Archive for November, 2007
by Thomas E. Brewton
Enforcing proper behavior is anathema to liberals, but essential to learning.
The recent Supreme Court decision in the MORSE ET AL. v. FREDERICK case, better known as the "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case, has generated controversy, both because of the Court's decision, and because of the concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Facts of the case were the following:
"At a school-sanctioned and school-supervised event, petitioner Morse, the high school principal, saw students unfurl a banner stating "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS", which she regarded as promoting illegal drug use. Consistent with established school policy prohibiting such messages at school events, Morse directed the students to take down the banner. When one of the students who had brought the banner to the event respondent Frederick refused, Morse confiscated the banner and later suspended him."
The Court's ruling, expressed in the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, was:
"Because schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use, the school officials in this case did not violate the First Amendment by confiscating the pro-drug banner and suspending Frederick…. Our cases make clear that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 506 (1969). At the same time, we have held that the constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 682 (1986), and that the rights of students must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment."
The Court's decision was opposed by many people, particularly liberal-Progressives.
What really agitated them, however, was the concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas.
by Thomas E. Brewton
Collectivism in the Federal government since the 1930s New Deal is paralleled by the emergence in financial markets of giant, multi-national financial institutions. Both reflect the detached, numbers only, view of socialistic regulators who deal in large abstractions called "the economy" and "the workers."
As Stalin is reputed to have said, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic. Make it big enough, and it can be made to seem in the best interests of society.
Stalin's detachment applies to the process of pooling thousands of individual debts, home mortgage loans, automobile notes, etc. into a single large debt package. Implicit is the idea that, even when a whole class of debt is highly risky, putting enough of them together will somehow mitigate the riskiness of any one of the components. Risks of default may be high in any one of the underlying pooled obligations, but aggregating enough of them into a single statistical vehicle presumably cancels the risk of individual components.
Macroeconomics is the Keynesian thesis that specific prices and wage rates don't matter, that it is sufficient to look only at averages of prices and wages for the whole economy. And, in that picture, the ultimate determinant of employment and economic activity is Federal deficit spending, the perennial Democratic Party "solution" to every economic slowdown. Closely allied is the theory that the Federal Reserve can control inflation and the level of economic activity by fiddling with interest rates.
By Alan Caruba
Finding, extracting, transporting, and refining crude oil is a very expensive business. It is also a very risky one. There are no guarantees that one will find oil and, finding it, there are no guarantees that the investment and all the assets involved will not be stolen by the governments that invite oil companies to tap their natural resources.
If you want to know why gasoline and everything made from oil is going to cost more in the years ahead, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Hugo Chavez, dictator of Venezuela, and a number of other nations who have engaged in extortion.
On June 26, Hugo Chavez told the Big Oil companies that had invested in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt that they were going to have to sell their assets at a ridiculously low price to Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state oil company. They were instructed to hand over majority control as part of Chavez’s nationalization program.
In power since 1999, this disciple of Fidel Castro fired 75% of the managers of the state company after they staged a strike in 2003. Only the increased investment by foreign-owed companies kept Venezuela’s oil industry from total implosion. This year he showed his appreciation by forcing out British Petroleum, Chevron, Total, and Norway’s Statoil. ConocoPhilips and Exxon Mobil Corporation have since concluded they too could not continue their operations in Venezuela.
The popular myth about Big Oil is that it wields such great power that nation states cannot resist them. The reality is that, faced with dictators like Chavez, often the only alternative is to leave or cut the best deal they can. The other reality is that Venezuela’s oil production has declined 25% since Chavez, a committed Communist, crushed the strike. With the major oil companies departing, how much greater a decline lies ahead? That is just one reason gasoline will cost more.