Sometimes when the outrageous material that seems to make up so much of life in today’s world, and especially today’s America, gets too thick in the air it produces something not unlike vapor lock for me.

I’ve sadly neglected this humble little blog for several weeks now, and although no one’s going to suggest that the absence of its voice has diminished public discourse to any degree, I still feel guilty about it. But what to write about? Hillary Clinton turning out while Secretary of State not only never to have used anything but a private e-mail address, maintained on a server physically located in her private house in New York, but never even bothering to have a State Department e-mail account set up for her? It’s not just her, either, but also her Muslim Brotherhood operative of an assistant who used a private e-mail account on that same server. We’re supposed to accept at face value her suggestion that she never, ever, not once, discussed any classified material by e-mail the entire time she was tramping all over the world? Breaking every previous record for miles travelled and places visited and time spent away from her office, the head of the U.S. Department of State was able to forego classified communication for weeks on end? Even better, two years after she leaves office we’re supposed to trust her assistants (including the Muslim Brotherhood’s representative) to tell us what we need to see from all those e-mails? Remember Hillary is a person with a documented track record for making important records disappear. She’s been that way, so far as we can tell, since Day 1: She disappeared public records while on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, preparing articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, and she disappeared the Rose Law Firm billing records that later surfaced (will wonders never cease?) in the White House private quarters. Her explanation was, “Shut up.”

The comedy that is Greece? They’re running out of money, have no intention of altering the habits that got them into this fix, and their only response to the rest of the continent’s reluctance to keep them afloat indefinitely is, “Shut up and pay.” They have the Hellenic equivalent of Dear Leader – mouthy, sarcastic, vastly-overly-impressed-with-himself, skilled skirmisher from the faculty lounge, but no, absolutely no idea of what it means to pay one’s own bills – as their finance minister. He’s scared the bejesus out of the guys with the money and irretrievably pissed off his peers who might lean on the guys with the money to get over it. It’s like the entire country’s been taken over by petulant sixteen-year-olds.

Closer to home, how about the EPA? Having already pretty much banned the production of wood stoves – notwithstanding large numbers out in flyover country heat with wood – now they’re wanting to come after your backyard cook-out. No, seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Or maybe, on the theory that the knee is closer to the shin, as they say, how about Washington State’s idea of having “limited license legal technicians” out there practicing law without supervision? They are supposed to be the “nurse practitioners” of the legal services industry. Sounds nice, and in truth there are many hundreds of thousands of people out there, without law licenses, doing what for all intents and purposes is indistinguishable from practicing law. You’ll find them working as lawyers’ paralegals and assistants. What’s novel about this new suggestion is that the legal “technicians” are going to be operating completely without supervision. After someone has worked for a skilled lawyer for twelve or fifteen years, she (most frequently she, but sometimes not) will not only have the skills to attend to a huge amount of the nuts and bolts of a client’s needs (and very frequently those will be some extremely complicated nuts and bolts), but she will also know the boundaries of her competency, and will never be more than a door or two away from the person she needs to kick an issue upstairs to see if this cow is or is not spotted. In other words, your highly-experienced assistant to a lawyer complements the lawyer’s skills and efforts; she does not substitute for them. The State of Washington is proposing to unleash on the unsuspecting world people with a year or so of junior college behind them. But don’t nurse practitioners do much the same thing in medicine? Well, yes. On the other hand if you’re going to see a nurse practitioner for a specific problem, you, as the owner/operator of your own body, are going to have some independent feedback to tell you whether what this person is doing is or is not getting you better. Not always true, of course (there wouldn’t be medical malpractice cases for failure to diagnose if you could always tell what was going on inside your own skin), but for a large slice of what ails you, if your nurse practitioner is tinkering around with you and you’re not getting better, you’ll know it. That’s simply not the case with legal services. Your legal position and problems do not produce unmediated physical manifestations and sensations. How you deal with a legal problem today can lay a land mine which won’t blow up for years, but when it does, will produce a blast out of all proportion to the legal issue of today which you thought you resolved, and will eviscerate your personal or financial existence. I do business organizations as part of my practice (in fact over the years I’ve done a fistful of seminars on LLCs, corporations, and LPs for one of the larger continuing education operators). An enormous portion of the mental effort involved in setting them up is working through with the client the numerous questions that all start with, “What happens when . . . ?” Even for the nominally purely domestic matters which the Washington program contemplates these “technicians” working around regularly implicate the substantive laws of property, taxation, and creditors’ rights. They also frequently involve financial planning and related economic principles as well. I beg leave to question whether a couple of years of junior college is going to prove sufficient to instruct them on when they’re out of their depth.

OK, how about Ferguson, the little town that last summer became America’s favorite place to hate? Gentle Reader will recall that a very large young thug attacked a police officer and got his ass shot for his troubles. The professional grievance-mongers assured us that the shooting was in cold blood, while the young scholar (nay, choirboy) was attempting to surrender. The left – which is to say the lamestream media and their pet constituencies – uniformly demanded the police officer’s head. Then the actual physical evidence was laid before the grand jury and it got to see what actually happened, and it declined to indict the officer. Ferguson exploded. Lost in the lamestream hand-wringing about “racial justice” and all the rest was the fact that they’d demanded the criminal prosecution of an innocent man, and it was the refusal of the responsible authorities to pursue that innocent which prompted the destruction of a city.

And it was all a lie, as even some lefties are now admitting. This thug, who matched the description of the suspect in a just-completed violent felony the report of which had within recent seconds been disseminated by radio and heard by this officer, was hailed by the officer and then reached into the police car, physically attacked the officer, attempted to seize his weapon, then when the officer attempted to arrest him for that attack, attacked again, and was shot with his head down, charging the (physically much smaller) officer. He got, in other words, neither more nor less than precisely what he deserved.

Enter the most politicized Department of Justice since the Palmer Raids. The everything-is-about-race minions of Eric Holder’s DOJ swept down on Ferguson, looking to act where the locals wouldn’t. In something of a surprise move, after parsing back through the physical evidence, even the race baiters of the DOJ concluded that the police officer acted in legitimate self-defense, and lawfully employed deadly force, thereby neither depriving this thug of any “civil right” he might otherwise have enjoyed nor committing any crime.  Even Dear Leader, whose politics are so steeped in race-mongering that he claims opposition to any single one of his policy preferences must necessarily be a function of his skin color, is defending the DOJ’s decision not to press on.

But the DOJ didn’t stop there. It conducted a wide-ranging investigation of the entire law enforcement system of Ferguson, including its police department, its prosecutor, its municipal court, and its general government. It has now released its report.

The DOJ came looking for racism and – mirabile dictu! – they found it. In truth that’s not the interesting part of the report. It’s not interesting because it’s expected, both objectively and subjectively. I say “objectively” because you’ve got a nearly all-white police force in a part of the country that has a track record of racial animosity, policing a city that is almost exactly two-thirds black, but that as recently as 25 years ago was only a quarter black. I say “subjectively” because we’re talking about investigators from Eric Holder’s DOJ, under the overall command of Dear Leader, and those ass-hats can make talking about adding a turning lane at the corner of Main Street and Vine into a racial issue.

