Hey, remember this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What a joke that’s become!

In the guise of campaign finance “reform” both the federal and state governments are with increasing frequency passing laws that violate the highest law — the U.S. Constitution.

[Washington Post] Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of this desert community believes that you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.

Last October, Galassini became annoyed — like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government — about the city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent e-mails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”

State law — this is the state of John McCain, apostle of political purification through the regulation of political speech — says that anytime two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.” This transformation triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filing forms, establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has raised no money and does not intend to. This must be done before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.

Galassini wrote to ask the clerk if it would be permissible for her to e-mail the 23 persons telling them the demonstrations were canceled — she got no response — and told the clerk, “This is all so confusing to me.” Confusion and inconvenience — Galassini could have made an appointment for tutoring by the clerk’s office concerning permissible speech — are probably intended consequences of laws designed to burden political speech that is potentially inconvenient for government. Galassini gave up trying to influence the vote.

She gave up. This was exactly why our founders created the Bill of Rights — so that Ms. Galassini wouldn’t ever have to “give up” petitioning her government! Sadly, our First Amendment rights are currently useless given the majority that makes up our South African Constitution-loving supreme court. Seriously, what’s the difference between our current speech laws and those which King George enforced?

Here’s a great tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, by Kevin Williamson:

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

Last year the founder of the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can satisfy only economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

Paraphrasing President Obama, one job of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to determine if a business is making ‘too much profit.’ Mr. Obama is correct in his assessment that nobody is entitled to “a certain amount of profit,” but where he runs frighteningly amok is taking that assessment to mean that government should be the decider, rather than the American consumer.

Mr. Obama’s statement is quite telling, and scary too: Recall the former Soviet Union leaders used to brag that they suffered no bankruptcies in the USSR — the reason being that one can never have a bankruptcy if there is no private property, or private ownership of business. The president told us in 2008 that his wish was to “fundamentally transform America.” Judging by his words below, he wasn’t kidding. And he wonders why so many Americans fear him, and think he’s a socialist or communist?

President Obama joined fellow Democrats in blasting a new fee on debit card users announced by Bank of America, arguing that banks do not have an “inherent right” to a certain amount of profits.

The bank has come under a hail of criticism after it announced it would begin charging debit card users $5 a month, blaming the move on policymakers who curbed the amount of fees they could collect from retailers.

“You don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated,” he said in an interview with ABC News. “My hope is that you’re going to see a bunch of the banks saying to themselves, ‘You know what, this is not good business practices.’”

“This is exactly why we need this [CFPB - Treasury Deparment's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau],” the president said. “We need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent stuff like this.”

Prevent stuff like what? Making a profit? Wouldn’t merchants (the banks’ customers) best determine if they’re being gouged or not rather than an unelected and unaccountable group of bureaucrats in the U.S. Treasury department? Wouldn’t consumers best decide, rather than some government bureau, if they would prefer credit cards or prepaid cards?

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out recently, here’s how government grows: It (1) either creates a real problem or invents a mythical one, then (2) proposes and enacts a “solution” to that problem. (3) Repeat steps 1 & 2.

So in this case the Democrat Congress, under the Durbin Amendment, invented the problem — that the economy was harmed by debit card fees that were too high for merchants — then enacted the solution, the Durbin Amendment, which by government fiat cut in half banks’ debit profitability, telling them that they could only charge 24 cents per debit transaction (from 44 cents).

This “solution” to an imaginary “problem” was typical liberally-activist government arrogance stemming from a belief that its “experts” could devise better economic engineering than that of 300 million consumers acting collectively.

It also smacks of hypocrisy in the form of propping up one kind of crony corporatism (bowing to the retail lobby) even as they demonize another (banking).

Here’s how the Democrat’s “solution” will affect you: less consumer choices — not just Bank of America, but the rest, like Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, Regions, and Morgan Chase, for starters, are now eliminating free checking and charging annual fees for debit-card holders, as well as eliminating many points programs.

According to CNN, “Your debit card may soon be denied for purchases greater than $100 — or even as little as $50.”

Hey, but thank heavens the government is “protecting us.”

Even worse, Mr. Obama must hate poor people. Without free checking, many poor Americans will be forced into costly high-percentage paycheck-cashers and money lenders. (Hello Amscot!)

Worst of all, the Durbin Amendment is a jobs killer: According to Portfolio.com, “the majority of startups and entrepreneurs often use their personal accounts as the initial run of funding. They count on the perks they can collect as ways to reward their staffs, especially when they can’t always afford the high-flying salaries of the past.”

Sorry, small business!

This is especially true for the smaller banks and credit unions that cannot absorb the financial loss:

The most noticeable change will likely be the closure of bank branches, reversing a decade-long growth. Branches today serve as customer-recruitment centers, as customers, once enrolled, do much of their banking electronically, by ATM or online. By making many new customers unprofitable, however, the Durbin amendment eliminates the incentive to compete by offering more branches.

Citing the negative impact of the Durbin amendment and other regulations on customer profitability, Texas-based IBC bank recently announced its decision to close 55 supermarket-based branches, eliminating 500 jobs, rather than increasing banking fees. Other banks will inevitably follow suit.

