From the Washington Whispers blog:

President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

Almost makes Al Gore seem like a conservationist.

Our resident legal and constitutional scholar Dave Kopel participated in this incredibly important amicus brief for the 4th circuit court of appeals. The amicus argues that the individual mandate to buy health insurance found in ObamaCare is not constitutional, neither through the commerce clause nor the necessary and proper clause. The brief was filed by the Washington Legal Foundation, in Virginia v. Sebelius. The lead attorney is Ilya Somin, of George Mason Law School. You can read more about Ilya Somin and his writing over at the Volokh Conspiracy law blog where Dave also contributes. I have a strong feeling that this case will be yet another blow dealt to the individual mandate and ObamaCare in general.

Outstanding essay on the disaster in Libya and President Obama’s failure to act, by Larry Diamond in The New Republic. Diamond mainly discusses the consequences for the Libyan people, but I think that the harm will be global. Barack Obama’s America is showing itself to be a paper tiger; and every one of America’s enemies, especially the tyrants in Iran and Venezuela, are realizing that they can step up their aggression. If Gaddafi stays, he will resume his nuclear and chemical warfare plans and his support of global terrorism, secure in the knowledge that this American President will do nothing to stop him, unless the Russians and Chinese give permission. This week is may be one that will cause terrible problems for the United States for decades to come, comparable to the week when Khomenei seized power in Iran.

I’ve previously defended President Obama’s enthusiasm for golf, but the picture of the American President going on television to announce his predictions in a college basketball tournament, while America’s interests and long-term security are in imminent peril, is disconcerting. Whatever Barack Obama’s virtues, Hillary Clinton was right: he was not ready for the 3 a.m. phone call; and it appears that he never will be.

The Colorado Springs Gazette’s reliably pro-liberty, pro-free market editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen responds to President Obama’s recent call for business to “do for America” by hiring American workers and supporting the American economy:

Obama wants businesses “to hire American workers.” Because he says so? Businesses will hire workers when efforts to “do for America” result in the need for assistance from new employees. They will “support the American economy” and “invest in this nation” by providing goods, services and commodities that improve the lives of Americans. They will do for America just as an athlete will run fast. But they won’t enter the race unless they are certain it’s not rigged against them.

When businesses quit trying to do for America, it’s usually because government is choosing winners and losers. When farmers grow too much corn, rather than crops Americans want and need, it’s because government pays them to.

Remember when banks made big loans to businesses that sought to “do for America?” That was back when a bank had to “do for America” in order to make money and survive. Then the federal government, at the insistence of former President George W. Bush, handed out billions in bailout funds — even to banks that weren’t failing. That’s when large banks stopped trying to “do for America.” That’s when their business models changed and they began hoarding cash — without the need to do much at all for America.

President Obama, do what you have spoken of. Work to skillfully extract government from the marketplace. Let businesses fight for their lives, which will force them to “do for America” and hire new employees.

Read the whole thing here.

It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance that some people are capable of. To hold two completely opposing viewpoints at the same time takes talent. For example, the left understands and readily promotes taxing things to reduce them. They want to tax cigarettes, candy, soda, gasoline, and all kinds of fun in order to get less of it. Obviously they are right. You tax something, you get less of it. Tax is just another way of saying “raise the price of” or “make more expensive.” By the same token, when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidize is just another way of saying “make cheaper.” The left again shows its understanding of basic economics by advocating subsidies to things they like – namely “green” energy and other feel good projects. So far, so good.

Where does the dissonance come in? Despite the left’s understanding of intuitive economics, they only apply these basic tautologies when they reinforce their policy beliefs. Ironically enough, they suddenly forget what they know when it’s not helpful and the cost becomes too high. In other words, in some cases the correct economic belief acts like a tax on their irrational worldview. Take for example this article in the Denver Daily News on ObamaCare. The Republicans insist that ObamaCare, with all its mandates, new regulations, taxes, and controls will undoubtedly raise the cost of health care and hurt businesses looking to hire employees. The Democrats predictably disagree with this conclusion and deny that ObamaCare will hurt workers looking for a job and the businesses trying to hire them.

