Putting 'Limited Government' in Perspective

The conservative view of limited government is less about chopping down trees—metaphorical or otherwise—and more about trimming back the overgrowth to give room for businesses, community organizations, and religious institutions to grow and flourish.

Lucy Schouten, Small Government: Only One Side of the Coin

Ms. Schouten offers several examples "of  private-sector solutions that have solved problems in both the public and economic spheres using innovative methods."

Research: Little Known Heart Condition Affects Mostly Educated Young Women

From the UK Independent:

A debilitating and poorly understood health condition which causes the heart rate to accelerate rapidly upon standing up predominantly affects young, well educated women, new evidence has shown.

The reasons for the association remain mysterious.

PoTS is believed to affect around one in 558 people, based on figures from the USA, but many doctors are still unaware of its existence. It is often misdiagnosed, or attributed to an associated condition such as anxiety, panic disorder, or chronic fatigue.

The new study, published in the online journal BMJ Open today, assessed 84 members of the national support group PoTS UK, and 52 patients diagnosed at an NHS clinic in Newcastle.

Many had been forced to change jobs or give up work by the condition, which causes fatigue and makes many basic, everyday tasks exhausting and difficult.

Researchers said that increasing awareness of the condition would be crucial to improving diagnosis rates and understanding.

Think Twice Before Killing Coal

"When it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking," argues Robert Bryce at NRO.

The green Left continues to push the claim that the reason there’s been no major action to cut carbon dioxide emissions is that some evil cabal — quarterbacked by climate “denialists” who have a “hostility to science” — has been blocking change. (By the way, that’s exactly what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on June 9.)

The reality — as shown by the numbers — is far different. Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to supply about 87 percent of all global energy because those sources are able to provide the vast amounts of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford. And for developing countries in particular, coal remains the fuel of choice because it is cheap and abundant, deposits are geographically widespread, and its price is not influenced by an OPEC-style cartel.

We can discuss the need for more action on climate change. But in doing so, we must also recognize that the U.S. has been leading the world in reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. Between 2005 and 2013, according to the BP numbers, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell by 8.7 percent. For comparison, emissions in Germany, which has spent about $100 billion on subsidies for renewables, have fallen by 4.6 percent. But the numbers in absolute terms are even starker. Since 2005, U.S. emissions have fallen by 563 million tons. That’s 17 times the reduction seen in Germany, where emissions have fallen by 40 million tons since 2005.

Meanwhile, since 2005, China’s emissions have grown by 71 percent, or about 3.9 billion tons, which is about six times the total reductions achieved in the U.S. and Germany. In the Middle East, emissions have jumped by about 600 million tons, an increase that effectively cancels out the combined reductions achieved in both the U.S. and Germany since 2005.

The punch line here is obvious: Numbers don’t lie. And when it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking.

Beltway Journalism's Blind Spot

"It’s now clear why the primary defeat of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, came so completely out of the blue last week," writes David Carr in the NYTimes. "Beltway blindness that put a focus on fund-raising, power-brokering and partisan back-and-forth created a reality distortion field that obscured the will of the people."

But that affliction was not Mr. Cantor’s alone; it is shared by the political press. Reporters and commentators might want to pause and wipe the egg off their faces before they go on camera to cluck-cluck about how Mr. Cantor, Republican of Virginia, missed signs of the insurgency that took him out. There was a lot of that going around, and the big miss by much of the political news media demonstrates that news organizations are no less a prisoner of Washington’s tunnel vision than the people who run for office.

Strassell: What Dave Brat Taught Conservatives

"With Washington determined to take a lesson away from Dave Brat's rout of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, let's make sure it's an enduring one," writes Kimberley Strassel at WSJ. "Let's talk 'reform' conservatism."

It happens that Mr. Brat, an economics professor, spent the bulk of his campaign rallying voters to a traditional free-market, pro-growth economic agenda. It centered on a tough criticism of crony capitalism and a clarion call for a flatter and more efficient tax code.

Mr. Brat reprised his themes for Fox News's Sean Hannity the night of his victory, explaining: "We need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes. [Michigan Rep.] Dave Camp had a good bill which simplified the tax code and had a Reagan-esque 10 and 25 percent rate. That made sense and it was going to be pro-growth." This clearly resonated with the 56% of voters who chose to rout a sitting majority leader.

