Financial Tabloid

The Wall Street Journal is an excellent newspaper on many levels, but it does have a character flaw: its coverage of Wall Street includes tabloid-like stories such as the one it ran recently on Goldman Sachs.

In the story, the Journal discusses a hamburger-eating contest among Goldman's mortgage traders after bonuses were paid in December 2007. It is ostensibly part of the story's theme, which is Goldman's "take-no-prisoners attitude".

Or the guys were just having some silly fun.

Moreover, the story only lets the reader know on the back pages in the second half of the article that any money wagered was donated to charity.

The public may have a prurient interest in the behavior of some on Wall Street. It doesn't mean it is the proper journalistic target of one of the nation's leading newspapers.

The Left Knows

Smart leftists know that their policies will cause various economic damage, even though they seek to hide that fact in public debate.

Andy Stein, who resigned this week as head of Service Employees International Union, was Barack Obama's biggest supporter in the 2008 presidential election. Stein has the SEIU contribute $85 million to help Obama and the Democrats win in 2008.

As quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Stein once said: "Western Europe, as much as we used to make fun of it, has made different trade-offs which may have ended with a little more unemployment but a lot more equality."

Funny how Barack Obama didn't make that idea part of his 2008 campaign.

SEC Malfeasance

You have no doubt hear all about the big news coming out of the Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday.

If you think I'm referring to its lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, that's because the SEC got away with its Goldman bomb to deflect attention from its malfeasance in the Standford Group's $8 billion Ponzi scheme.

The SEC's own inspector general investigated the SEC's actions (or more accurately inactions) regarding Stanford. And the report, buried on the SEC's website, paints a devastating picture of the regulatory agency defaulting on its core mission - to protect investors from fraud.

The SEC's investigators believed Stanford was a Ponzi scheme in 1997 and referred the case to its enforcement division to prosecute. If the SEC had done this, most of the $8 billion of money lost would have never occurred - since Standford's Ponzi scheme grew in size and scope over the next 11 years.

When the inspector general asked why the case against Stanford wasn't brought, he was told the SEC preferred to bring cases against prominent firms that we easy to win.

Naturally the Democrats response to the financial crisis is to give more money and authority to such a bankrupt organization.

And when the SEC does bring case, such as the one against Goldman Sachs, don't assume it does so for honorable reasons.

GM Lies

General Motors ran an advertisement in today's Wall Street Journal saying "We've repaid out government loan. In full. With interest."

This is consistent with a column GM's CEO wrote with the same message.

There is one problem with this.

It isn't true.

The government originally lent GM tens of billions of dollars, most of which was converted into equity during GM's bankruptcy. A small portion remained as a loan.

So what GM has done is repay the small portion that remained as a loan. But the vast majority of the original loan remains unpaid as GM equity. And it is very unlikely GM will ever make enough money for taxpayers to get their money back.

If you want to buy an American car from a company that doesn't have government money invested in it - buy Ford.

Healthcare, Lombardy-style

This Wall Street Journal article discusses the impact of private sector competition on the quality of healthcare in the Lombardy region of Italy.

Italy has a national healthcare system, including long waiting lists for critical care typical of socialized medicine. In 1997, the government decentralized authority to the various Italian regions to allow them to innovate. In Lombardy, the government encouraged private sector hospitals to compete with the public ones, who previously received all of the government funding.

The result? Healthcare quality has increased, while costs have been contained, in Lombardy relative to the rest of Italy. The Wall Street Journal quotes a local surgeon: "Up to 10 years ago my patients had to wait months for heart surgery. Now, in Lombardy, it can be done almost immediately, in both state-run and private hospitals."

The last point, about state-run and private hospitals both not having wait lists, deserves particular attention, because it highlights an often-poorly understand aspect of the free market. The competition and innovation that a private enterprise introduces into the market forces the government-owned enterprise to improve its operations - otherwise patients and customers will flee the government-owned facility for the private one.

This is critical to hospitals (85% of the hospitals in the U.S. are not-for-profits but the for-profit ones provide critical innovation and competition to keep the not-for-profit ones operating efficiently); and insurance (where studies have shown that the for-profit insurers drive innovation in the market that the mutual or not-for-profit insurers then emulate to maintain their competitiveness).

And it would be true in public education if a robust voucher system was implemented, where truly competitive education markets would improve the quality of public schools as they would be forced to be competitive with charter or private schools.

Obama's healthcare reform (and for that matter his efforts on education) are a giant step in the wrong direction. Obama is unleashing the power of government, and controlling private actors, in his healthcare plan. Quality of patient care will suffer.

War is Peace

You might think that the resolution of the political crisis in Honduras last year with a presidential election might have ended the matter.

But you would be wrong.

Recall that the Obama administration took the side of Hugo Chavez's ally, former president Manuel Zelaya, after the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest Zelaya for violating the Honduras constitution.

Chavez claimed this was a coup, which became the Obama administration's position, despite the fact that Zelaya was arrested according to Honduran law. In fact, the Law Library of Congress, an American institution, reviewed the situation and agreed that Zelaya was removed from office in accordance with the Honduran constitution.

