A few recent stories in the news have caught my attention, so I wanted to comment on them. First, CNN ran an editorial on hate crimes. I already responded to it in the comments, but I wanted to address one other point the authors made. In the last paragraph, they make the claim (without a reference, I might add) that “over two-thirds of the American public favor hate crime laws.” So? Over two-thirds of the American public are morons. I suspect that any survey you would conduct on this issue would go something like this. Hate is bad. Crime is bad. Therefore, hate crime is doubly bad. So any law making hate crimes illegal is doubly good. Sure I’ll vote for that. It doesn’t matter that it’s meaningless. The term “hate crime” is like something right out of Orwell’s newspeak. It’s doubleplusungood. It is literally thoughtcrime brought to life, and the potential dangers of attempting to police people’s thoughts are far greater than the danger of ignoring a perpetrator’s motivation in committing a crime.
In other news, the First Amendment is under attack in Wisconsin, as an Iraq War veteran turned entrepreneur is being harrassed by the local constabulary for flying the US flag upside down as a sign of distress. His quote at the end of the story really says it all: “It is pretty bad when I go and fight a tyrannical government somewhere else, and then I come home to find it right here at my front door.”
Lastly, I recently posed the question, is Atlas shrugging? Here is one more bit of affirmative evidence from the Wall Street Journal, documenting that previous attempts to “soak the rich” in various states have never achieved the stated goal. Raising taxes significantly on the rich only provides incentive for them to avoid the taxes, either by moving out of the oppressive state or working harder to shelter the income, thereby driving down the state’s annual revenue. In Atlas Shrugged, the rich are encouraged to disappear to Galt’s Gulch — in real life, they are being encouraged to relocate to tax havens like Texas or Florida. Either way, the government’s attempts at redistributing wealth are thwarted.