Before we start on this, let’s remind ourselves of some universals. Observation No. 1: Every institution out there which intentionally sets itself apart from the rest of the citizenry, and which enjoys rights and powers not enjoyed by citizens in general, will inevitably develop an us-versus-them mentality. That is true of the armed forces. It is true of the IRS. It is true of the DOJ’s very own FBI. It is true of the NSA and the CIA. It is true of the police forces of every penny-ante town in America. [Irrelevant aside; rant to follow: I hate it when I hear a police officer or bureaucrat refer to ordinary citizens – in contrast to themselves, of course – as “civilians.” Listen, jack-ass, unless you are a member of the United States Armed Forces actually on active duty, you are a civilian. Period. That you cops like to dress up in military gear and play around with weapons you’re not trained to use correctly does not make you anything other than a civilian. You’re just a very dangerous civilian. The contrast to “civilian” is not “government,” it’s “military”; when you bust someone for stealing, that person goes before a civilian court, not a court martial. End of rant.]

Observation No. 2: Every group which thinks of itself as “not-them” is going to seize upon every last point of distinction between “us” and “them,” and highlight it. It is simply not human nature to ponder the points of commonality that “we” share with “them.” It’s precisely why fraternization in the midst of combat, e.g. the Christmas truce of 1914, is so vigorously discouraged and punished. When you think of the guy in the trenches opposite yours as being even a tiny bit not-fundamentally-distinguishable from yourself, you lose a little something of your moral capacity to blow his brains all over that corner of Flanders.

Sub-Observation No. 2.1: Noticing easily-observed physical distinctions between “us” and “them” is hard-wired into the human animal. It is the vestige of survival instincts the failure of which meant, in a world in which humans were not even at the top of the local food chain (let alone a world in which luxuries such as “social justice” could be even imagined), death by violence or starvation. When there is never enough food to go around, every other group of hominids, Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, or Clovis People, is a potential source of food. Successfully take theirs and your little band of hunter-gatherers survives for another day, another week, another season. Lose that fight and you and your little band (with all of whom you’re blood kin, by the way) dies. Just that simple. Agriculture and husbandry, the twin innovations which for the first time allowed humans to enjoy Enough to Eat on even a precarious basis, are less than 10,000 years old. Neanderthals, from whom we get something like 10% of our DNA, survived the world that preceded those innovations for something like a quarter-million years; Cro-Magnon Man had evolved by fully 43,000 years ago. Whatever may be the morality of it in today’s world, it is not realistic to suppose that police officers will fail, in seizing on points of distinction between “us” and “them,” to seize on observable physical differences as well.

Observation No. 3: Institutions which enjoy, relative to the people or groups among which they exist, rights and powers not enjoyed by those other groups or people, are going to be exposed to a powerful temptation to engage in predatory behavior. It is why the medieval nobility rode pell-mell through the peasants’ fields, trampling their crops, in pursuit of game. They did it because they could and the peasants could do nothing about it. It is why whites in the Jim Crow South were so routinely abusive towards blacks. They did it because they could, with no consequences to themselves. It is why historically civilian populations have fared very poorly when invading armies move among them, at least when the soldiery is not restrained by threats of draconian punishment from its commanders. [Wellington understood this when on the Peninsula. He once came upon a group of his troops outside a peasant’s house. One of his soldiers had taken an apple without paying for it. Wellington turned to the junior officer among them and told him in ten minutes to report to him that this man had been hanged. Which he was, with the apple jammed into his mouth. Compare and contrast the behavior of the French armies among the same populations at the same time, and how they were treated when caught alone or in small groups.]

Observation No. 4: Most people are no better behaved than they are compelled to be.

Observation No. 5: Things like how a police force lives with the population it supposedly serves do not develop or exist in a vacuum. This is not to play who-shot-John; in fact, I say that more to point out that games of who-shot-John in situations like Ferguson are nearly always going to steer you into a dead-end. Mutual hostility breeds . . . mutual hostility. It needn’t start with any clear-cut or even specifically identifiable data point, such as a horribly tragic – and all too frequently occurring these days, it seems – sequence where young child is, whether aware or not, acting as if armed and threatening, and a police officer over-responds, whether out of inexperience, or fear, or excessive zeal, or whatever, and shoots the kid dead. The thug that Officer Wilson shot was not that hypothetical child, by the way. But at least that’s the kind of incident you can point to and say, “That was when the walls went up.” I didn’t see anything in the Ferguson report to suggest that such a point ever occurred. I get the impression that, little by little, through thousands of points of interaction, the Ferguson police force and the population each came to the conclusion, each seemingly justified by the other’s behavior, that the other side was the Enemy.

All of that having been said, the DOJ report does recite several instances of what can only be described as explicit bigotry of white police officers about and toward blacks. It recites several anecdotes which are explicable only in terms of overt racial animosity. The report does not say that each of the reported incidents was corroborated by the investigator, either through independent witnesses or documentary sources, although I’d hope that were the case. Objectionable? Absolutely. Surprising? Not really.

Here I may as well shove in a general comment on the DOJ report. In the race-specific discussion I found it to be somewhat light on numeric data, and sketchy on cause-and-effect discussion. For example, for each of the instances discussed where the Ferguson police engaged in behavior that was pretty plainly tinged with – even if not actually arising from – racist animus, you have to assume that some number of people would have heard the story from the mouth of the protagonist. How many? You can’t know for sure, but my question is how reasonable is it to assume that each of those stories became widely enough known to seep into the consciousness of the black population of a city of roughly 21,000 people? On the other hand, replicate enough such events and no single one of them needs to get widely known before some critical mass of the population personally knows someone who has had a bad experience with the Ferguson police where any objective, reasonable observer would agree that the police’s behavior was racist. What would be that critical mass? I can’t say, and I don’t know that anyone can.

A good deal of the DOJ’s analysis of the racism problem in the Ferguson police department relies on so-called “disparate impact” analysis. I’ve already vented my problems with “disparate impact” analysis elsewhere on this blog. What I would have preferred to see is a more detailed statistical analysis – neither more nor less than a multi-variate regression analysis – of their data. In several places there are statements that blacks experienced Outcome X more frequently than whites, “even after accounting for” a litany of stated factors. Did they in fact “account for” all these other things? Statisticians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and others in the behavioral sciences have a great deal of experience in such numerical analysis. How much of that kind of rigorous number-crunching went into the DOJ report? I’d remind Gentle Reader that it’s been only roughly six months since the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Wilson. I must question whether the data could be assembled, modeled, and tested with anything like mathematical rigor in that time. Gentle Reader will further bear in mind that any given statistical test can only look for correlation, really. Causation has to be teased from the results of multiple tests, each subjecting the observable data to stresses from different approaches.

Just for example: Let’s take two of the concrete data points given in the report. Ferguson has a population of roughly 21,000 people and roughly two-thirds of them (by the 2010 census data) are black, or roughly 14,000 people. We know nothing much at all about the individuals who make up that 14,000 people. We do know, on a purely random sampling of them, that among those of them who are males between the ages of 18 and 34, they are significantly more likely than the general population to have a conviction for a serious crime in their history, or to have pending charges for a serious crime. Again on a purely random sampling basis, we know that the females of that group are much more likely than the general population to have a child who was born while they themselves were still teenagers. Since that latter pattern has existed for some time, it’s not unreasonable to expect that, among all individuals of that 14,000, those who are in the 18 to 34 age bracket – those who were born between 1981 and 1997 – many more than in the general population were born to women who had their first child while still a teenager. We can expect those patterns to emerge because they’re generally true of the American black population. Those patterns almost assuredly do not hold true for all of the 14,000 black residents of Ferguson, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect each to be equally true – statistical variation is an ever-present phenomenon – but you’d have to be a fool or a charlatan – like Eric Holder or Dear Leader – to suggest that none is true for any statistically significant proportion of them.

