From American Exceptionalism to American Deceptionalism

Largely misunderstood or misused today, American Exceptionalism refers to the unique and exceptional form of governance created by the American Constitution with respect to individual power, liberty and freedom.

Prior to the creation of this nation, all forms of governance had been tyrannical, that is, total power and liberty were held by a monarch — or a czar, a dictator, a military conqueror, or a tribal leader — who in turn gave limited power, freedom and liberty to the individual.  Under the framers' historically new and "exceptionally" American form of constitutional governance, power, liberty, and freedom flowed from the Creator directly to each individual, who in turn gave limited power and liberty to the state (i.e., government).

In an interesting essay, Professor Ben Voth argues that today "[w]e are besieged by an intellectual elite intensely committed to a grand design of American Deceptionalism," whose four characteristics he defines as follows (below are excerpts only):

1. American is not exceptional. For our epistemic elite composed of Hollywood storytellers, jaded journalists, professional activists, and reactionary academics it is a cardinal rule that America is exceptional in only one respect: guilt. America is exceptionally guilty of any moral violation that the mind can conjure up — whether selfishness, bigotry, hatred, imperialism, greed, murder, genocide, sexism and on it goes — no nation has committed greater sins than this one.
2. The general American public is incredibly stupid and ignorant. The stupidity of Americans necessitates and justifies all kinds of rhetorical manipulations aimed at raising them up out of their failure to follow the example set by the higher beings inhabiting the East and West Coast and select urban centers. The deception spoken of by [MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan] Gruber was not unusual and is in fact normative for American elite. There is consequentially a voracious paternalism among the armies of Grubers that care for the American public through elite institutions.
3. Christianity, Judaism and religiosity contribute to the stubborn bad character traits of Americans. If Americans would stop clinging to religion, the nation could progress and lean forward. ... A breed of secular Pharisees takes us on a new shining path ... Religious people need to 'coexist' and cooperate with the secular Pharisees provided to them by American deceptionalists. 
4. American deceptionalism is a bipartisan movement. The elite of the Republican and Democratic Parties have a shared contempt for the general public. ... Ethics are a vulgar notion held among populists. They have no place in deceptionalist governance.

The author concludes:

Because American deceptionalists abhor individual rights, they attack individuals to isolate them and force broader adherence to group identity politics and politically correct thinking designed by the elite.  They seek to manipulate, control and limit notions of individual heroism.  The individual is inherently construed as a threat to social order.  Americans can and should challenge argumentatively, the assumptions noted above -- whether in classrooms, national cathedrals, boardrooms, council meetings, or rallies. Aspects of an American renaissance are already in the making, but the convictions of American deceptionalists are stubborn and persistent. They will require heroic resistance to fully defeat and return the nation to an appreciation of individual liberty.

Source: American Deceptionalism, Ben Voth, American Thinker

Jackie's Gang Rape Story: Early Lessons

Any woman with an ounce of estrogen in her body had to be seething as she read the Rolling Stone story of “Jackie’s” gang rape by nine University of Virginia frat boys. A reader’s desire to punish those men – in some creatively vile ways not fit to put on paper – would have been palpable.  In hindsight, that estrogen-infused, brain-deprived reaction appears to be exactly what the author and the magazine sought to achieve with the now-discredited story.

Jackie’s story began falling apart when others, exercising basic journalistic skills, discovered there was no party at the fraternity house on September 28, and the fraternity rushed in the spring, not the fall – two simple facts neither the author nor the magazine made any attempt to check. Rolling Stone issued a lame quasi-retraction, and Jackie’s own friends began backing away from her story. Now we learn that Jackie herself tried to withdraw from the story before it was published.

No doubt more will come out as the larger story unfolds, and it should. The innocents deserve exoneration, and the guilty deserve condemnation.  All of them.

In the meantime, we can draw a few early lessons from Jackie’s story.

One, liberal-progressives lie, distort, exaggerate, and emotionally manipulate with complete abandon to achieve their nefarious objectives.  The manufactured ‘war on women’ is one example.  Others include Jonathan Gruber’s candid (even proud) admissions of the public lies told by liberal-progressives to win passage of Obamacare, and IRS officials’ lies surrounding abuse of conservative organizations and individuals.  Lying worked in each case, but only for a time (a really short time in Jackie’s case).  Truth eventually raises her beautiful head and overcomes.  