Now we learn from the Wall Street Journal that two Democratic Congressional aides, Fulton Armstrong who works for Senator John Kerry, and Peter Quilter who works for Congressman Howard Berman, recently attended a dinner organized by U.S. ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens with members of the Honduran cabinet.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Armstrong and Quilter told the cabinet members that in order to have good relations with the U.S., they should accept the Obama administration's position that Zelaya was removed by a coup and not by the rule of law.

America's policy to Honduras in the Zelaya matter has been one of the most outrageous acts in foreign policy history - siding with a dictator and his ally against the rule of law and the desire for freedom by Hondurans.

And to add insult to injury, the Democrats are literally trying to re-write history so they can save face politically - domestically to help them refute that they sided with a dictator and internationally so they can show how tough the Obama administration cab be.

Tragically, the Obama administration is being tough with allies like Honduras and Israel and soft on enemies like Iran and Venezuela. It is, and will prove to be, a disaster for America and her allies. This is what happens when a man becomes president with a leftist worldview.

Liberty and the Left

One of the things that isn't realized by many Americans is how much the left despise America's founding principles, in particular the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal on a debate at Shimer College about its future direction helps illustrate this.

Shimer is a very small liberal arts school focused on a Great Books curriculum. It lost students and was short on money, so it hired a new President, Tom Lindsay, to help revive the school

As part of his efforts, Lindsay changed the mission statement, noting that the word "liberal" in "liberal education" has the same root word as "liberty", that the "highest liberty consists in freedom of the mind", and that studying the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Federalist Papers were an important part of a liberal education.

You might think such a statement was uncontroversial. But then you may not be familiar with leftist ideology and the modern American college. As noted in my column "Is Healthcare a Right?", the left despises the principles of individual rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence, so such a mission statement is fighting words to the left.

In response, one professor said: "Code words for the right wing." One student said: "Words that tea-baggers throw around." And the mention of America's founding documents caused concern, described as "chauvinistic" by one student.

The fundamental problem is that freedom, the scorned "liberty" to leftists, is incompatible with equality of result. In the most generous interpretation, the left throws freedom overboard in its pursuit of wealth redistribution to try to achieve equal outcomes. The less generous interpretation is that the left seeks to control individuals, as all collectivists throughout history have tried to do, and the welfare state is the latest manifestation of that desire to control humanity.

This understanding helps explain why the left despises America, because America really does represent ideas and values inimical to the left's beliefs. And it is why the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and liberty are fighting words to a leftist.

Is Healthcare a Right?

The fundamental driver of the left's desire to create socialized medicine and pass Obama's healthcare legislation is the belief that healthcare is a right that the government must secure for all people. Specifically, this means that if a person can't afford to pay for healthcare themselves, the government should pay for it.

At some level, it sounds like the left is taking the principles of the Declaration of Independence and applying it to a new area of public policy. It is worth repeating here the critical passage from the Declaration:

All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted amongst Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed.

The right to life can be thought of as a person owning their own life, that nothing is more precious than your life being your own to live and not to live at the dictate of another.

The right to liberty reflects the right to think and act for oneself, that the distinctive means by which a person lives is through the use of their mind, and that for another to control or limit the freedom to think for oneself is to subvert this most profound means of human survival.

The right to the pursuit of happiness reflects the need to translate your thoughts into concrete actions, that nature requires effort to achieve your goals, and that you should be free to pursue your own goals to achieve your own personal happiness.

While these may seem "self-evident" to us as they did to Thomas Jefferson when he wrote them, they reflect a radical vision of human existence as compared to the vast sweep of human history - where tribes, kings, emperors, and religious leaders claimed ownership of a person's life, the right to dictate what they should think and believe, and the right to control their actions.

One fundamental aspect of these rights is that they are held equally by all people (the "all Men are created equal" part articulates this), so for something to be a "right", it must not infringe another person's rights. As Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas said: "My freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin." Or in other words, Bill Gates has the same rights, no more but no less, as the poorest man in the country.

So it is worth asking: is government-provided healthcare a "right"?

To secure such a "right", either the government has to tax someone to pay for it or coerce a doctor or healthcare provider to provide healthcare services - but whether by taxation or coercion, another person's rights are violated (in this case, their own right to the pursuit of happiness) to make the "right to healthcare" a reality.

To paraphrase William O. Douglas: "the right to pursue my happiness by securing access to healthcare must be limited by the proximity of your wallet."

If you say in objection, isn't this an argument against all forms of welfare spending, the answer is: it is.

And that is why the left despises the founding principles of America, the Declaration of Independence, individual rights, and capitalism (as the economic system that reflects individual rights). A leftist wants to deprive some people of their rights, so the government can steal their money to give to someone the leftist wants to have it instead.

It used to the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who most strongly believed these principles as the basis for governing America. It is one of the great tragedy's of American history that the party of Jefferson became the party that led the revolt against the principles of the Declaration of Independence.