So what? Well, each of those data points is a strong predictor for future involvement in the criminal justice system. And like it or not, people who are involved in the criminal justice system are seldom involved at only one point of contact. They tend to have multiple points of intersection, and to have repeated intersections over their lives. So just based upon those two data points – 21,000 population, 14,000 black – even with a 100% black police force we’d expect any police behavior patterns which can be described as unduly aggressive for any reason at all to have a “disparate impact” on Ferguson’s black population. Is there anything that might throw some cross-bearings on that? I suppose you could look at those persons from the 14,000 for whom none of the general patterns is true. Go find those black inhabitants of Ferguson who have no serious criminal past, who were born to women whose first birth occurred at age 20 or later, and look at their interactions with the Ferguson police department. Now do the same thing for the 7,000 Fergusonians who aren’t black. Some of them will fit into either of the criminal-history or teenage-mother groups, and others won’t. Figure out how many of each there are, and then see how their interactions with the Ferguson police play out.

How would those numbers look? Can you even assemble the data for such analysis in six months? I’d wager that you’d find some irreducible statistical disparity between blacks’ experience of the Ferguson legal system and whites’, but that disparity would be nowhere nearly the strength reasonably sufficient to indict the entire force for pervasive racist behavior.  I’d like to see, for that matter, some data on the distribution of use-of-force incidents among the individual officers who have served on the Ferguson force over the past decade or so. Are they concentrated among identifiable individuals?  But I’m just guessing; I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. My point on all that is that the DOJ report just doesn’t give the impression of being the result of the kind of rigorous mathematical analysis that would allow it to reach the conclusions it does, whether or not those conclusions are in fact true.  Even a blind pig will find an acorn every so often.

Last point on the racism angle of this report: Ferguson may present a marvelous chance to conduct precisely that kind of statistical examination. It’s a small town, but still large enough that there will be lots and lots of data to measure. Its institutional omerta has been shattered; you show up with the proper credentials and my guess is you’re going to get to see the actual records necessary to figure out who has been doing what, how, when, and to whom.

The genuinely interesting point of the DOJ report, in contrast, is the first part, which throws a really glaring spotlight on the monetization of the American criminal justice system. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire system – the city manager, the council, the chief of police, the command structure, the field officers, the city judge and court staff – viewed enforcement of the criminal law and civil fine system as being neither more nor less than a revenue source for the city. Attempted summary is pointless; as the Blogfather would say, read the whole thing.

It wasn’t just that the city intentionally set its fines and penalties as high as they could. How offenses were charged and prosecuted was viewed as a revenue function. If a given offense could be charged as a state crime or a violation of a municipal ordinance, the offense would be charged under the city code, explicitly so that the city could keep the revenue. Officers’ individual responsibilities were structured so as to favor generation of municipal violations rather than investigation of state crimes, which is to say felonies (you know, the serious crimes). Jail time for offenses was not favored (in fact the judge could recall only a single instance), but rather imposition of fines and penalties. Missing a court date, however, was greatly frowned upon (and was itself the subject of still more monetary punishment); most people who went to jail in Ferguson did so not because they committed an offense, but because they missed some court date or other obligation imposed with respect to the monetary punishment imposed on the underlying offense. A treadmill, in other words.

The city court routinely set over 1,000 cases for each docket call. Each docket call was scheduled for no more than three hours. The judge – who was also the city attorney, and so tasked with rendering general legal advice to the city council and its officers, including in respect of its financial affairs one would assume – regularly refused to permit witnesses to testify, or heard all the available proof, in order to get through the docket. Just handed down decision after decision after decision. I have a stupid question: Why does this individual still hold a Missouri law license? How in the hell can you advise a city on how to structure its municipal code and ordinances so as to create revenue streams, and them impartially preside over the tribunal at which the translation of those laws into revenue occurs?

The DOJ report documents numerous examples of correspondence within the system in which everyone is in the know and everyone – including that judge – discusses how to collude to extract the maximum revenue from the legal system. It is really sickening. It is, in fact, nothing less than a chicken-shit town’s version of the same idea behind Stalin’s Gulag. As Solzhenitsyn relates, the Gulag in the form it became was a specific economic response to the industrialization question in the Soviet Union. Solovki began as a more-or-less straight-up extermination camp. Then Naftaly Frenkel arrived and showed them how the prisoners could make money for the system. At first they worked principally in logging and other extractive industry in the Karelian peninsula, but then Frenkel showed Stalin how the system could be scaled, massively scaled, upwards. The Belomor – the Baltic-White Sea Canal which ate several hundred thousand dead – was merely the first big industrial project. After that and for the next 25 years they never looked back. Ferguson, Missouri could not – thank God! – establish a network of camps fed on eternally-replenished supplies of enemies of the people, but they by God could float their lousy little patch over hell on the revenue from their criminal justice system.

The drive for revenue was relentless, and produced what the DOJ was able to document as pervasive violations of constitutional law, both in its processes and the substance of its law enforcement.  One example:  The police would regularly do what they call a “ped check,” or the pedestrian equivalent of a traffic stop . . . for no reason at all. Hint: You’re no more entitled to pull a pedestrian over without probable cause than you are a motor vehicle. They’d demand to see identification, which you are constitutionally entitled to refuse to produce except as a result of a lawful stop . . . which these “ped checks” were not. Then when people would refuse, or dog cuss the cops (which you’re constitutionally entitled to do, actually), they’d arrest you for “failure to comply,” which you’re likewise constitutionally not permitted to do except in respect of a lawful order, which demanding identification without constitutionally permissible basis is not. And not infrequently while they were arresting you for “failure to comply,” they’d go ahead and beat the shit out of you or taze you for good measure. Because. See Observation No. 3 above.

I do think that the DOJ reports gets it right when it points out that, at bottom, it was the single-minded focus on money which drove the police to a place where all of those constitutionally objectionable behaviors were not merely likely, but nearly inevitable.

But why do I describe that as the “interesting” part of the report? Because it rips the curtains off what the criminal legal system in the United States has become. It has become an enormous apparat whose acknowledged (at least within itself) purpose is not the protection of public health and safety, but rather the feeding of itself from its own population. Civil forfeiture; these cock-eyed “drug task forces” out on the interstates who never seem very interested in catching mules carrying smack, or grass, or blow in one direction, but rather cash in the other; the crazy over-charging of everything (see the Blogfather’s wonderful, short, and very distressing “Ham Sandwich Nation” in the Columbia Law Review) in an effort to extort guilty pleas; the hamster wheel of probation which artificially produces violations which artificially produces yet more fines and penalties, and longer probations – the legal system can no longer exist without creating offenses. Short of going out and hiring people to commit crimes, the only way the money can be brought in is precisely the sort of behavior documented in Ferguson, Missouri.