Two, liberal lies cause real harm to the country and to innocent people.  Obamacare is the most extreme example.  A law now, the Affordable Care Act is a policy nightmare that has cost millions of people their health insurance and their health care providers, with more pain to come if implementation proceeds. With the truth of this disaster now obvious, a majority wants it repealed and replaced. 

Jackie’s story has caused harm to innocents, too.  The immediate damage is to the reputations of the men accused of such a reprehensible act and to their fraternity. The long-term damage will be felt by future rape victims who fear having their veracity doubted if they report the crime. 

Three, liberal college administrators are justifiably reaping the bitter fruit they have sown. They have been complicit in hyper-sexualizing campuses with co-ed dorms and bathrooms, bowls of free condoms, sex shows and Vagina Monologues plays, and titillating sex courses of no academic value. Add a generous supply of alcohol, and the situation becomes combustible.  A “sexual assault crisis” on campus?  Whatever did they expect?

Four, feminists have completely lost their minds, along with any moral grounds on which to speak for women. After Jackie’s story was called into question, feminist Zerlina Maxwell argued in the Washington Post that the facts [read truth] didn’t really matter because the story “helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.” She’s wrong; facts and truth do matter above all else.

After decades of advocating that women play the non-committal hook-up sex game with men, feminists find women aren’t faring very well. So they’re petitioning the federal government for new Title IX regulations to tilt the campus sex-playing field in favor of women: to force colleges to adopt policies that presume the honesty of an accuser and the guilt of an accused. 

“It’s no coincidence that the Rolling Stone article spent a great deal of time advocating for the expansion of federal involvement in higher education via Title IX of the Civil Rights Act,” Jonah Goldberg points out; “regulations that would erode the presumption of innocence in rape cases on campus.”  God help the University of Virginia men if such regulations were already in place.

As we stand with and defend the innocents, whatever residual outrage we feel from reading Jackie’s story should be redirected to the guilty:  liberals who try to avoid the consequences of their incessant dishonesty.


Update:
U-Va Students Challenge Rolling Stone, T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post
Rolling Stone and Random House Deserve Defamation Lawsuits, Leslie Loftis, thefederalist.com
Why the Media's Fact Problems are Way Bigger Than Rolling Stone, Mollie Hemingway

Reforming Anchor Baby Citizenship

"Any serious immigration reform considered in the next Congress should revisit the concept of birthright citizenship (namely that all children born on U.S. soil are citizens, regardless of their parents' status), or what is sometimes referred to as the 'anchor baby' issue," writes Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood. She gives the following rationale:

• Birthright citizenship incentivizes illegal immigrants to have children on U.S. soil in hopes it will allow them, the parents, to gain legal status;
• It fuels "chain migration," the process whereby one legal family member, once 21 years of age, is able to apply to bring in parents, siblings and in-laws. According to one study, 747,413 (or 66.1%) of the 1,130,818 immigrants granted legal permanent residency in 2009 were family-sponsored immigrants.
• It is costly to the U.S. taxpayer. While illegal immigrants themselves do not qualify for welfare, they can obtain Medicaid and food stamps on behalf of their U.S.-born children. (One study found that "nationwide, 40% of illegal alien-headed households receive some type of welfare.")
• And last but not least, birthright citizenship, as currently understood, is arguably unconstitutional.

Wood explains the constitutional issue this way:

For America’s first 100-plus years, the idea that just because someone was born on U.S. soil made them a U.S. citizen was disavowed. But a Supreme Court decision in 1898 (yes, there was judicial activism back then, too) that broadly and wrongly interpreted the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause changed all that.

The original intent of the Citizenship Clause was to ensure former slaves were given citizenship status.  It was never intended to give such status to children born here because their parents were living here as foreign ambassadors, diplomats or consuls, or simply because their non-citizen parent(s) had a baby while visiting or residing, legal or otherwise, in the U.S.

Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky puts it this way:

It is just plain wrong to claim that the children born of parents temporarily in the country as students or tourists are automatically U.S. citizens. They do not meet the 14th Amendment’s jurisdictional allegiance obligations. They are, in fact, subject to the political jurisdiction (and allegiance) of the country of their parents. The same applies to the children of illegal aliens because children born in the United States to foreign citizens are citizens of their parents’ home country.

Source: Not All Kids Born in the US Should Be Made Citizens, Genevieve Wood, The Daily Signal, The Heritage Foundation

Poll: Race Relations Worsening During Obama's Leadership

A Bloomberg poll finds the following:

President Barack Obama had hoped his historic election would ease race relations, yet a majority of Americans, 53 percent, say the interactions between the white and black communities have deteriorated since he took office, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll.

Those divisions are laid bare in the split reactions to the decisions by two grand juries not to indict white police officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.

 

Source: Most Americans See Race Relations Worsening Since Obama's Election, Bloomberg

Barnett: How to Finally Kill Obamacare

Law professor Randy Barnett, who directs Georgetown University Law School's Center for the Constitution, writes in USA Today that "there is now a clear path to repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act next year."

• There is now a serious financial risk to the ACA now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear King v. Burwell, which challenges the legality of the IRS ruling that — contrary to the law's specific language — permits federal subsidies in states that have not built their own state exchanges.
• Opponents of ACA should begin to develop — and have ready — a viable alternative law, one that has gone through the regular order legislative process.
• As a rule, Supreme Court justices are reluctant to invalidate a law on which many relied. It will be far easier for the justices to enforce the law's existing language if they know there is a viable alternative that can be enacted by both house of Congress and signed by the president within a week of their ruling.
• The alternative law should:
• completely repeal, in its first line, each and every word of the ACA;
• restore the private insurance market using actuarially-based insurance priced according to risk;
• restore consumer choice to buy true private insurance limited to the terms they want to pay for, including policies insuring only catastrophic costs, and medical savings accounts;
• increase competition among insurers by allowing state regulated policies to be sold across state lines so people don't have to change insurance when they move; and
• increase equity by extending tax benefits now available only to employer0based insurance.

By having a legislatively-vetted replacement in the pipeline and in the public discussion before oral arguments are held in March, Barnett argues, Obamacare's opponents can make a favorable ruling against the law much more likely.

O's Immigration: Illegals Lose Public Support, States File Lawsuit

"Seventeen states are involved in a lawsuit filed Wednesday challenging President Obama's executive actions on immigration," reports Breitbart. "Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Caroline, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the governors of Mississippi, Maine, North Carolina and Idaho filed the suit in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas."

The lawsuit argues:

• The executive action on immigration conflicts with the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Take Care Clause limits the scope of presidential power and ensures that the chief executive will uphold and enforce Congress’s laws – not unilaterally rewrite them under the cover of “prosecutorial discretion.”
• The DHS Directive failed to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act’s required notice and comment rulemaking process before providing that legal benefits like federal work permits, Medicare, and Social Security be awarded to individuals who are openly violating immigration laws.
• The executive action to dispense with federal immigration law will exacerbate the humanitarian crisis along the southern border, which will affect increased state investment in law enforcement, health care and education.

Polls also find public support for illegal immigrants is falling.

• Quinnipiac reported "that support for immigrants is at its lowest level" ever measured by the poll:  48% now say illegals should be allowed to stay, compared to 57% a year ago.
• A post-Obama Economist/YouGov poll found that only "47% now favor providing those here illegally having a path toward citizenship ... In February, more than half favored some sort of pathway to citizenship."

Sources:
17 States File Lawsuit Challenging Executive Amnesty, Caroline May, Breitbart
Quinnipiac University Poll press release, Nov 25, 2014
Only Democrats Support Obama's Executive Order on Immigration, Kathy Frankovic, Economist/YouGov Poll, Dec 2, 2014

Why the Middle Class is Hurting

"The American middle class has absorbed a steep increase in the cost of health care and other necessities as incomes have stagnated over the past half decade, a squeeze that has forced families to cut back spending on everything from clothing to restaurants," reports the Wall Street Journal, which provides this chart on changes spending and income in middle class households since 2007.