At first glance these two opposing views are easy to dismiss out of hand. They both reflect each side’s preconceived worldview and policy positions. Therefore, we must apply first principles to get at the root of who is right and who is wrong. Last I checked, economic laws have not changed since ObamaCare was passed. When you raise the price of something, you still get less of it. It stands to reason that raising the cost of hiring employees would result in getting less employees. Instead of a business paying an employee’s salary plus the old taxes, now they’ve got to pay the employee’s salary, the old taxes, plus the new taxes imposed by ObamaCare. The cost of hiring an additional employee just got higher.

If Congress were really interested in “stimulating” job growth, they’d make hiring employees LESS costly, not MORE costly. Undue the onerous regulations on businesses. Quit taxing them at ever increasing rates. Quit forcing businesses to pay for the goodies that Congress mandates. Allow them to contract with whomever they want for whatever wage they both agree on. These are things that would spur growth. Crushing business with new taxes and regulations is exactly the opposite of job growth – it’s job death.

Just a few days ago, the Colorado Springs Gazette published a fantastic op-ed on ObamaCare. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: another one? Yes, another one. But this one is special. This op-ed actually gave me hope – real hope – not that superficial, chanting like a zombie type hope we were sold in 2008. The article touches on the Republican pledge to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare. It’s usually the “replace” part of it that gets me feeling uneasy. (Replace it with what?) Anyhow, the Gazette does a fine job of giving the bright side of this whole mess.

Namely that:

The GOP is likely to slow implementation by refusing to fund much of the plan. ObamaCare opponents may help elect a new president in 2012 who permits a full repeal. Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to declare the meat of the program — which requires individuals to buy private health insurance — as unconstitutional.

OR, in another tasty alternative to the hopeful outlook: ObamaCare could collapse on its own.

It does nothing substantial to increase the supply of health care resources, while entitling 30 million additional consumers to consume health care at the same rate as those who have paid for it. The government has promised coverage, which isn’t the same as care. It’s hard to see how this could result in anything other than rationing and waiting for those who have historically paid for front-of-the-line medical services or pre-paid for them with insurance they earn or buy.

See, there are reasons to be hopeful. Personally I’d be happy with either outcome. Full collapse would not be pleasant, but it might be the medicine the general public needs to get off the “free” health care train. Usually that’s exactly what it takes to rid us of our wildest delusions: sober reality.

What’s so enjoyable about this particular op-ed is the part that normally makes me uneasy. When the Gazette talks about how to “replace” ObamaCare, I’m heartened. They conclude that the reason we’re in the whole health care mess is precisely because we never had a free market in health care to begin with. Think about every other sector of the economy that remains relatively free: computers, cameras, automobiles, airlines, the shake weight. In each sector we have falling prices coupled with greater quality over time. This is just not the case with health care and insurance largely because consumers of health insurance are not the final customer paying the bill, unlike with car insurance.

The whole third party pay deal has got to go. How come there are no geckos trying to sell you health insurance? Why no “Flo’s?” Why no Army generals? No All-State hands in the field goal nets? No Esurance cartoons? How come? Because health insurance companies are not trying to court you for business. They don’t have to. Think about the last time you asked your doctor how much a certain procedure was going to cost? Maybe never right? Add to it the fact that we have a whole arsenal of mandates, both state and national, and suddenly I’m paying for mental health insurance and maternity care. No wonder health care costs so damn much. Give us a free market in health care please!

The Encyclopedia Britannica Blog is running a series this week assessing the Obama presidency. My entry, with the title above, argues that President Obama has been successful at promoting gun control, taking into account the fact that Obama has faced a Congress with strong pro-gun majorities, and that the Obama administration determined to spend its finite political capital on other issues. For a person who supports the agenda of the gun control lobbies, but who does not agree with the lobbies’ assertion that gun control is politically popular, President Obama’s low-key strategy has been intelligent and productive.