While outside the scope of the DOJ report on Ferguson, it is not at all inappropriate to ask to what extent the last several decades’ lavish municipal spending on benefits contributes to this unslakable thirst for revenue. Unlike the feds, cities like Ferguson can’t just print up the money to fund their health insurance and retirement programs. Unlike the State of Missouri, they are subject to oversight by state-level officials who likely won’t let them get too far off the balanced budget reservation. So the only way they can put people in their early 50s on long-term, 80% of highest-average-five-years’-salary (or whatever other unreasonable measure) retirement is to haul in more money. Taxes are an imperfect method; in fact, one of the communications the DOJ report cites is one city official reminding his interlocutor that, sales tax revenue being problematic, the court system needs to step up to the plate. Jack the city’s property taxes too high and people leave.

You have, in fact, to wonder how much the city’s financial (mis)management is to blame for the shift from one-quarter to two-thirds black in a single generation. Blacks, being as a group less well-off, are more immobile, and those who cannot easily move are more likely to congregate in areas where property prices are lower than elsewhere . . . like places where the whites are leaving as fast as they can price their houses and businesses to sell. Thus you get several reinforcements to a vicious cycle: City spends beyond its means; those who can begin to leave, and the more who have left or are leaving, the lower the prices the next to leave can obtain for their properties; property tax revenue begins to fall off, which means the city must charge a higher tax rate to produce the same overall revenue; more people leave, driving property values still lower; the city begins to fill disproportionately with those who can’t pay a lot for their houses and don’t go shopping at the more expensive stores; now sales tax and property tax revenues are down; the city’s pension obligations are unchanged through all of this and the state comptroller keeps busting them for under-funding their obligations; so the city jacks up its tax rates some more. At some point you’ve hit the practical upper limit to what you can raise by way of tax revenue. What’s left (remember we decline to consider spending less as an option, Gentle Reader)? What’s left is funneling 1,000 people an afternoon through a court on bullshit charges of “failure to comply” with some swell-head cop’s demand to cough up identification on the street corner.

I am afraid there is no cure for Ferguson, in the sense of restoring it to a functioning municipal corporation. Every single member the police force, every single staffer on the court, the judge, the mayor, the city manager, and every member of the council should be removed from public employment and barred from ever being employed by the State of Missouri or any of its agencies, instrumentalities, or political subdivisions. I know that’s harsh; there are probably a few police officers who have long wanted to vomit over how they have been made to do their jobs. But the problem is that those officers don’t bear the mark of Cain; you can’t tell them apart from the guys who’ll taze some 18-year-old kid whom they just decide to hassle on the sidewalk one afternoon because they’re running behind on their monthly ticket quota. It’s not, in other words, that we know that they are “bent coppers,” it’s that we cannot know that they’re not, and when you’re talking about the kind of power that goes with a badge and a gun, the people are entitled to more assurance than that. The city leadership can go to hell; every stinking one of them had the chance to raise six kinds of hell over what was going on and they all not only chose not to, they played along.

The Assistant Chief Race Baiter, Eric Holder, famously accused the United States population of being “cowards” because we didn’t want to talk about – “conversation” is the word you hear, by which is meant, “You people shut up and I’m going to harangue you” – race all day, every day. We sure do need to have a conversation, that much is undisputable. But it’s not the conversation he’s wanting to have. We need to discuss to what extent it is or is not Good Policy to give the criminal law enforcement authorities such a direct financial interest in the continuance and expansion of criminal behavior. I humbly suggest it is Bad Policy to align the interests of the police and the interests of the criminal so closely. At some point, after all, you get to the point that the money extracted from the crook by the criminal law system, to be funneled into the police officer’s pocket, becomes nothing more than a cost of doing business for the criminal element, to be built into its financial calculations. It’s overhead to be recovered from the criminal classes’ customers . . . by which is meant you and me, tovarish.

Where are we headed?

Good thing you members are so stupid, said Greek finance minister Varoufakis; if we’d told you the truth you’d never have given us your money.  The attentive reader will recall this is more or less precisely what Jonathan Gruber bragged about — carelessly, and on video — in respect of passing the “Affordable” Care Act.

The Greeks needed to get approval for an extension of the current bail-out agreement, which was set to expire today.  Part of getting that approval was the presentation of a list of reforms which the newly-elected Greek government (elected by an overwhelming margin, by the way; there’s no room to dispute that this is the government that the Greeks want) would undertake to implement.  In fact they produced a list, and obediently all those Europeans — remember they’re supposed to be so much smarter than us hillbilly Americans — obediently voted to approve handing over more money to a government that among its very first acts rejected its predecessor’s prior commitments to gets its affairs squared away.  Those would be, just to remind Gentle Reader, the commitments which induced the rest of the Euro zone to bail them out in the first place.  Even the Germans, the ones who as a practical matters are going to be expected to pay the bill eventually (everyone else is too broke anyway), voted to do it.

Now, after the horse is out of the barn (always, always after when they’re spending their taxpayers’ money; never before), people are actually, you know, looking at what the Greeks in fact said.  And they’re figuring out, just now (remember, Best Beloved, how much smarter the Europeans are than us roob Americans), that the Greeks really didn’t promise much of anything at all.  This was quite intentional, according to the Greek finance minister.  In conversations with the Euro wallahs in Brussels — notice how that city, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, is getting to be the ubiquitous  venue for pervasive chicanery — Varoufakis was told (he won’t say by whom) that the existing stated goal of achieving a budget surplus of 4.5% of GDP was “unrealistic,” but that if a lower number was stated, the chances of getting the Europeans Germans to unbelt were roughly zero.  The suggestion (which Varoufakis claims came from the finance ministers of the other Euro countries) was, well, why don’t you just vaguely describe it?  Said and done, and boy it worked like a charm.

Did the Greeks promise to make people work past their current ridiculously early retirement age?  Well, not really.  Did the Greeks promise to keep trimming their bloated public sector employment?  Why no, in fact the government has promised to re-hire all the government drones previously let go.  Did the Greeks promise to continue cutting their expenditures?  No, they made some vague promises to collect more taxes from their famously fraudulent population.  This is despite the fact that in January alone, €27 billion was sent by Greeks out of the country.  This is merely continuing a trend, and now the predictable calls for capital transfer restrictions are to be heard.  Yeah, let’s throw up some capital barriers, because that’s what the whole Euro project was about, wasn’t it:  making it harder for people, goods, and capital to transfer freely around the European continent.  That’s how you create a unified economy to compete with China, India, and the U.S.

What it all comes down to, of course, is the simple demand to write off the money that the rest of Europe pumped into a corrupt, broken Greek economy.  Prime minister Tsipras has now joined his finance minister in letting the cat out of the bag:  “We have achieved the goals we set for ourselves in this first round of discussions,” the prime minister has disclosed (which is to say, those wonderfully brilliant — in comparison to us drooling Americans — European parliaments have agreed to keep pouring sand down a rat hole on the off chance that this time the Greeks will actually do as they promise), and now the government will be able to “speak with honesty [from a Greek official?!?] and without extortion about the substance of the credit agreement.”  “We will put on the table our request for the reduction of Greek debt.”  So that’s it:  Hand us your money and agree never to see it again.  So that we can continue to retire at age 52 or whatever it is.  So that we can continue not to pay our own taxes.  So that we can continue to employ everyone and his cousin on the public teat.

