Publius Awakened

The legislative battle over health care reform is over. Through procedural tricks and the purchasing of votes, the Obama Administration succeeded in passing historically intrusive legislation.

Recognizing that Congress failed to protect individual freedoms, Americans must now turn to the states and the courts to defend our Constitutional liberties.

Appropriately, 13 states filed suit against the federal government last Tuesday asserting that, “the Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.”

Over the last week, other states continue to join the fray, either by filing independent suits or by joining the original lawsuit. As a Pennsylvanian, I am proud that Pennsylvania State Attorney General Tom Corbett was one of the original 13 plaintiffs. A candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Corbett said he is pursuing the suit as “a 10^th Amendment issue” and that he would be pursuing the suit whether he was running for governor or not. Read the rest

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For many, college is the time when they venture out on their own ideologically, discarding the beliefs of their family and friends in favor of new ideas that they either stumble upon or are exposed to in their new setting. Indeed, the way in which the college experience severs the social and geographical bonds that tie young people to the community of their adolescence creates a vacuum of influences where new ideas flourish and a new morality often develops.

Importantly, this campus-centered morality is founded on an appearance of thinking for oneself but regularly involves the uncritical adoption of another person’s needs as the morality’s driving force. This is evident in the international humanitarian who organizes students to stop hunger in Africa; it’s evident in the new socialist who self-consciously sloughs off his middle class background to decry the excesses of capitalists and starts a group working to unionize service employees; most of all, it’s obvious in the student who worked tirelessly to elect Barack Obama in 2008 because he or she felt that health care was a right.

What all these archetypes of college life have in common is that they involve the college student’s acceptance of another person’s needs or values as more important than the individual student’s own. Ayn Rand called such people “second handers” – those who live through others — explaining that, “After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand.” Read the rest

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Being a Libertarian, a classical liberal or a political individualist is about imagination. It’s about imagining alternatives to the way we live today and these alternatives are often as foreign and impossible as living on Mars. The focus on imagination in our politics differentiates us from most political tendencies whose adherents seek incremental changes of leadership and direction rather than changes in how we live. For this reason, we’re more liable to be understood by the scientist or science fiction fan than we are by the Democrat or Republican and it’s for this reason that political individualism has always thrived and found inspiration in science fiction novels.

Robert Heinlein – and maybe Robert Anton Wilson or J. Neil Schulman if you’ve really done your homework – defined libertarianism for a lot of people in the second half of the 20^th century. But the influence of science fiction authors over the libertarian movement isn’t surprising because they – like us – imagine new ways of life. Heinlein was probably most explicit in imagining new ways of life without government but this proto-libertarian strain runs through a lot of science fiction and can be found in the work of the most mainstream author from Harry Turtledove to Terry Pratchett. Read the rest

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Reading “The Stone Canal” by Ken MacLeod – a science fiction writer quickly becoming one of my favorite authors – I came upon this bit of dialogue:

“…the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market … sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!”

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been trading comments with Chris Potter over at Slag Heap on City Council’s attempts at central planning or maybe it’s the giant hammer and sickle sitting on the front page of this blog, but this subject has been on my mind for a while and MacLeod captured it brilliantly in the above passage.

The West is Red and it isn’t that way because of a single revolution, election or dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, socialism has and is making steady progress in the United States thanks to the efforts of self-described “progressives” who desire equality in means rather than equality in opportunity.

I’m probably going to tackle the question of political labels in my first Pitt News column after the break. Until then, this is just a quote that I think many of you might find instructive or particularly poignant in its directness.

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Pittsburgh City Council’s unwavering determination to make doing business in Pittsburgh more burdensome — see prevailing wage law, nonprofit baiting and even price controls for towing services – was front and center in today’s Council meeting.

At issue was the decision of Aramark – the company contracted to provide concessions at the Mellon Arena – to have its current employees reapply for work as it moves operations across the street to the new Consol Energy Center.

The employees were understandably unhappy with having to reapply for their jobs and so their unions created a public relations nightmare for the Penguins and Aramark and evidently put pressure on City Council to intervene. Well, City Council intervened today with a letter – written by Bruce Kraus and reprinted at City Paper’s Slag Heap – that reads like a Leftist’s guide to overreaching a local government’s authority and meddling in business decisions to score political points. Read the rest

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I know I haven’t been posting frequently in the last few weeks as midterms are currently taking up a great deal of my time but something I read today blew my mind: the United Nations General Assembly elected a stooge of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to serve as that body’s president in September 2009.

I don’t spend much time thinking about the UN and I generally consider it to be a useless organization beneath my notice but this is just amazing. The stooge in question, Ali Abdussalam Treki, served as foreign minister to the Gaddafi dictatorship during the 70s and 80s and, in an effort to prove he’s as crazy as his boss, he made sure to denounce homosexuals during his first press conference as President of the General Assembly.

So, to my friends and readers who believe in globalism and the United Nations, I challenge you to defend the organization that would elect a dictator’s lapdog to serve as their president.

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Ending the Democrat’s legislative dominance last month, Massachusetts voters elected Scott Brown the 41^st Republican Senator of the 111^th Congress and simultaneously killed Democratic hopes for statist health care reform.

But like Lazarus from the grave, Democratic health care reform reappeared Monday as a new proposal, drafted by the White House, that combines elements of both the Senate and House bills. Although repackaged, the White House’s proposal is simply a patchwork imitation of the bills that were consistently rejected by the American people in elections and polls around the country.

Indeed, the latest data from Newsweek shows that, as of Feb. 18^th, only 40 percent of registered voters support Barack Obama’s health care reform plan whereas 49 oppose it. Furthermore, an aggregation of polling data from Jan. 20^th to Feb. 18^th compiled by RealClearPolitics shows that, on average, Americans oppose the President’s plan by a margin of 14.3 percent.

Clearly, the Democrats’ dogged pursuit of health care reform is not about representing the will of the American people but instead it is about pursuing a radically divergent conception of rights and imposing this conception on our nation. Read the rest

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The Community College of Allegheny County’s student government gave preliminary approval to student Christine Brashier to form a chapter of the national Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at CCAC, the Post-Gazette reported.

The group will receive student activity money in what should be recognized as a major step forward for advocates of the Second Amendment on area college campuses. A similar organization functioned at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 but is no longer a registered group on campus.

Individuals over the age of 21 can apply for a License to Carry Firearms at their county sheriff’s office and said license allows them to legally carry a concealed firearm in Pennsylvania. Regardless of whether or not the student is a permit holder, area campuses ban students from possessing firearms on campus.

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The City’s response to last week’s storm illustrated that government is better suited to making regulations and collecting tax dollars than it is to providing services. Although it’s important to praise the employees of the Departments of Public Works and Public Safety for their admirable efforts, it should be recognized that city politicians failed once again to prepare Pittsburgh for a major snowfall.

For instance, consider the fact that Pittsburgh’s road salt budget for 2010 is $559,640 – down $400,000 from last year. This drastic cut in the road salt budget may seem like a small issue to some readers but it is indicative of how government priorities differ from taxpayer priorities.

Importantly, road salt spending wasn’t reduced as part of an across-the-board budget reduction. City revenue for 2010 increased by more than $5.6 million and city expenditures increased by almost $10 million so we know that the cut in road salt spending wasn’t brought about by a fiscal crisis.

Indeed, the budget of the Department of Public Works Bureau of Operations – the bureau responsible for snow removal and road salt purchasing – is the only division of Public Works to have its budget cut this year. Read the rest

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