The Other Half of History Daily Blog
Thoughts on modern politics from a historical perspective.
John Roberts Plays Activist on Obamacare
Now that Chief Justice John Roberts has joined with the Court’s activist wing on two landmark cases, conservatives are quite naturally wondering what has happened to him.
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Race-Based Campaigning
It’s a little shocking to see how President Obama and Governor Romney are campaigning against each other purely on the basis of race. I’ve just been reading some literature from the organizations the two Presidential candidates have put together to build support among their respective racial groups: White Americans for Romney, and African Americans for Obama.
Each makes the same basic appeal, which can be characterized as “vote for this candidate because his skin color is the same as yours.”
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Liberals are Anti-Choice, Pro-Coercion
In my last post I talked about the Orwellian logic that allows big-government liberals to describe themselves as “pro-choice.”
Truth be told, every benefit that liberals claim to offer society depends on taking choices away from people. Every once in a while, in an unguarded moment, a liberal will admit this.
No Liberal is Pro-Choice
We have evolved to need coercion. Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman
The partisan fight over Governor Scott Walker’s “Act 10” law in Wisconsin is just the latest illustration of the importance of coercion to the political agenda of the left. Prior to the enactment of Act 10, public employees in Wisconsin had union dues automatically deducted from their paychecks. They had no choice in the matter, and that’s the way liberals liked it.
Walker’s new law gave the each government employee the right to chose whether his money goes to the union, and earned Walker the undying enmity of the union leaders, Democrats around the nation, and the left in general. The outrage that Walker’s law engendered demonstrates pretty clearly that conservatives, rather than liberals, should be the ones generally be identified as “pro-choice.”
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Public Employee Unions vs The Rest of Us
It looks like Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, is not the only politician trying to rein in the power of the public employee unions. Even Democrats are starting to realize that some limits have to be placed on the pay and benefits government workers can get. The fight is going to be bloody, because there is absolutely no limit to the amount of treasure the unions are willing to demand.
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