Source: Basic Costs Squeeze Families, Ryan Knutson and Theo Francis, Wall Street Journal

Obama's Amnesty Impact on Social Security

The long-term financial condition of Social Security and Medicare will vastly worsen as a result of Obama's executive order legalizing an estimate 5 million illegal immigrants.

• Most workers pay into the programs for their working careers, between 40 and 50 years. But millions of Obama's newly legalized are working-age adults with children, so many could be in their 40s or older.  Thus they could pay FICA taxes for the next, say, 15 or 20 years — less than half the average American worker — and be eligible for the full array of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
• In addition, most will be lower-income workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that foreign-born, full-time workers earn about 80% of native-born Americans ($33,500 vs. $41,900).  Social Security is a social insurance program and is structured to provide disproportionately more benefits for lower-income workers. Medicare pays the same regardless of how much a worker pays in.
• Given the demographic unknowns, estimating the amnesty's financial cost to our retirement programs — and so to U.S. taxpayers — can only be approximate. But using a basic simulation model, we believe the government will receive about $500 billion in payroll tax revenue (including Part B and drug premiums), and expect it to pay out some $2 trillion in benefits over several decades. 
• In one executive order Obama may have created his biggest income transfer scheme yet, and imposed the worst financial challenge to our two already-struggling retirement programs. And millions of Americans can expect to see their taxes go up in the future to pay for it.

Source: Obama's Amnesty Will Create a Fiscal Nightmare for Entitlements, Merrill Matthews and Marke E. Litow, Investor's Business Daily

Univ of Illinois Could Lose $4.5 Million for Hiring Terrorist

A wealthy donor will withhold a $4.5 million planned gift to the University of Illinois if the school goes forward with its plan to pay a convicted murderer and domestic terrorist as a professor, reports Eric Owens @ the Daily Caller.

Last month, the statewide board of trustees cleared the way for the flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign to rehire 1970s-era Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist James Kilgore, a convicted murderer who participated in a 1975 bank robbery during which bank customer Myrna Opsahl was shot and killed.

The 42-year-old mother of four bled to death on the bank floor.

Now, Chicago businessman Richard Hill has notified officials at the University of Illinois at Chicago that he will rescind a pledge to donate $6.5 million to the UIC bioengineering department, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Hill, the retired CEO of Novellus Systems, has already given $2 million. However, he has vowed to withhold every last dime of the remaining $4.5 million if school officials allow Kilgore to teach courses in Urbana-Champaign.

“I no longer wish to be associated with University of Illinois,” the retired CEO wrote in a letter to school officials. “The Academy at the University of Illinois has clearly lost its moral compass.”

Thank US Fracking for Low Gas Prices

"Global energy markets have been upended by an unprecedented North American oil boom brought on by hydraulic fracturing," reports Bloomberg.  With crude oil prices collapsing worldwide (at about $70 a barrel today), Russia and the OPEC cartel are the losers, while American consumers and European economies are among the winners.

The winners:

• With average gas price at $2.77 a gallon, every day American consumers are saving $630 million on gasoline compared with what they paid in June prices.
• Every penny the price of jet fuel declines means a savings of $40 million for Delta Airlines.

 The losers:

• Many OPEC members need oil prices to stay at or near $100 a barrel to break even: $161 for Venezuela, $131 for Iran, and $98 for Saudi Arabia, for example.
• Russia's break-even cost is $105 a barrel. With 50 percent of its revenue from oil and gas, it can no longer relay on the same revenue to rescue its economy already suffering from European and US sanctions.

Meanwhile, "[t]he International Energy Agency estimates most drilling in the [US] Bakken formation — the shale producers that OPEC seeks to drive out of business — return cash at $42 a barrel," reports Bloomberg. According to one expert cited, US shale oil producers may break even at $40 a barrel or less.

Sources:
Oil at $40 Possible as Market Redraws Politics From Caracas to Tehran, Gregory Viscusi, Tara Patel and Simon Kennedy, Bloomberg
Saudis Risk Playing With Fire in Shale-Price Showdown as Crude Crashes, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, U.K. Daily Telegraph
As Oil Prices Plunge, Wide-Ranging Effects for Consumers and the Global Economy, Steven Mufson, Washington Post

Obamacare's Hidden Taxes on Jobs, Wages

Many have already felt the pain of Obamacare's impact on their health insurance coverage and medical care, but that's only half the story. The other half is the negative, long-term impact Obamacare has on jobs and the opportunity for personal career advancement, as University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan explains in the November Imprimis.

