Is power needed to "implement principles"?

A "progressive" WSJ commenter stated

What is the point of principles if you have no power to implement them?

My response:

Principles are not "implemented". They are displayed, adhered to personally, and presented to others as a shining example. Principles do not require power or force.  

Some examples...

Principled: opposing abortion by standing in the sleeting rain outside a clinic holding a poster stating your beliefs

Not principled: using the force of law to prevent women from making a difficult choice

Principled: volunteering at a homeless shelter, donating your own time and money 

Not principled: using tax law to force your neighbors to support your personal cause

She clearly didn't get it, and responded with a non sequitor, mocking my nobility for standing in the rain. An aside, it has been my observation that progressives far too often respond with a non sequitur or even an ad hominem attack.

Otherwise she might have noticed that I was trying to produce an example representative of the abuses by both sides (conservatives and progressives) when it comes to trying to use their power to "implement principles". As I said, principles are not implemented (especially not through force, which kinda contradicts the very notion of "principles").

prin·ci·ple noun \'prin(t)-s(?-)p?l, -s?-b?l\ : a moral rule or belief that helps you know what is right and wrong and that influences your actions

Noble or not, I have never stood in the rain to protest abortion, primarily because the Republicans err when they try to impose their beliefs on the subject through the force of law. Thus, the quiet protest is more principled than screaming for a law so you can force your neighbors to comply.

Ditto for the soup kitchen example--"helping the homeless" is a cause readily taken up by the Democrats, who use the force of law to forcibly extract money from their neighbors to provide Section 8 housing, etc. while never stepping foot inside a shelter and doing real, principled work. Both sides relish the power to force the peons to bend to their will.

For what it's worth, I do drive past a clinic on my way to & from work. That clinic has a small group of protesters peacefully holding their signs just about every day. More than once, people in the car with me have stated something like "Whether you agree with them or not, you gotta respect that those people are standing out there in this weather for their principles."

Think Group A could be made aware of the "evil" actions of Group B?

First, we have the most recent entreaty on the part of Public Citizen, which is a progressive organization structured as a 501(c)(4) who's purpose (currently) to fund political advocacy  to urge Congress to overturn the right of 501(c)(4) organizations to fund political advocacy. 

If it weren’t for everything Public Citizen has done for the past 42 years and counting, the cloud of corporate greed looming over so much of our lives may by now have cast all of America under a permanent shadow.

During my 16 years of service in the U.S. House of Representatives, I saw over and over again just how vital Public Citizen is to defending health and safety, consumer rights, and our very democracy from Big Business and its many puppets in politics.

Public Citizen does the hard work behind the scenes that helps get good laws passed and bad bills stopped.

I really don’t know another organization that more skillfully and effectively counteracts the vastly better funded legions of corporate lobbyists that infest the halls of Congress day in and day out.

And — most significantly at this moment — nobody is doing more than Public Citizen to fight the U.S. Supreme Court’s stupid and stupefying decision in the Citizens United case.

It’s largely owing to Public Citizen that the movement to overturn Citizens United — and its evil twin McCutcheon v. FEC if it goes badly too — with a constitutional amendment has taken root so deeply and so quickly.

In this season of giving, I hope you will join me in making as generous a contribution to Public Citizen as you can.

Public Citizen can’t win without help from engaged Americans like you.

Then we have the Daily Kos. The Daily Kos is a product of Kos Media, LLC. It's a for-profit corporation sustained by advertising to and (non-deductible) contributions from its members. 

Here’s a sneak peek at our priorities for next year so you can see what your contribution would be supporting:

• We'll be rolling out Daily Kos 5 in the first half of the year, and it'll blow you away. It’s a huge investment in our community that will feature a streamlined look and dramatically better publishing experience, new features, better social media integration and added functionality to the mobile site.
• We'll be working to get Nancy Pelosi her gavel back and keep the Senate. And as bonus, we’ll be fighting to get rid of Mitch McConnell. (We raised an astonishing $1.6 million for candidates in 2013—and it wasn’t even an election year for most of the country. We’re going to blow that away in 2014.)
• We’ll continue to provide the news coverage that makes Daily Kos the go-to place for progressives when big things happen.