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not. Banking will become less innovative and consumer-friendly.

No word yet from President Obama if large chain retailers will next be investigated by the CFPB for earning “a certain amount of profit.”

Free speech for me, but not for thee? That seems to be the message in New Orleans. The video is courtesy of the Media Research Center.

And I do love the part where city councilwoman Susan Guidry orders the police to take down the signs (on private property, no less) citing “public safety.” She admits she doesn’t even yet herself know what law the man is breaking by putting up the signs (did I mention on his private property?) and goes on to rattle off a few “maybes” as the cops take them down. “Maybe it’s the size of the signs…” Or, maybe Ms. Guidry is only for free speech that’s not critical of her ideological leanings? And while we’re at it, maybe we should also remove ATMs in the name of public safety too, since that’s were people are commonly mugged. That’s the message she seems to be making — people might do violence to the man, so we’ll punish him rather than those who might do violence.

As to the woman complaining he posted no anti-Bush signs. Seriously? You know how many times I’ve read “Bush Chimp” or “Bush lied” or anti-Bush Katrina signs (including in trips to New Orleans). Pleeeeease!

This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg about the fallacy-laden arguments that occur over time when the government gets its nose into something it never should have and then people attempt to disconnect that market intrusion many years later.

In his 1973 Libertarian Manifesto, the late Murray Rothbard argued that the biggest obstacle in the road out of serfdom was “status quo bias.” In society, we’re accustomed to rapid change. “New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly.” Not so with government. When it comes to police or firefighting or sanitation, government must do those things because that’s what government has (allegedly) always done.

“So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services,” Rothbard laments, “that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.” The libertarian who wants to get the government out of a certain business is “treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial.”

If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, writes Rothbard, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. “How could you?” defenders of the status quo would squeal. “You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes . . . if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? . . . What material would they use? . . . Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”

It’s worth keeping this fable in mind as the reaction to last week’s CNN–Tea Party Express debate hardens into popular myth. Moderator Wolf Blitzer had asked Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) what should happen if a man refuses to get health insurance and then has a medical crisis. Paul — a disciple of Rothbard — explained that freedom is about taking risks. “But, congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

At this point, a few boneheads in the audience shouted “Yeah!” and clapped, though liberal pundits and activists imagine they saw an outpouring of support.

Paul calmly replied that he’s not in favor of letting the man die. A physician who began his career before Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, Paul noted that hospitals were never in the practice of turning away patients in need. “We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves,” he observed. “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”

Read the rest. It’s great stuff. Government doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It makes one wonder how people think we educated ourselves prior to the advent of the Department of Education.

Here’s a great excerpt from Andrew McCarthy:

Say a governor and state legislature had enacted a scheme to establish a state religion, or at least to advantage one religion over others. One could argue that this was — or was not — unwise policy. It certainly seems as hostile to liberty as the idea of coercing a citizen to buy a commodity as a condition of citizenship. Yet, for the first 160 years of governance under the federal constitution, there would have been nothing objectionable about it under U.S. law. Until the Supreme Court suddenly decided to “incorporate” the Establishment Clause against the states, the First Amendment was no bar. The federal government, as Jefferson put it, was “interdicted from intermeddling” in matters of religion — religion was an issue left to the states and their citizens, and we trusted them to handle it responsibly.

That is the way our system is supposed to work. The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them — and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things — meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society — which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

One last post on the London riots a couple of weeks ago, in this case an observation from Jonah Goldberg.

If you begin a sentence saying that nothing excuses wanton mob violence and theft, but refuse to come to a full-stop with a period or, better yet, an exclamation point, you know that there’s a “but” coming that will invalidate all of the platitudes that came before it. When someone says, “There’s no excuse for violence, but . . . ,” that “but” is a Pandora’s box of leftist banshees that have left human wreckage in their wake for millennia.

Ultimately, the Left’s weakness for riots stems, I believe, from two things: statist paternalism and power-worship. It’s an amazingly reactionary sentiment when you think about it. The lower classes are savages who need the benign power of the state to keep them from acting on their savage instincts. When the state doesn’t nurture and civilize them, the urban masses revert to their animal natures. The Left doesn’t condone the violence, of course, they just say the violence is to be expected when conservatives cut social spending. Or as I put it in my column, “In other words, the cuts don’t justify the violence, but the threat of violence justifies avoiding cuts.” On a cynical level, when the lower classes rise up and wreak havoc, the self-appointed spokesmen for society’s “victims” see an opportunity to press their advantage. They hold up the mob like a Medusa’s Head, to petrify the bourgeoisie into making ever more concessions.

As for power worship, there’s always been something about the power of crowds that seduces the leftist mind (see Liberal Fascism). There’s also something about the “authenticity” of street thugs that’s intoxicating to liberals and way too many young people generally, particularly if there’s a racial component thrown in. (If the Black Panthers were white, everyone would instantly recognize them as indistinguishable from neo-Nazis.) How else to explain how so many middle class and even upper class criminals got caught up in this authentic expression of lumpenproletarian rage?

