supermajority decided to make their own religion illegal. I equated those to the majority limiting the freedoms of a minority simply because they disagree with them.

All of that reminds me of the issue of making polygamy illegal. Robyn said she’s heard this, but I did some research about the laws surrounding the legality of polygamy and basically they were instituted specifically with Mormons in mind. Effectively, just like some of our immigration laws, they were passed by the majority as a way to legally discriminate against the minority (and then cry that the minority deserves to be discriminated against because they break the law). I have a hard time with the imposition of the will of the majority on the minority simply because they have a majority. More democracy/majority rule isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Other than this, the NY Times article itself is still disgusting and blatantly biased.

"Is a Windfall Profits Tax Justified by Ability to Pay?" by Gerald Prante with the Tax Foundation (HT: Club for Growth):

"Yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made the following statement in support of her windfall profits tax on oil companies to finance a temporary gas tax holiday:

'We will pay for it by imposing a windfall profits tax on the big oil companies. They sure can afford it.'

They can afford it? What does that even mean? A windfall profits tax will be borne almost entirely by the shareholders of the oil companies. Companies really have no "ability to pay" as their taxes are borne by individuals, which is where the true "ability to pay" lies...

If one truly feels that the current profits Exxon (and others) have made are excessive and unfair, then really the only fair tax would be to somehow tax those shareholders past and present that have truly benefited from those "excess" profits."

I've mentioned it before, I wish there was a way to not tax corporations themselves, but to somehow allow the tax liability to pass through to shareholders, similar to an S corp. It would get rid of any special tax treatment of certain industries (like big oil) and allow them to use that money for additional investment or the payment of dividends (so shareholders could pay for the tax on their share of the profits). Of course, dividends wouldn't be taxed separately. The biggest obstacle I can see is a logistical one: determing each shareholder's share of income would be an administrative nightmare.

"New Face, Yes, But With Ideas Dating To '30s" IBD op-ed by Thomas Sowell:

"One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far less important than the momentous weight of responsibility that office carries.

Just the power to nominate federal judges to trial courts and appellate courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, can have an enormous impact for decades to come. There is no point feeling outraged by things done by federal judges if you vote on the basis of emotion for those who appoint them."