Even The Economist has less than fulsome praise for the Greeks, although it can’t resist a side-swipe at the one major economy in Europe that makes a point of living within its means:

 “The real Greek tragedy is that, with a bit more statesmanship, Mr Tsipras could have nudged Europe on to a happier path. The euro zone desperately needs a counter-narrative to its failed German-inspired policy of austerity. As leader of the hardest-hit economy, armed with a strong democratic mandate, Mr Tsipras was well placed to offer one. He could have sought allies against excessive austerity and for looser fiscal and monetary policy in places like Italy and France—and even inside the ECB. Yet by quibbling over his debt extension and backtracking so ostentatiously on sensible reform he has alienated more or less everyone. That is quite some achievement.”

“Failed”?  As it turns out, the economies that were bailed out that have done best since then are precisely the ones that have stuck with the “austerity” plans forced on them.  The one that conspicuously hasn’t — Italy — is also the one that pissed backward.  The program of getting your affairs in order and at least making a stab at living within your means has only “failed” from the perspective of those whose livelihoods consist of feeding on the European taxpayer.  Oh, and by the way, the Greek economy has tanked since Syriza was elected, quite apart from the billions of Euros being hidden abroad by its own citizens.

Why the title of this post?  It may be a coincidence that the Greek finance minister is an academic economist, just like Jno. Gruber (Varoufakis’s first government gig is finance minister of the entire country; now that’s a recipe for success).  And it may be purely happenstance that they both think it’s just hilarious to lie to democratically elected assemblies in order to get passage of legislation that would stand no chance at all if the truth were told about it.  And it could be of no significance at all that both seem to relish the experience of pulling a fast on one all those stupid voters and their stupid representatives.  And it might be nothing more than random odds that both appear to believe that indefinitely spending other people’s money on economic arrangements that are demonstrably non-sustainable is a wonderful idea.

I am reluctant to ascribe such a remarkable area of overlap to pure chance, though.  Given the monolithically hard-left tinge of academia these days, I am much more inclined to view such goings-on and such policies as being the natural result of putting someone in charge who has not had the educational experience of making payroll from his own pocket, a person for whom being disastrously, consistently wrong means nothing more than a sharp rebuttal in an academic journal no one reads anyway.

These Greeks aren’t even bearing gifts.  They’re just presenting a demand for a license to steal.

The Washington Post reports on the foreign governments that gave millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s family “charitable foundation” during her tenure as Secretary of State, during times when those foreign governments were actively engaged in various negotiations or transactions with various agencies and instrumentalities of the U.S. government, including some dealings that involved, at least on a collateral level, the Department of State headed by one Hillary R. Clinton.

Quite apart from the brazen effort to buy influence through private benefits provided to a high official’s affiliated entity, there is the question of just where all this money ended up.

You see, the Clintons’ foundation doesn’t just sit on the money it rakes in.  It spends it.  Some of it, I’m quite comfortable, is honestly spent doing Good Work here, there, and elsewhere, and spent actually doing stuff like buying bricks to build schools in sub-Saharan Africa, or actually buying crates of vaccine against whatever disease.  Bully for them.  But where else does the foundation spend money?  Who are its employees?  Who are its “consultants”?  To what other “charitable” organizations does it transfer money, and where do those organizations spend their own money.  These questions are necessary to ask because the “charitable” organization racket is unusually susceptible to use for political money laundering.

Let’s say that Company X is given to understand that a $10 million donation to the — he’s dead, and was undoubtedly a crook while alive (he was under active investigation by the FBI when he died), so we’ll just slime him — Murtha Family Foundation (my apologies if any such entity actually exists; I’m just using this as a hypothetical illustration) would be well-received, at a time when Company X is trying to sell Product Y or Program Z to the federal government.  The size of the contract is $750 million over the course of five or six years.  Get this contract, in other words, and the future of your company for that period of time is assured.  You might even be able to sell it for a couple hundred million dollars, cashing out and going to do whatever.  So Company X fades $10 million to the foundation.  The foundation then takes some portion of that — let’s be really optimistic and just say 60% of it — and actually goes out and buys textbooks for rural school districts or whatever.  That still leaves $4 million, however.  Now, private foundations are restricted on what they can pay insiders and their relations, so maybe John Murtha’s nephews, grandchildren, and cousins can’t realistically be paid more than $175,000 per year or so . . . each.  What do they do?  Well, they have titles like “marketing director,” or “community development coordinator,” and so forth.  But what do they physically, personally, do on a day-to-day basis?  Well, Grasshopper, you’d have a hard time answering that question, because other than occasionally standing up after a Rotary lunch to gas on to a bunch of somnolent businessmen quietly belching and wondering if they’re going to make their 1:30 meeting back at the office, you can’t really tell they’re doing much of anything other than cashing a paycheck twice a month.

But hist!  What’s this?  Why, the foundation has a $300,000 per year “consulting” agreement with, let’s call it Coalfield Strategies, LLC, to provide hazily-defined “services” to the Murtha Family Foundation.  But who is “Coalfield Strategies, LLC,” anyway?  Why, it turns out when we look at the secretary of state’s filings that “Coalfield Strategies, LLC” shows a principal place of business in the same building as one Fred Q. Zimmelfritz.  And lo! when we examine the campaign financial disclosures of John Murtha and his affiliated political organizations, we find that Fred Q. Zimmelfritz is a major donor to all of them, to the extent of around $200,000 per year.  And if you do a little digging here and there, you find that companies with business in front of John Murtha’s Congressional committees seem to have a pressing need for services of the nature provided by Coalfield Strategies, LLC.

When we look closer at the Murtha Family Foundation’s other vendors, we find that “Steamtown Industrial Services, Inc.” is providing cleaning services to the foundation under an annual contract which, when you look at how much office space actually needs cleaning and how long it ought to take to clean it, works out to something like $250 per hour.  Really?  That kind of money to empty the trash can, dust the window frames, and vacuum 800 square feet of floor?  All of which is performed twice a week by someone getting paid $13.25 per hour?  And when we look a bit closer at “Steamtown Industrial Services, Inc.” we find the name of Thaddeus R. Golatznik; returning to those same campaign financial disclosures we find that name as well high on the list of donors.

And so forth.

Don’t think stuff like this actually happens?  Gentle Reader will recall that before he became Governor Lothario, Elliot Spit-hole Spitzer was Attorney General Lothario of the State of New York.  While in that office he made a name for himself for “investigating” various publicly-traded companies in different industries.  The insurance industry was a favorite target.  But Lothario’s office gained a reputation for leaking that they were “investigating” Company X or Industry Y . . . even though as things not at all infrequently turned out, no charges or civil proceedings were ever initiated against Company X or anyone in Industry Y.

So what?

Company X was invariably a publicly-traded company, and Industry Y was invariably populated by publicly-traded companies.  When word leaks out that the New York state attorney general is “investigating” Company X, with vague (always vague) hints at massive exposure to fines and penalties (and of course defense costs), what happens to Company X’s stock?  Right:  It drops by 15%, or however much.  And then what happens?  Company X gets served a complaint filed by Major Securities Class Action Litigation Firm, asserting all manner of Rule 10b-5 violations for failure to disclose that Company X was engaging in Behaviors A, B, and C, thereby failing to make a material disclosure necessary to make the other disclosures made not misleading under the circumstances.

