Indignant Desert Birds

It seems that Mitch McConnell hates the fact that Democrats won’t go along with his ideas. The fact that his ideas are terrible is sort of besides the point. Remember that gridlock comes, not from congressional obstinance, but from legitimate disagreement about the best course of action for America. That disagreement is good and healthy, but in order to properly weigh and measure which side has the better plan, they must be allowed to implement that plan.

So McConnall has a… call it a vestige of a point. The American political system really is broken. In 2008, Americans elected Obama and a huge Democratic majority. They promised to pass a huge stimulus, pass healthcare reform, and end the war in Iraq.

We ended up with… a continued involvement in Iraq, a barely adequate healthcare reform, and a Federal economic stimulus that almost (but didn’t quite) do enough to cover the anti-stimulus being done by the various states.

The reasons for this had little to do with the leadership of Obama or Pelosi (or Reid!), and everything to do with the mechanics of Congress. It is shockingly easy for a small group of elected officials to gum up all of Congress and keep it from doing anything. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming an engine installer for auto body damage.

If we tried the Democratic plan and it failed, I’d agree that McConnell should be allowed his turn to fix things. Instead, he was able to block the Democrats from implementing their plans, and is furious that Democrats are able to block his.

Tags: conservative, pestilence, politics by Punning Pundit
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The thirteenth amendment reads in full:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

There’s an odd clause in there, seemingly allowing slavery to exist under certain circumstances. I don’t think it was the intention of the Abe Lincoln– or whoever wrote the actual text of the Amendment (possibly Lyman Trumbull)– intended to create a loophole allowing for slavery to exist. I’m not psychic, so I won’t pretend that I have time traveling mind reading powers, but it seems unlikely. Rather, I think it’s simply impossible to draw a bright line between prison and slavery.

Which is why this article about prison labor is so scary. There is nothing inherently wrong with prison labor, per se. The feeling of utter uselessness is perhaps the most depressing one in the world, and the ability to do something probably keeps at least a few people from going stir crazy.

So that’s one thing. Stacked against that you have “wet-suit-clad inmates repair[ing] leaky public water tanks”. I’m not sure how much it costs to hire someone to to put on a wet suit, re-breather, grab a welding torch and get to work, but I’ll bet it’s more than $29,000 a year.

This creates some awfully perverse incentives for society to create more prisoners than it otherwise might. It might sound like cartoonishly evil to imagine that a judge would accept payment in order to convict children, but such things happen.

If we’re using prison labor as free labor– if we’re selling that labor off to private companies (as is strongly implied by the article), that means that there are two people being deprived of the value of their labor: 1) the inmate and 2) the person who would otherwise be getting paid to do the job in lieu of the slave.

This is what we mean when we say that labor has dignity. The dignity of labor is one of the major differences between a slave society and a free one. It may not be the case that organized labor is the only force capable of standing up against the reimposition of slave labor– not even I will be that hyperbolic– but it is the case a well organized labor movement is capable and incentivized to stand up against the encroaching prison state.

This is what they are fighting for in Wisconsin. Not a particular wage and benefit package, but the right to stand up and say “we are worth more than slaves.” If they can’t do that, then who will?

Tags: human rights, liberal, pestilence, politics by Punning Pundit
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The overwhelming majority of Americans are not Communists. In general, we believe that a free-ish market is a better way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services than government departments. But an awful lot of Americans seem to want government-run health care. Why? What makes health care so different from the rest of the economy that many of us want to turn it over to the people who brought us the Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles?

Is it because health care is a necessity? Food is a necessity, but no mainstream politicians are pushing plans for tax-funded universal distribution of cheezburgers.

Is it because health care is expensive? Housing is expensive, and it’s a necessity, so why is nobody promising me socialized apartments?

Is it because we’re not happy with the health care the market is providing us with? I doubt that, too. I work for Microsoft, and everybody’s got tons of complaints about our products, but nobody wants to replace us with Federal Windows and Federal Internet Explorer.

Is it because other first-world countries have socialized medicine? If Canada jumped off a bridge, would you jump off, too? Besides which, other first-world countries really don’t have socialized medicine. Britain and Canada may have true socialized medicine, but Switzerland and the Netherlands only have mandatory private insurance programs, and France and Germany have health care systems which are more market-oriented than America’s current health care system (which includes Medicare, Medicaid, and a tax system which heavily subsidizes full-service employer-provided health insurance).

Tags: communism, pestilence, politics by Maniakes
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