Andrew McCarthy has a great observation in last weekend’s GOP debate, which found Mitt Romney utilizing Federalism in order to attack Obamacare even as he (still, foolishly) defends Romneycare — mandates by a state versus the federal government. While McCarthy believes Romney’s recent discovery of Federalism is simply a convenient ploy to deflect criticisms, he finds Romney’s argument nonetheless factually perfect.

The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them — and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things — meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society — which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

If I were living in Massachusetts (or anyplace else), I would argue that health care is not a corporate asset and that it’s none of anyone’s business whether I choose to buy coverage. But if I lost that debate, and if the coercive mandate law bothered me enough, I could move to some state where the law was different. Or I might decide that, in the greater scheme of things, life in Massachusetts was worth enduring the nuisance and costs of state policies to which I objected. But in either event, none of my calculations would be the concern of someone living in, say, Colorado — at least as long as he wasn’t being made to pay for it.

To the contrary, Romney’s competitors opined that the federal constitution barred states like Massachusetts from imposing an individual mandate as part of an effort to ensure that every citizen in the state was covered. And from there, the putative champions of limited government went haywire. Some want gay marriage banned. Some want abortion banned and criminalized. If you listened to them long enough, it was like listening to Democrats: If I disapprove of it, surely it must be prohibited. If I approve, surely it must be the law.

I confess to thinking we’ve lost our way. The Framers gave us a federal constitution for a confident, self-determining people — people who could be trusted to make sensible choices, to govern themselves through legislation rather than be strait-jacketed in the uncompromising logic of law.

… [Our overspending woes and massive national debt] gets solved only by drastically slashing the functions of the central government. It gets solved by zeroing out departments, agencies, and bureaucracies; by returning those functions to the states so that the people directly affected can decide what ought to be done and how much they’re willing to pay for it — not with other people’s money but with their own.

What does McCarthy forecast our chances of this occurring? Zero! Heh. That’s hardly the attitude that brought down King George, eh Andrew?

There was a great commentary today by Bill McGurn regarding the state of religious freedom in America today, and where that’s trending (hint, not up). McGurn’s opinion cited a recent case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which the Supreme Court agreed to hear shortly.

The background of the case centers on a teacher working at this small religious school who was fired for breaking a church belief of taking church disputes outside the community (in this case punitive action against the teacher due to absenteeism). But what’s really on trial here isn’t one teacher or one school, rather the idea that the First Amendment guarantees the freedom to exercise ones religion (not just a freedom to believe, but exercising it) based on the rules that religion.

At the core of their concern is just this: the politically correct rewriting of the First Amendment. Post-1791, what made America’s religious freedom truly radical was not simply that it allowed people to worship (or not to worship) as they saw fit. The radical part was the guarantee it gave to corporate freedoms: to hold property together, to own newspapers, to run schools, to open hospitals and clinics, etc.

That understanding is now up for grabs. Last week, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said approval for a local merger that would create a new Catholic hospital system will depend on maintaining a “public mission”—by which he means the performance of procedures, such as sterilization, at odds with church teaching.

In San Francisco, opponents of circumcision recently attempted to outlaw it via state ballot. The California State University system has been found within its legal rights to deem a Christian fraternity and sorority unfit for recognition. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board declared that two Catholic colleges are not in fact Catholic.

These are not cases of people trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Instead they involve the question whether faith communities are free to live their own beliefs in their own institutions. Somehow the more “tolerant” we become, the more difficult that becomes.

Given: in cases of a religion forbidding modern medicine or pharmaceuticals, etc., which leads to death, particularly that of a child who has no power to decide for themselves, this issue becomes more complex. But in the case of a an adult teacher joining a private institution knowing full well its rules, I have no sympathy. When you join a particular group, you submit to that communities values and policies — and this, by the way, is a principle pillar of rationale behind the 10th Amendment and Federalism (The U.S. Constitution defined specific power, yielding all others to the states and the people, i.e. communities, whereas the states could define any powers except those bestowed to the federal government via the Constitution. Don’t like your state, you can move and force the other 49 to compete).

That is, if one can simply force a group to mend its beliefs — albeit justified when being deprived of life, liberty or pursuit of happiness — the very definition of a “group” becomes meaningless.

Here’s the best retort and thought of the week on what I call the entitlement-hooligan riots in the U.K.

Presumably, London-type riots would not last long in either Texas, or Arizona. — Adam Baldwin on twitter.

Indeed. Thank God for the Second Amendment. I say thank God rather than “Thank Jefferson” because even Jefferson would have understood that such a right is natural, bestowed by The Creator, or if you’re not religious at very least by virtue of having been born a human being. Contrast that with the grand Ponzi scheme, house-of-cards, and castle built on sand known as the Entitlement State, which you better believe is bestowed by consent of the government, rather than by the governed. Things legislated as exceptions and fractions have grown into behemoths as rule and whole. Even so, fully expect that as our 80-million-checks a month government grows amok such riots will no doubt begin here once those government dole checks end. That’s the trap of Socialism-lite — rather difficult to replug that genie once it’s out.