The key is Obamacare's "tax distortions," i.e., those changes in behavior on the part of businesses and households for the purposes of reducing their costs (tax burdens) or increasing their subsidies (tax benefits). These tax distortions "create all kinds of productivity problems and will have visible and permanent effects on the economy."

Obamacare effectively creates three new hidden taxes on full-time employment and business expansion via the employer mandate and the federal premium subsidies:

• Since the employer mandate applies to full-time employment, Obamacare effectively penalizes (or taxes) employers who offer full-time employment to workers and rewards employers who offer part-time employment to workers.
• Since the employer mandate applies only to employer with 50 or more employees, Obamacare effectively discourages (or taxes) businesses that grow and expand, hurting employees who would have advanced financially as a small business grew into a larger, more profitable business.
• Since state exchange premium subsidies (tax breaks) are progressive and based on worker earnings — the more a worker earns, the less he/she receives in government tax breaks — Obamacare effectively creates a new hidden tax on wages.

"In conclusion," writes the author, "I can make you this promise: If you like your weak economy, you can keep your weak economy."

Source: Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Economic Productivity, Casey Mulligan, Imprimis.

US Welfare Spending Second Only to France

"We Americans pride ourselves on not having a 'welfare state'," writes Robert Samuelson. "We're not like Europeans."  In fact, our 'welfare state' is bigger than all European countries but one.

Call it a massive case of national self-deception. Indeed, judged by how much countries devote of their national income to social spending, we have the world's second-largest welfare state -- just behind France.

This is not just conjecture. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -- a group of wealthy nations -- has recently published new figures on government social spending. Covered is unemployment insurance, disability payments, old-age assistance, government-provided health care, family allowances and the like. ...

But wait. Direct government spending isn't the only way that societies provide social services. They also channel payments through private companies, encouraged, regulated and subsidized by government. This is what the United States does, notably with employer-provided health insurance (which is subsidized by government by not counting employer contributions as taxable income) and tax-favored retirement savings accounts.

When these are added to government's direct payments, rankings shift. France remains at the top, but the United States vaults into second position with roughly 30 percent of its GDP spent on social services, including health care. We have a hybrid welfare state, partly run by the government and partly outsourced to private markets.

Below are the OECD rankings, courtesy AEI's James Pethokoukis:

Piketty's Progressive Economic Policies Fall Flat

French economist Thomas Piketty was the darling of the Left last year as the champion of progressive policy proposals — including an "80% tax rate on high incomes and progressive tax on great wealth" — to eradicate economic inequality.  He may have sold a lot of books, argues Michael Barone, but "his policies don't seem to be selling well anywhere."

There were no campaign ads calling for Piketty taxes this fall. Raising the minimum wage got some attention, but, writes Barone,

It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that an increased minimum wage is a transfer of income from fast-food customers to fast-food workers minus those who are replaced by kiosks. That's not a very effective way to sock it to the top 1 percent. ...

America already has lots of economic redistribution. American voters evidently sense that more redistribution would sap economic growth. They're willing to throw a little to minimum wage earners, but they don't want to kill the geese laying the golden eggs.

Piketty's progressive policies are faring no better in other nations.

Even in Brazil, with near-zero growth and mush greater inequality than the U.S., incumbent President Dilma Rousseff saw her percentage slip from 56 percent in 2010 to 52 percent this October.

In Britain, facing an election next May, there are calls within the Labour Party to oust leader Ed Miliband, who has called for freezing energy prices and a tax on "mansions," which would hit Londoners hard.

Piketty confesses he has seldom left Paris in his adult years. But even there his policies are in trouble. The job approval of Socialist President Francois Hollande, who imposed a top income tax rate of 75 percent, currently hovers just above 10 percent.

Politicians opposing massive economic redistribution have a hard time coming up with appealing rhetoric. But there seems to be something more powerful working in their favor — a widespread if 8unspoken understanding that government attempts to "spread the wealth around" (as candidate Obama once told Joe the Plumber) tend to destroy it instead.