Both sides of the aisle talk about the “echo chamber” and how important it is to have one that can out-trumpet the other. An echo chamber, for those wondering what I’m talking about, is an effect achieved through coordinating the efforts of various communication outlets working together to spread a message. For example, a blogger uncovers this amazing story that reveals X, then a bigger blogger picks up on it and writes about X, which in turn catches the eye of the two guys running Complete Colorado therefore tipping off more bloggers, and then news sources are forced to acknowledge X and cover it. If you’re lucky enough, Drudge eventually picks up on X and alerts the whole nation to it. When small time and big time news outlets successfully come together to advance a certain narrative, the echo chamber effect can be massive and influential – in other words – massively influential.

Typically the left has had the bigger and better echo chamber. Although those on the center-right have come together in the last couple of years to create a rather effective machine of their own. (Take a look at Peoples Press Collective and Complete Colorado for example). Also typical of an echo chamber is its do-it-yourself mentality and grassroots beginnings.

Knowing all of this, you might be as surprised as I am to find out that the left’s echo chamber has extended far beyond any DIY or grassroots effort. Like waking up one morning to find you’ve got a winning lottery ticket on your nightstand, the left has hit the echo chamber’s version of Powerball. In addition to their successful Colorado Democracy Alliance (CODA) organization, they’ve also got the biggest, baddest slugger in the big leagues batting clean-up for them – the establishment media.

Imagine the clout an echo chamber could have if any message they wanted out there and popularized would be parroted by the establishment media. Let’s just say for the sake of argument, that someone, somewhere wanted to trumpet to the world that skyrocketing health care costs had nothing to do with ObamaCare. Maybe the story would originate from a press release sent from an official department of the state of Colorado. Perhaps a local and usually fair and balanced business news outlet would report on it. Then maybe a local, leftist news website would trumpet the press release as God’s spoken words, along with their lefty affiliates here and here. Suddenly, the establishment newspaper of record cannot abstain from parroting the narrative themselves in their own piece. Even silly news outlets join the party with their own facsimiles.

If, and this is one mighty large if, that ever happened here in Colorado, we at the Independence Institute would not take it lying down. We would probably ask our Health Care Policy Center gurus Linda Gorman and Brian Schwartz to respond to the insane propaganda being trumpeted from sea to shining sea. Brian Schwartz might respond by pointing to something like this from the Cato Institute. Health Care Policy Center director Linda Gorman might respond, being the brilliant genius she is, with something along the lines of this:

• John Deere, Verizon, Caterpillar, McDonald’s, Boeing, and AARP, among others, both operate insurance plans and have publicly stated that ObamaCare is going to raise their costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. They have acted on their claims. Show me the numbers.
• Commissioner Morrison says that the Division of Insurance is “in the process of reviewing rates.”  Still, she knows that federal health reforms have “contributed from zero to a maximum of 5 percent of those increases. It’s not the primary cause for increasing rates.”
• Perhaps an explanation of how Commissioner Morrison arrived at her conclusion will have to wait until the Division spends the $1 million it got from the Obama Administration to, in the words of Governor Ritter, “educate consumers about health insurance.”
• Milliman estimates that HMO increases will be 9.0% for January 2011 renewal and 11.0% for PPO renewal. So, if the ObamaCare increase is “just” 5% of those increases it is responsible for half or more of the 2011 premium increases. Perhaps she means that it is just 5% of 9%, or (.05)*(.09) which equals .0045% and, given my premiums, is equal to $3.00 a month for three people. Her analysis can see such a small amount? It is truly powerful and we must bow before it.
• AARP, Caterpillar, Boeing, Aetna, John Deere, Verizon and McDonalds are raising deductibles and co-pays or dropping their health insurance plans. While these changes may not be reflected in premiums, they are reflected in higher co-pays and deductibles. They are also reflected by the fact that the availability of child only health insurance policies and mini-med policies has been severely compromised by the advent of ObamaCare. This is a cost, but it conveniently isn’t included in “premiums.”
• The Division claims that most of these are due to medical cost increases—does she think that ObamaCare has no effect on medical costs? Remember the device taxes? The health information technology requirements? The slacker mandate? Guaranteed issue requirements? The required increases in vision and dental coverage for the kiddies? They don’t take effect until later? Yep, we all know that businesses don’t anticipate cost increases.