What are Company X’s options at that point?  They’ve now got bet-the-company choices to make.  Even if they’re really comfortable that they did nothing illegal and can beat any proceeding actually brought by Lothario’s office, the illegality of the undisclosed behavior is not an element of a Rule 10b-5 action, and a judgment entered in that action can easily drive them to a choice between bankruptcy or forced sale.  They have to settle that class-action suit.  So they settle.  By the time the expenses of the suit are paid out of the recovery, each shareholder gets $0.28539 or some other piffling amount per share.  The law firm, however, is awarded several million in fees.  Company X  is now out from under the securities litigation.  And a couple of months later, Lothario’s office quietly lets it be known that there doesn’t appear to be any basis for further proceedings, and Company X’s stock goes back up.  Everyone’s happy at that point, right?

Well of course they are, because the partners at Major Securities Class Action Litigation Firm, several of whom just happen to be major campaign contributors to Lothario, can now count their money, and begin writing checks to the campaign coffers of . . . wait for it! Attorney General Lothario.

So while interesting in its own way, that WaPo article stops well short of asking all the questions that need to be asked and answered.  If in politics the ultimate question is always cui bono? then until we know who is feeding at the Clinton foundation’s trough we do not know to what extent this trail of foreign money does or does not taint the woman who wants to be our next president.  We do not know to what extent the political operations and operatives of the would-be president are effectively on the payroll of some very, very unsavory foreign governments.

Since when is it “inappropriate” to question anything about an American president?  Especially about an American president whose political mentor, and one of the very, very few people he’s never thrown under the bus even by implication (this is in contrast to his grandmother, his preacher, and countless others), is a man who “declared war” on the United States and actually, genuinely blew places up and killed people in the course of following through on that, and who had himself photographed within the past decade grinning like a jackass, standing on an American flag, bragging on how he got away with it?  Especially about an American president who, not only while in office, but among his first acts in office, went gallivanting all over the world apologizing for his country, including in places which are explicitly hostile to the United States and teach that we are the Great Satan?

If someone can show me a single data to suggest that Dear Leader genuinely does love his country, in that he prefers it over all other national or ethnic polities, and that he is prepared to engage in some act of personal sacrifice (whether physical, financial, political, emotional . . . or anything at all) in order to accomplish something which is demonstrably for the betterment of the country as a whole, and not just some pet constituency or donor base . . . well, then I’ll accept that maybe he does love his country.

But not until someone can show me that data point, because everything else he’s done in his entire life not only suggests, but screams from the high hills, that Giuliani was exactly, precisely correct in all material respects.

Members of the U.S. Congress are by and large prohibited from engaging in outside employment for third parties while in office.  Sometimes this has really, really perverse effects, such as Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, who is a licensed surgeon, wanting to do just enough paid work to afford to keep himself insured while he maintains his license, and not being able to do so.  Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist (which is, let’s point out, a medical degree, in contrast to a degree in optometry), has the same issue.  They fall afoul of the law of unintended consequences.  Having members of Congress be on someone else’s payroll while in office — as Daniel Webster was, by the way; he was thoroughly on the take (as outlined in some detail in The Great Triumvirate) for interests with matters in front of the very committees Webster sat on — is just a bad idea, and so it’s prohibited.  That’s not to say it doesn’t happen anyway, with congresscritters and others — Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas was on the mafia payroll while on the court.

Nor does the prohibition apply to the general making of money.  Newt Gingrich got himself in the soup for taking a book advance, but — at least as I understand it — he would not have been prohibited from writing a book and receiving royalties from it.  It was the advance bit that crossed the line.  And of course, there are at least some members of Congress who, despite a lifetime in “public service” seem to have got extraordinarily wealthy while in office, notwithstanding the very real financial demands arising from shuttling back and forth between one’s constituency and Washington, as well as living in one of the most expensive cities in the country while on the job.  Henry Reid of Nevada is one such; he’s never really held a job, and yet his financial disclosures show he has done himself handsomely well.

Suffice it to say the system isn’t perfect.  Every rule you can think up can be circumvented, somehow, by someone sufficiently devious who has enough people willing to assist him.  About all you can do is expose the crooks and vote against them . . . rinse and repeat.

On the other hand, it seems the British Parliament does not prohibit outside employment by third parties for MPs.  How does that system work?

This is how it works.  There are, it seems, MPs making up to £1,600 per hour (as of today’s exchange rate of $1.5436 per pound, that’s $2,469.76 per hour) working for someone other than the British taxpayer.  Is either the fact of that employment or its rate of compensation inherently improper?  Well, no.  In fact, there is a legitimate argument to be made that denying members of the legislature actual, real-world, pay-it-out-of-your-own-pocket experience outside the bubble of national politics results in worse decision-making in the legislative chamber:

“To answer this we need to ask what we want our MPs to be: a professional cadre of career politicians with no outside interests; or people with jobs and connections in the real world beyond Westminster. To that end, is getting well-paid for joining a board of directors primarily on account of past ministerial experience the same as continuing to follow a career as a doctor, dentist or barrister once in the House? Both constitute outside interests but are clearly very different. * * * In the modern world, voters expect their elected representatives to be full-time parliamentarians, assiduously working on their constituency caseload, for which they are paid some £67,000 a year plus expenses. But this risks turning Parliament into a glorified council rather than the cockpit of debate on issues of national importance.”

For a specific example from history, about the only way Churchill was able to remain in Parliament during his wilderness years, from 1932 through September, 1939, was his prolific writing, for which he was paid.  Is anyone going to argue that having him vanish from public life would have been a preferable outcome?  And I suppose it’s possible to be worth $2,469.76 per hour to someone.  But we may legitimately ask precisely what a Member might possibly be doing for someone who is able to pay that kind of money per hour, and why that person thinks those services are worth that sort of money.  That is a much-less-settling thought.

Because, you see, some of those MPs at least are not just working, they’re selling themselves in their capacities as MPs.  Both are former members of the cabinet, foreign ministers.  One is Labour, the other Conservative.  Both were caught on camera offering a Chinese company to use their status and stature as senior politicians to provide privileged access to the power-brokers of their worlds for fees of at least £5,000 per day.  The “Chinese company” of course turned out to be nothing of the sort; they got caught by a sting run by The Daily Telegraph and Channel 4 news.  Both are now resigning from Parliament.  Neither appears to be terribly apologetic about it.

Whatever the theoretical arguments on both sides of the outside-compensation issue, it’s hard to suggest that this whoring of one’s office does not cross any line you can draw anywhere.  I’m not sure I which I find more objectionable — that they were so brazen about what they were doing, or that they were willing to do it for the Chinese.  Because make no mistake: If you’re doing business with any Chinese company outside China, you’re actually doing business with the Chinese government.  Anyone who thinks that the Chinese government is some sort of morally neutral actor who’s only in it to make a dollar and go home peacefully to enjoy the fruits of his labor is just nuts.

At least, however, the British are up in arms about this.  We, on the other hand, patiently await the shrieks of protest from the palace guard lamestream media about Hillary Clinton’s foundation opening wide the floodgates to foreign donations, in advance of her putative run for the White House.  This from the political machine that gave us “no controlling precedent” in accepting campaign contributions from Red China.

Once upon a time, when Billy Carter, the then-president’s brother, went to work for the Libyans, it was a major scandal here.  As Inspector Clouseau would say, “Not any more.”  I guess it remains to be seen how Britain, with a very different tradition regarding MPs and their “regular jobs,” deals with this, or not.

