Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Obamacare struck down as unconstitutional by Florida judge

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Hans Bader again, writing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

A judge in Florida just declared the health care law known as “Obamacare” unconstitutional, ruling it void in its entirety. Judge Vinson rightly declared the health care law’s individual mandate unconstitutional, since the inactivity of not buying health insurance is not an “economic activity” that Congress has the power to regulate under the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Under the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Morrison (2000), which I helped litigate, only “economic activity” can be regulated under the Commerce Clause, with the possible exception of those non-economic activities that harm instrumentalities of interstate commerce or cross state lines.)

Judge Vinson also rightly declared the law as a whole unconstitutional. The health care law lacks a severability clause. So if a major provision like the individual mandate is unconstitutional — as it indeed was — then the whole law must be struck down.

[…]As I noted earlier in The Washington Examiner, “To justify preserving the rest of the law, the judge” in the earlier Virginia case “cited a 2010 Supreme Court ruling [Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB] that invalidated part of a law — but kept the rest of it in force. But that case involved a law passed almost unanimously by Congress, which would have passed it even without the challenged provision. Obamacare is totally different. It was barely passed by a divided Congress, but only as a package. Supporters admitted that the unconstitutional part of it — the insurance mandate — was the law’s heart. Obamacare’s legion of special-interest giveaways that are ‘extraneous to health care’ does not alter that.” In short, Obamacare’s individual mandate is not “volitionally severable,” as case law requires.

The individual mandate provision also was not “functionally” severable from the rest of the law, since the very Congress that passed Obamacare deemed the individual absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goals (as Judge Vinson in Florida correctly noted).

[…]Cato legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, who filed briefs against the law in Virginia, comments on today’s decision here, calling it a “victory for federalism and individual liberty

I also got two more opinions about what this means:

Not sure who to believe. An injunction would have been better.

News

Is the TSA more interested in airport security or supporting unions?

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Consider this story by Hans Bader in the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

The TSA shut the door Friday on a private airport screening program that was making the inefficient agency look bad by outperforming it in safety, innovation, and passenger satisfaction.  The TSA’s action was praised by a liberal union in Washington that expects to unionize the TSA, the American Federation of Government Employees. Its head, John Gage, applauded the Obama Administration for requiring a “federalized” government “work force.”

Previously, the Screening Partnership Program allowed airports to replace government screeners with private contractors. 16 airports did so. “But on Friday, the TSA denied an application by Springfield-Branson Airport in Missouri to privatize its checkpoint workforce, and in a statement,” TSA head John “Pistole indicated other applications likewise will be denied.” The TSA’s head said he did not see any “clear or substantial advantage” to the TSA in allowing additional airports to use private screeners, although he said that the few other airports that already use private screeners will be allowed to continue to do so.

[…]Earlier, the TSA retaliated against a veteran pilot who exposed the TSA’s security failures, taking away whistleblower Chris Liu’s credentials and firearm.

The Obama Administration is now seeking to unionize the TSA, even though the TSA was originally forbidden to unionize due to security concerns.  Unlike the TSA’s current head, all past TSA Administrators have recognized that collective bargaining and union work rules are inconsistent with the flexibility needed to protect public safety and adapt quickly to changes in terrorist tactics. (Undercover agents have managed to slip bombs past TSA screeners, and the TSA is even less effective at detecting them than the private security firms it replaced after 9/11).  The AFGE union predicted on January 21 that voting to unionize the TSA will begin by mid-March.

The problem with unionizing the TSA is that it leads to the same problems we have in public schools, where there is no concern about pleasing customers because it is impossible to fire teachers no matter how badly they perform. Is it the job of government to provide adult day care to a bunch of poorly-performing layabouts? If the TSA cannot do the job of keeping us safe, then why should be locked into hiring them? We need to have more flexibility to get the best people for the job, and that means that we cannot hire union workers who will not respond to our needs.

News

Unemployment rate in socialist Spain now above 20%

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Map of Europe
Map of Europe

Here’s the story from Yahoo News.

Excerpt:

Spain announced Friday its jobless rate surged to a 13-year record above 20 percent at the end of 2010, the highest level in the industrialized world, as the economy struggled for air.

It was more bad news for an economy fighting to regain the trust of financial markets and avoid being trapped in a debt quagmire that has engulfed Greece and Ireland and now menaces Portugal.

Another 121,900 people joined Spain’s unemployment queues in the final quarter of the year, pushing the total to 4.697 million people, said the national statistics institute INE.

The resulting unemployment rate was 20.33 percent for the end of the year — easily exceeding Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s target of 19.4 percent.

Spain appears to be stuck in a rut of staggeringly high levels of unemployment.

After posting a jobless rate of 18.83 percent in 2009 and now 20.33 percent in 2010, the government is forecasting 19.3 percent for 2011 and 17.5 percent in 2012.

The Spanish economy, the European Union’s fifth biggest, slumped into recession during the second half of 2008 as the global financial meltdown compounded the collapse of a labour-intensive construction boom

It emerged with tepid growth of just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and 0.2 percent in the second but then stalled with zero growth in the third.

Zapatero has said the fourth quarter will show positive growth which would pick up steam in 2011 but he warned that job creation would be “far from what we need and desire. It will be slow and progressive.”

Remember that Spain elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in April 2004, who is a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which is very similar in policy to Barack Obama and the Democrats.  Let’s see what has happened in Spain. (H/T Spain Economy Watch)

Unemployment:

Spain Unemployment Rate
Spain Unemployment Rate

Private sector employment:

Spain Employment Rate - Private Sector
Spain Employment - Private Sector

Public sector employment:

Spain Employment - Public Sector
Spain Employment - Public Sector

So what do we learn from this?

Well, the public sector doesn’t really sell any products or services, so they don’t really have any customers to please, nor do they have any revenue. They exist by confiscating the wealth of other people (in the private sector) who do have products and services to sell, and do have customers to please. The governments job is to HELP the people in the private sector and not to raise their taxes, or control them, or get in their way except to make sure that they compete fairly and honestly with other people in the private sector. When government oversteps their bounds by raising taxes too high and spending too much, they stop acting like a REFEREE and start acting more like a PARASITE.

You’ll note that Obama is also spending trillions of dollars on government boondoggles – and where is our unemployment rate now?