This is going to be hard work. It’s also going to be expensive.

Daily Kos has over five million unique readers every month and an operating budget of just $2.5 million. We could fund operations for two years if every reader chipped in just one dollar, but we all know that not everyone is in a position to do that—especially after the holidays.

So, I’ll ask again: If you’re fortunate enough to be in a position to give after the holidays, could you chip in just $5 a month to keep Daily Kos going through the 2014 election?

I wonder if the folks at Public Citizen will ever put the Daily Kos or Kos Media, LLC, in their list of corporations ruining the electoral process by funneling "unlimited" monies to candidates?

According to Wikipedia, during the 2004 U.S. election campaign, Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to fifteen Democratic candidates denoted as most needing funds and that Daily Kos led a fundraising campaign again in the 2006 midterm election campaign in conjunction with MyDD and State Project. This time around, they raised over $1.4 million for 17 "Netroots Candidates," 

A Clemson Christmas

Way back in 1999, I bought a new car. Every year, when we received our stickers from IPTAY, I put one with the others on the rear window of that car. This went on for many years until I decided it was finally time for a new car. I decided to give the old car to my niece who was turning 16 rather than trade it in or sell it, but before I did that I took a few last photos.

With my brother's family being Gamecocks, I figured the first thing they'd do is scrape those stickers off the car.I thought about making keeping the stickers on the car a condition of ownership but decided to not be an ass. I did mention that I hated seeing those go.

What I didn't know was that my brother would surprise me by presenting me with the stickers later. He spent hours carefully scraping them off the car keeping them as intact as possible and stuck them on a piece of foam poster board. He said he thought that since Mrs. Percy was so creative that she could do something with them, maybe put them in a frame or something.

That was back in the summer. Flash forward to Christmas morning when I opened a large square present, about 24-by-24 inches. It was a beautiful matted and framed 3-d Tiger Paw, made from those same stickers and foam poster board and the actual tiger paw is about the size of a large dinner plate.

A close up...

This will be hanging in a place of honor in my office from now on!

Thanks so much to my brother for saving the stickers and thanks ever so much to my wife, a true Clemson spirit!

Pathological Altruism, Enabling and Codependency

James Taranto's more-or-less daily column in the WSJ is one of my favorites, so it was nice to see a theme I've espoused before echoed in his latest offering. To wit, I wrote this entry back in 2008...

http://dontcomeinhere.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-big-surprise-bailout-of-freddie-and.html

Congress and the Administration have teamed up to cover the losses of these mortgage behemoths. They essentially took them over as government operations, kinda like Hugo Chavez did for many industries in Venezuela.
Now, between the three of them (Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie), US taxpayers are on the hook for about half of the existing $12T in mortgage debt.
...
The student loan industry is a mirror image of the mortgage industry and is likely to face a similar explosion. Government creates a perverse incentive (usually in the name of diversity) to loan money to people who cannot pay it back. As a government supported program, private lenders are willing to take more and more risk, pocketing the profits and turning to the Government to cover to losses....
Our Government is a classic enabler and we are all codependent. An enabler is a person who by their actions make it easier for an addict to continue their self-destructive behavior by rescuing the addict. The codependent party exhibits behavior that controls, makes excuses for, pities, and takes other actions to perpetuate the obviously needy party's condition, because of their desire to be needed and fear of doing anything that would change the relationship.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578545523824389986.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Oakley defines pathological altruism as "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm." A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails to anticipate the harm, "an external observer would conclude [that it] was reasonably foreseeable." Thus, she explains, if you offer to help a friend move, then accidentally break an expensive item, your altruism probably isn't pathological; whereas if your brother is addicted to painkillers and you help him obtain them, it is. 