But how surprised can we really be, no matter from which side of the pond we look at it?

The monstrosity commonly referred to as Dodd-Frank was the parting gift to the enormous financial institutions of America — we can call them “Big Money,” just like there’s “Big Oil” and “Big Data” — from two of the least savory characters in recent Congressional history.  I’ll remind Gentle Reader that the competition along that scale is ferocious.

Specifically Barney Frank of Massachusetts — who claimed not to know his lover-boy was running a homosexual prostitution ring out of his apartment — and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, better known as a “Friend of Angelo” — who took a large below-market mortgage from Countrywide Home Loans at the same time that company was in the process of becoming the largest single purveyor of the toxic loans which later tanked the entire U.S. economy — gave to their patrons in Big Money the statute which bears their names.

Among its many objectionable features are many which do either or both of two things, namely vastly increase the cost of doing business to banks, or alternatively require banks to engage in what is essentially bad business.  Just as an example of the latter, you cannot even send a notice of your intent to foreclose (let along actually start the foreclosure process) a residential mortgage until the borrower has been in continuous default for 120 days.  I’ve studied the hell out of the statute and the regulations in question, and there’s no definition of “default.”  But the Consumer Financial Protection Board’s policy is that “default” applies only to failure to pay principal or interest on the actual loan.  If you’ve ever read through your own home loan or security documents, you’ll realize you as the borrower have many more obligations than just that.  Like maintaining the property, or paying the real property taxes on it, or keeping it insured, or (for VA, FHA, and similar loans) occupying it as your principal place of residence.  All of those obligations have very specific purposes, and are not just cooked up from thin air to oppress Joe Home Owner.  Thanks to the CFPB, though, a bank now has to watch its borrower let the insurance on its collateral lapse, let the taxes go delinquent, and see the windows broken out, and its only option is to pay itself to protect its collateral.

So what Dodd-Frank has done in that specific instance boils down to requiring banks to give their borrowers four months of free principal and interest payments, as well as provide them insurance coverage, and pay their taxes.

And so forth.  At any rate, as Todd Zywicki reports in The Washington Post, the entirely predictable effects of Dodd-Frank are now becoming measurable.  Here’s a link to the article he’s referring to.  When you artificially increase the costs of doing business across an entire industry, the smaller players in the industry have a harder time accommodating those increased costs, especially if the extent of the increase is not scaled to the size of the particular business.  Regulatory compliance is among the classic examples of how this happens, and it is also the classic example of large industry players using government to squeeze out their smaller competitors.

In short, Dodd-Frank was no accident.  A motivation for its provisions was certainly the Robin Hood desire to steal from “the rich” and give to “the poor,” as if you, from the perspective of Washington, can have any realistic notion of telling who is which.  But another motivation was the desire of the two principal authors to bestow a gift on their patrons in Big Money.  How seriously did Big Money take the threat of community banking?  Well, over the 15 or so years preceding its enactment, our tiny little semi-rural county saw three community bank more or less run out of town several large regional banks.  How could this be?  Because the community banks knew their customers, knew whose family paid its bills, knew where the business growth was, which local businessmen knew their stuff and had a track record of making things work.  And they could make their decisions locally, instead of having every penny-ante home improvement loan be referred for approval to Charlotte, North Carolina, or Jacksonville, Florida, or somewhere else hundreds of miles and a universe of economy away.  In short, the community banks could leverage their superior knowledge in order to survive.  Now, those same community banks have to comply with the same regulations that CitiGroup and Chase and Bank of America.  Anyone want to speculate on who’s better able to absorb those costs?

Is community banking dying in the United States?  It could be.  Will that be a boon to local borrowers?  For some, perhaps.  But for many, many others, the borrowers whom Big Money is leery of, precisely because Big Money cannot know its customers as well as the community banks once did?  They’ll simply be frozen out of the credit market.  Which means that homes will not be built, businesses will not be started or expanded, jobs will not be created.  Someone explain to me how this is a good thing for the country overall.

For me, at least.  Dear Jno. Gruber, the fellow who brought us “it’s a good thing American voters are so stupid; otherwise we’d never have passed the ACA,” apparently in April, 2010 mooted the prospect of directly taxing fat people according to their body weight.  This occurred in a short (two-page) essay he published in the magazine of the National Institute for Healthcare Management.

Gruber places the idea of a direct tax on being a lard-ass in the context of a sin tax, such as cigarettes and alcohol.  Being Gruber, of course, he generously concedes that taxing the things that “cause obesity” is trickier than tobacco or booze taxes, because “while every cigarette is bad for you, clearly some food consumption is good for you!”  Wonder if that insight was part of his dissertation.  And — gotta love how this ol’ boy is awash in empathy for his fellow (if hopelessly stoopid) Americans — “A simple tax on calories could do more harm than good by deterring low-income people from getting enough nutrition. Likewise, the very complicated relationship between different types of food consumption and health poses significant challenges.”  You mean that something as complicated as human nutrition in a heterogeneous society, in which there are vast variations in what people eat, how they eat it, when they eat is, what effect it has on their bodies, and what they’re doing with the bodies they have so bewilderingly fed is actually — one’s heart bleeds for poor Jno. — beyond him?  Forsooth!

But don’t worry; Jno’s got it figured out.  You just directly tax the lard-asses.  “Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight.”  It’s touching, really, to see once again the left’s instinctive reaction to anything they don’t like: tax it.  Sort of like The Economist’s recent cover story.  The cover displays a man bounding down a mountain of oil barrels.  The lead editorial is to the effect that we should “Seize the Day” of low energy prices to . . . tax energy.  Really, that’s what their notions of how to “rationalize energy policy” boil down to.  Let’s take a momentary (and it is momentary, as recent spikes in pump prices of $0.10/gallon or more in less than two days have shown) downward price deviation in one of the most unforgivingly expensive items the typical American has to buy a great deal of, and make it artificially even more expensive.  You’d think that a publication that calls itself The Economist would be familiar with the old Wall Street saw “never mistake trend for destiny.”  Gasoline at $1.72 a gallon (around here) is a brief let-up; those taxes will be there forever, even when it’s back up to $3.25 a gallon.

Think that having to fork over a chunk of change to the government, to do with as it pleases, based on what your bathroom scale says (actually, it would have to be government scales, and how frequently would you have to weigh in?), is perhaps a bit . . . intrusive?  Don’t worry, so Gruber:  It’s already happening “indirectly” in how employers are allowed to charge back health insurance premiums for their deep-draft workers.  “Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI. The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent.”  Let’s disregard for the moment the fact that BMI has been pretty thoroughly de-bunked as a useful measurement of health risk; many professional athletes have high BMI and would therefore be treated — and taxed — the same way as your ‘umble correspondent here, who is (just keep repeating: “honesty is the best policy”) a fat body.