Brat's win, argues Strassel, "is surely awkward for a new wing of the conservative movement that has taken to arguing that the whole free-market, supply-side, Reaganesque agenda is passé." She links Mr. Cantor's "Making Life Work" agenda to the new reformers' manifesto, 'Room to Grow," the central premise of which is that "conservatives need to embrace government to endear themselves to the 'middle class'."

Mr. Cantor never endorsed the more dramatic proposals of the "reformers," though he spoke broadly kind words about "Room to Grow." His "Making Life Work" agenda made him a poster boy of that new GOP impulse to focus on populist initiatives that cater to the middle class.

Mr. Brat openly derided "Making Life Work," referring to its "catchy little phrases to compete with Democrats for votes." As he told Mr. Hannity: "I do not want the federal government trying to make my life work." Mr. Brat also ably tied together the cronyism/complexity/growth arguments to make the case for real tax reform (rather than Democrat-lite tax spending).

The hallmark of conservative policy innovation is the use of markets to limit government and expand citizen freedom and choice. That's reform. The lesson of the Brat-Cantor race is that the traditional reform concept is still popular (and populist). At least when it's delivered with economic understanding and conviction.

Lois Lerner's IRS E-Mails - the Saga Continues

"The Internal Revenue Service told Congress Friday it has lost a trove of emails to and from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the agency's Tea Party controversy, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year," reports Fox News.  "The IRS said it cannot locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year."

Scott Johnson @ powerlineblog.com posted two comments related to this news story. The first is an anonymous email he received from a Department of Justice lawyer:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Keep up the good work.

PS.

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

The second draws a historical connection between Lerner's missing emails and President Richard Nixon's missing 18 1/2 minutes of Oval Office tape recordings:

The charge that Richard Nixon “endeavored” to misuse the IRS made its way into the second of the three articles of impeachment voted against him by the House Judiciary Committee. Nixon’s efforts to misuse the IRS were futile. They went nowhere. Nixon and his henchmen desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents, but their efforts were a pathetic failure.

Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” As we have come to see, Caulfield was on to something... 

Economist: Why Everything You Heard About [Eating] Fat is Wrong

"The case against fat [in diets] would seem simple," writes the Economist, in a review of a new book entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz.

Fat contains more calories, per gram, than do carbohydrates. Eating saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, which in turn is thought to bring on cardiovascular problems. Ms Teicholz dissects this argument slowly. ...

... the vilification of fat, argues Ms Teicholz, does not stand up to closer examination. She pokes holes in famous pieces of research—the Framingham heart study, the Seven Countries study, the Los Angeles Veterans Trial, to name a few—describing methodological problems or overlooked results, until the foundations of this nutritional advice look increasingly shaky.

The opinions of academics and governments, as presented, led to real change. Food companies were happy to replace animal fats with less expensive vegetable oils. They have now begun abolishing trans fats from their food products and replacing them with polyunsaturated vegetable oils that, when heated, may be as harmful. Advice for keeping to a low-fat diet also played directly into food companies’ sweet spot of biscuits, cereals and confectionery; when people eat less fat, they are hungry for something else. Indeed, as recently as 1995 the AHA itself recommended snacks of “low-fat cookies, low-fat crackers…hard candy, gum drops, sugar, syrup, honey” and other carbohydrate-laden foods. Americans consumed nearly 25% more carbohydrates in 2000 than they had in 1971.

In the past decade a growing number of studies have questioned the anti-fat orthodoxy. Ms Teicholz’s book follows the work of Gary Taubes, a science journalist who has cast doubts on the link between saturated fat and health for well over a decade—and been much disparaged for his pains. There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. “It seems now that what sustains it,” argues Ms Teicholz, “is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.”

Interestingly, government pushed the high-carb/low-fat food pyramid on an entire generation. Now we're told we have an obesity epidemic. Teicholz's book, which contains "well over 100 pages of notes and citations" and "covers decades of nutrition research," may explain why low-carb diets are increasingly successful and popular in reversing weight gain.