(if I were the) King of the Forest

So yes, if you want to be pedantic about it Social Security is not in trouble at all. It is covered by the trust fund. The managers of the Social Security Administration can sleep well at night knowing they’ve served us well in securing the benefits they’ve promised.

But unless we do something clever, and fairly soon, the federal government as a whole will be in trouble because of Social Security. To me that is a distinction without a difference.

I strive for conservative ideals, but I recognize we no longer live in a conservative society and that’s not going to change during any tenure you choose to grant me. What I will seek out is necessary compromise: policies which meet short-term political or social needs using the tools available but which embody the ideal of long-term cultural change to render those tools unnecessary.

The question, then, for both Presidential candidates is: What do you think is a “fair” tax rate? What is a “fair share” for any individual citizen, whether or not they are “rich”?

And, even more importantly, on what basis do you make that determination?

I expect, then, that he runs his practice strictly on a cost-reimbursement basis. After all, any money he or his staff take home at the end of the day to pay their mortgages or to feed their families or to buy cars and gizmos or to pay for entertainment — whatever money they take home to live their lives — comes from profit.

In March 2007 The Boston Globe published an opinion piece by Peter H. Schuck of the Yale Law School and Richard J. Zeckhauser of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard which described the adverse effects of so-called “bad apples” and “bad bets” on the effectiveness of government assistance programs. By “bad apples” they […]

Notwithstanding the popular mythologies of “Democratic Accountability“, under the best of circumstances our control as individual citizens over the actions of our government is diffuse and indirect, and under the worst circumstances it is all but nonexistent. In the absence of large-scale corruption, conflicts of interest, and bureaucratic inertia democratic government may reflect the general moral consensus of society as a whole but it can never reflect all the subtleties of an individual moral outlook. There is probably no one in America, now or in any earlier golden age, who can say that all their tax dollars are wisely or even agreeably spent. Even good government is by nature a compromise.

If you really believe in ensuring your economic activities, including charitable giving, reflect your individual moral values and your individual social vision and your individual voice you would be wise to remove as much of that economic activity as possible from the control of others who might see the world differently – to remove as much of that economic activity as possible from the control of any communal agent, including and especially from the control of government.

Would those calling now for confiscation of that “excess” through a windfall profits tax be equally willing to to make up the “shortfalls” through a windfall loss subsidy during the next down cycle? That would be “fair”, if perhaps unproductive. But I don’t remember any of them being in favor of that in the past. And I can’t imagine it happening in the future.

Rather, in their lexicon “fairness” seems, at least with regard to business, to mean “responsible for losses but not entitled to profits” — risk without reward.

In advocating for Microsoft to defy the Chinese government’s censorship orders and stand up for free expression in China you are demanding that an American corporation take it upon itself to disregard the local laws of the community in which they operate. You are demanding that they substitute an American standard of civil liberty and an American vision of proper social regulation for the locally determined political and cultural choices.

We routinely view the problem of illegal immigration effectively as one of importing labor. But it is a much more useful paradigm to view it as exporting work, despite the fact that the work doesn’t actually leave the country … If we view illegal immigration as an illicit export of jobs rather than as in illicit import of people, we see a different set of solutions to the problem.

Which way do you want it? Opportunity comes with risk; security impedes opportunity. If you want creditors to give people opportunity you can’t blame them for enabling risk-taking. If you want them to prevent risk-taking you can’t blame them for denying opportunity.