But really… who knows? I can’t predict what would happen if the left really did have the mainstream media parroting their talking points. It’s a good thing we don’t have to worry about anything like that right?

Constitutional mistakes just keep coming out of the Denver Post.

One was the editorial board’s assessment that “ObamaCare” is somehow constitutional.

Two more mistakes have just come from Post columnist Mike Littwin. In his Oct. 23 profile of the Tea Party Littwin wrote, that “the founders’ visions were often in complete opposition.”

Actually, the Founders’ visions were remarkably consistent — their disagreements were about how best to achieve common goals. Those common goals included a limited, republican federal government held to trust-style standards and protecting personal liberty. (American dissenters from those goals were called “Tories” and fled the country or dropped out of public life after the Revolution.) You can find the details in my new book The Original Constitution: What It Really Said and Meant.

Littwin returned with another column on October 27, in which if he didn’t make an error, he certainly left an mistaken impression.

He wrote “It was only recently that O’Donnell was laughed at by a group of law students . . . for saying that the separation of church and state was not guaranteed by the First Amendment. It’s an old argument, since the words themselves aren’t in the Constitution. But it was Thomas Jefferson, one of your more important founders, who did say exactly that in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists concluding that the First Amendment built ‘a wall of separation between Church & State.’”

What Littwin apparently doesn’t understand is that “separation of church and state” meant something different to Jefferson than it means in discourse today.

Today the term is used for the view that both federal and state governments must divorce themselves from all religious recognition, even at the risk of seeming anti-religion. Believers in this view are called “strict separationists.”

That was hardly Jefferson’s view, since when he was governor of Virginia he supported religious holidays and blasphemy laws.

Actually (as most recent scholarship confirms), the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment meant only that the federal government could not establish a national church or otherwise favor some religions over others. My own research on the subject appears here.
[For the future, please note that Jefferson is not a very reliable source of constitutional meaning anyway, since he was in France when the Constitution was drafted and ratified.]

Senate candidates Ken Buck and Christie O’Donnell have gotten a lot of flak for saying they don’t buy the current notion of “separation of church and state.” Critics have tried to portray this as an opinion that is somehow looney or extremist. If so, then the current Supreme Court of the United States is looney or extremist, because it doesn’t agree with strict separation, either.

The Politico website is reporting that the Obama administration is asking Congress to amend one of the many odious burdens on free-enterprise contained in the massive tax bill health care reform bill, H.R. 3590 (aka Obama Care). According to Politico:

The Obama administration Monday urged senators to scale back a tax reporting requirement in the health care law. The law requires businesses to track all cumulative purchases from vendors that total $600 or more in one year. The provision was designed to raise revenue for the health care law but has been universally panned by the business community, which anticipates a mountain of new paperwork to comply.

The amendment, from Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), would scale back the reporting requirements to cumulative purchases of more than $5,000 per year and exclude companies with fewer than 25 employees. So far, no Republicans have voiced support for the amendment.

“We are committed to reducing the gap between taxes legally owed and taxes paid,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Monday. “However, the administration believes that the burden created on businesses by the new information reporting requirement on purchases of goods that exceed $600, as included in Section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code as modified by Section 9006 of the Affordable Care Act, is too great.”

Almost sounds like the administration is seeking some reasonable middle ground while Republicans are being obstructionist, until you read further and find out that the scaled back tax reporting requirement would be paid for by “imposing a new tax on oil companies.” Huh?

Before you try and wrap your head around the twisted logic of burdening an industry with a new tax to replace a tax reporting requirement that even the administration says is a “burden created on business” in the first place, check out the alternative:

Geithner and Sebelius said they strongly oppose the amendment from Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), which would completely repeal the 1099 provision. It would be paid for by removing money from a fund created by the health care overhaul designed to promote prevention and wellness.

On a unrelated note, if Treasury Secretary Geithner is truly committed to “reducing the gap between taxes legally owed and taxes paid,” then he really ought to be looking in his own backyard. The Washington Post recently did some digging and discovered that:

Capitol Hill employees owed $9.3 million in overdue taxes at the end of last year, a sliver of the $1 billion owed by federal workers nationwide but one with potential political ramifications for members of Congress.

One can only hope.