As the latter example suggests, the idea of "codependency" is a subset of pathological altruism. "Feelings of empathic caring . . . appear to lie at the core of . . . codependent behavior," Oakley notes. People in codependent relationships genuinely care for each other, but that empathy leads them to do destructive things.
Ostensibly well-meaning governmental policy promoted home ownership, a beneficial goal that stabilizes families and communities. The government-sponsored enterprises Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae allowed less-than-qualified individuals to receive housing loans and encouraged more-qualified borrowers to overextend themselves. Typical risk–reward considerations were marginalized because of implicit government support. The government used these agencies to promote social goals without acknowledging the risk or cost. When economic conditions faltered, many lost their homes or found themselves with properties worth far less than they originally had paid. Government policy then shifted . . . the cost of this "altruism" to the public, to pay off the too-big-to-fail banks then holding securitized subprime loans. . . . Altruistic intentions played a critical role in the development and unfolding of the housing bubble in the United States. 

The same is true of the higher-education bubble. As we've argued, college degrees became increasingly necessary for entry-level professional jobs as the result of a well-intentioned Supreme Court decision that restricted employers from using IQ tests because of their "disparate impact" on minorities.

 

Reagan Quote is Prophetic

In a letter to the editor in WSJ, someone rendered this Reagan quote.

Ronald Reagan warned of the strategy that Ms. Noonan describes in a speech he gave on Oct. 14, 1969, at a fundraiser for Eisenhower College.

Then-California Gov. Reagan said: "We are approaching the end of our second century. It has been pointed out that the days of democracy are numbered once the belly takes command of the head. When the less affluent feel the urge to break a commandment and begin to covet that which their more affluent neighbors possess, they are tempted to use their votes to obtain instant satisfaction. Then equal opportunity at the starting line becomes the extended guarantee of at least a tie at the finish of the race. Under the euphemism 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' we destroy a system which has accomplished just that and move toward the managed economy which strangles freedom and mortgages generations yet to come."

Back in '69 he probably wasn't senile yet (Alzheimer's), and this comment was simply prophetic.

Welfare $$ > Minimum Wage

Want to know why unemployment and foodstamp use remains at high levels (foodstamps is all-time high)?

http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/welfare-can-pay-more-than-that-entry-level-job-20130820

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/02/on-labor-day-2013-welfare-pays-more-than-minimum-wage-work-in-35-states/

"Not only do government-assistance programs for the unemployed pay more than minimum wage in 35 states, but they also pay more than a $15-an-hour job, according to the report. Hawaii has the "most generous benefit package," following by the District of Columbia and Massachusetts.

"In 11 states, these programs pay more annually than the average teacher after his or her first year on the job. In 39 states, it pays more than a starting salary of a secretary. And the comparisons continue.

In total, the federal government spends $668.2 billion on these programs annually, while states give out another $284 billion, the report finds. 

“The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,” Tanner and Hughes write in their new paper. “Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit,” which offers extra subsidies to low-income workers who take work. “In 13 states [welfare] pays more than $15 per hour.”

"Tanner and Hughes award the national welfare championship to Hawaii, which offers $60,590 in annual welfare benefits, once you account for the fact that welfare benefits are tax-free to the recipient, compared to work-related wages. That’s the equivalent of $29.13 an hour. Rounding out the top five were D.C. ($50,820 per year and $24.43 an hour), Massachusetts ($50,540 and $24.30), Connecticut ($44,370 and $21.33), and New York ($43,700 and $21.01).

And the kicker:

"welfare benefits are entirely tax-free.

Obama Administration Abuses of Power

After Tea Party IRS scandal, etc. there may be a reason for that one too. See Investor's Business Daily's take...perhaps this was another take of Obama administration using its muscle to silence opposition...

On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken foreign laws.

Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their guitars contain "East Indian Rosewood," which is the exact same wood in at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and their inventory of foreign wood seized?

Grossly underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to Republican politicians. Recent donations have included $2,000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and $1,500 to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

By contrast, Chris Martin IV, the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee over the past couple of election cycles.

"We feel that Gibson was inappropriately targeted," Juszkiewicz said at the time, adding the matter "could have been addressed with a simple contact (from) a caring human being representing the government. Instead, the government used violent and hostile means."

That includes what Gibson described as "two hostile raids on its factories by agents carrying weapons and attired in SWAT gear where employees were forced out of the premises, production was shut down, goods were seized as contraband and threats were made that would have forced the business to close."

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/052313-657569-gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation.htm#ixzz2eKU9MF6G 

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