What Jno. is disregarding here is the distinction between a price and a tax.  The one is a bargained-for term of voluntary exchange which captures each side’s needs and limitations.  The other is an involuntary exaction the amount of which has no bearing on either side’s requirements, and which is determined wholly without reference to the subject matter of the transaction.  To illustrate:  Requiring everyone who receives more than a certain amount of “income” (as defined) during a year to pay over $0.40 of each dollar above that arbitrary limit has zero to do with whether being able to retain only $0.60 of each dollar is appropriate to the circumstances under which that dollar of “income” was generated.  Your only alternative to paying $0.40 is not to receive the income at all.  Charging me $3.25 a gallon for gasoline leaves me with any of several alternatives: I can so arrange my transportation needs as to minimize the amount of driving I must do; I can, within limits, change my mode of transportation (getting rid of my F-350 for an F-150, for example); I can switch from gasoline to diesel, and hope to compensate for an even higher per-gallon price by increased miles per gallon; I can shop around for someone who will charge me only $3.19 per gallon.  As Thos. Sowell pointed out, for decades Alcoa controlled almost the entire American market for aluminum.  Yet during that period the price of aluminum fell by something like 95%; why?  Because there were many substitutes for it.

Insurance premiums for the seriously obese should be higher.  “Insurance” is a contractually-agreed allocation of risk between an insurer and an insured.  The laws of large numbers enable an insurer to calculate, with a varying degree of exactitude, precisely how much of Event X it may expect over a given Population N of insureds who are exposed to the risk of Event X.  It can therefore, for a fairly small price relative to the cost of each Event X, promise to take some portion of that risk off an individual insured’s hands.  It’s math, pure and simple.  Math being rather merciless, however, when there is more of Event X to be expected among Population N or for any specific member of Population N, the aggregate risk that must be apportioned increases, and if you don’t want to break your insurer, so that now, ex-post and after they’ve already parted with the money they thought would relieve them of some or all of that risk, the risk of Event X gets re-allocated back onto the individual members of Population N, then you’ve got to recover that aggregate cost of Event X from Population N.  Period.  You cannot change the math of it.

The Grubers of the world see no moral or functional distinction between a price and a tax.

As Hayek and others pointed out long ago, prices and their movements allow the free flow of incredibly complicated information among enormous groups of people almost none of whom can be in direct communication with each other.  I have no idea what it takes to plant, tend, harvest, and process a tree, anywhere in the world.  I can see, however, what that 2×4 down at Lowe’s costs me, and I can decide whether to build that garbage can enclosure or not.  I can tell my contractor that I’ll forego finishing my basement just now because those 2x4s just cost too much, for me, right now, and with the specific other demands on my earning capacity as of right now and as I can foretell them.  Prices in a free market allow the development and flourishing of what Hayek called an “extended order” of voluntary cooperation.

Taxes are the antithesis of prices.  Taxes are not imposed based on millions of individual decisions taken by mutually independent actors.  They are centrally determined, in kind and amount and purposes to which put, and then they are imposed outward and downward.  Taxes communicate nothing; in fact, being involuntary they cannot communicate anything.  They are an exercise in coercion pure and simple, whereby one group seizes the property of another group to use it for purposes determined utterly without reference to the needs or desires of the group from whom seized.  The “sin tax” on lard-asses like me would generate revenue streams for the government that would be used for purposes utterly unrelated to the ostensible reason the tax was collected.  Just like “sin taxes” on booze and tobacco aren’t used to reduce drunkenness or nicotine consumption, or to make better any of the conditions caused by either.  Those moneys get plowed into re-paving roads every four years whether they need it or not, or building hilarities like a “land port” in a downtown area, to sit vacant and all-but-abandoned for several decades.  Or they get put into “higher education,” which these days means hiring more administrators, “diversity coordinators,” and sundry grievance-mongers, rather than improving the library system or putting more or better professors in front of classrooms.  Or they will fund the travel and entertainment budgets of agencies like the IRS, with their $50,000 demonstrations of painting (seriously, that happened, at the same time the IRS was targeting taxpayers based on their political views).

Gruber’s equating prices and taxes is more than a little bit of a Freudian slip.  We must always, always bear in mind that leftism is inherently coercive and irreconcilable with human liberty.  You cannot be a leftist and at the same time be a friend of human liberty.  Cannot be done.  You may believe that you have identified values which rank higher on whatever scale you choose than human liberty, and we can have a good-faith debate on whether you are right.  But you cannot pretend to be for both.  Gruber is a leftist.  As his now-revealed comments about the design and passage of the “Affordable” Care Act show quite plainly, he relishes the notion of sticking it to John Q. Public without the latter’s even realizing what’s being done to him.

When a leftist like Gruber tells you that a price is the moral or functional equivalent of a tax, he is doing neither more nor less than projecting his own desire for coercive power onto the participants in one of Hayek’s extended orders.

But, as I mentioned at the top of this post, I’m a lard-ass, and as such I have problems with proposing to tax my ass (literally) so that the University of Blank can hire another “counselor” for the “victims” of “microagressions” like being told that the intricacies of differential equations do not vary by the skin color of the student.

I have a book which I was given many years ago from my late grandfather.  He was born and grew up in a tiny little town in the Midwest which to this day does not have a traffic light, and only a half-dozen or so stop signs.  He grew up, went to Northwestern, where he interrupted his studies to serve as a medic in the Great War.  He returned, finished his degree, and went to Harvard Law School.  I have his diploma, signed by Roscoe Pound, at the house somewhere.  That was back in the day when a farmer’s kid from nowhere could manage to go to an Ivy League law skool in the days before student loans.

In any event the book is Abe Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories, and was published in 1901 by Alexander K. McClure.  The stories were harvested from people who’d actually known Lincoln back in the day.  Among my favorites is the one where he was in a heated discussion with some people and the proposition was made along the lines of, “Well, why don’t we just call it so-and-so?”  The astute reader will recognize in this an early murmuring of what has since become accepted political dogma.  In a world in which there is no truth, only competing narratives, it genuinely does not matter what something is, or is not (e.g. “homosexual marriage”), but rather and only what you call it.

Lincoln’s response was to pose the question of how many legs a calf would have if you called its tail a leg.  “Five!” the answers piped up.  No, Lincoln pointed out, the calf would still have only four, because “calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

Which brings me, by logical transition so smooth as to be scarcely noticeable, to the question of what is the unemployment rate in the United States.  “5.6%!!” crow the lefties and their publicist arm (which is to say, the lamestream media).

Except it’s not 5.6%, not by a wide margin.  If you are so completely unemployed you’ve given up hope and looking for work for the past four weeks, you’re no longer “unemployed” for purposes of the BLS count.  Seriously, you aren’t; it’s as if you just vanished from the face of the globe, as if your belly no longer needed food, your children no longer needed food, and your car began to run on cold tap water.  If you’ve been making $82,500 a year and lost that job because your employer went bust — or if you used to work at a bookstore and minimum wage hikes have put your employer out of business — and in order to keep some ramen noodles on the table you cut your neighbor’s lawn for $50 every other week, you’re counted as “employed,” and therefore not “unemployed.”  If, because of how companies now use software to schedule their workers so that as few of them as possible are “full-time” for purposes of various federal and state mandatory benefits, and because of how many companies now use that software, you can only cobble together, among two or three part-time jobs, 18 or 20 hours of paid employment each week, you’re “employed.”  And so forth.

The CEO of Gallup calls this for the bullshit it is.  As the Blogfather would say, read the whole thing.

The employment picture is dismal and all the mulligans and we’re-not-counting-those-hungry-people-out-of-work will not change that.

This is, of course, a further illustration, as if such were needed, of why you never, ever trust government numbers on their faces.