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Greedy Government is the Problem
By Rob Roper

On April 15, 2009, the day hard working Vermonters officially paid up what Forbes magazine just labeled (again) the nation's highest individual tax burden, Vermont Democrats and Progressives responded by voting to increase Vermont's tax burden by $24 million. By passing H.442, they voted for higher income taxes. Higher death taxes. New taxes on iTunes and other electronic downloads. The vote was 82 - 54

The Return of Reactionary Liberalism
By John McClaughry

When old and true liberalism gained a legislative majority, it enacted government programs to meet those perceived needs - and it unashamedly raised taxes on the better-off to pay their costs.

"Reactionary liberalism" recognizes the same needs, but its practitioners lack the political courage to raise the taxes to pay the bills, and face the wrath of the taxpayers. So reactionary liberalism contrives to use the power of government to force third parties to shoulder the costs of its liberal agenda. Those third parties - usually private businesses - are then forced to raise their prices to cover the additional burden of supporting the mandated benefits.

Testing, Testing, 1,2,4, Whatever
By Martin Harris

From Princeton, President Tilghman answered her West Virginia alumnus as follows: "Princeton students are such a remarkable group that they can’t be judged by fact-based tests".  That’s where I failed the contemporary-culture-shock test;  within living memory, the educational culture once used fact-based tests at every level from K to 12 to determine grade-to-grade promotion, and universities used them to see whether engineers about to graduate were capable of designing bridges which wouldn’t fail under traffic load, whether wannabe economists had learned how to qualify mortgage loan applicants, whether future agronomists had become reasonably expert in crop-seed DNA analysis. As recent untoward events have suggested, that sort of educational rigor doesn’t prevail any more, illustrating just how fact-based tests have become the Rodney Dangerfields of formal education: they don’t get no respect. Except, superficially, when they seem to show improvement: a recent (25 Mar 09) Rutland Herald headline says "Test Results Improving Statewide" and you have to read deep into the article to learn that the "good news" is that 88 Vermont schools, this year, failed to meet Federal Adequate Yearly Progress standards, down from 116 last year.

Audit the Federal Reserve
By Jessica Bernier

For all of the talk about government being more transparent I find it interesting that Peter Welch, who sits on this same committee has not joined over 100 of his colleagues in cosponsoring legislation which would provide transparency into one of these institutions-- the Federal Reserve. HR1207, The Federal reserve Transparency Act, would require a much needed and never performed audit of the Fed.

"You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."  -- Adrian Rogers, 1931

Pro-gay marriage groups spent more than $228,000
By Dave Gram, The Associated Press, April 28, 2009

Supporters of Vermont's new gay marriage law spent more than $228,000 lobbying for it in the three months before the historic April 7 votes to pass it over Gov. Jim Douglas' veto. ...

An opposition group, Take It To The People, which advocated a nonbinding statewide referendum on the question, spent more than $10,000 on its efforts from January through March.

Go Private Whenever You Can
From the Caledonia Record, May 2, 2009

A fundamental axiom of successful businesses, whether private or public, is not to get into, or, if you are already in it, get out of any business that you should not be in. Schools are about education. They are not about food service, transportation systems, even cleaning and ground care, yet virtually every school board we know is trying, usually ineffectively, to manage these illegitimate spin-offs from their real business - education.

The Little Station that Could
GNAT to study Act 60 and education spending
By Andrew McKeever, Manchester Journal, April 23 2009

The drumbeat of criticism and controversy about Act 60, and its successor legislation, Act 68 — the state's educational finance law ­ may no longer match the intensity of a decade ago, but below the surface, misgivings simmer.

Into the debate has now stepped Manchester's own cable access television station. GNAT — Greater Northshire Access Television — finished filming a show last year about the effects of Act 60, 10 years later. It's now in the process of putting together a follow up that looks at the growth in education spending in Vermont, which has ballooned by almost 67 percent since 1997.

Environmental Ticketing An Abuse Of Rights
From the Caledonia Record, May 1, 2009

Environmental ticketing is simply another reduction of citizens' rights to a free and fair trial of allegations of wrongdoing by, in this case, an emotionally partial lobby and enforcement agency.

Monahan Filaments to lay off 54 Workers
By John S. McCright and John Flowers, Addison Independent, April 27, 2009

Bristle manufacturer Monahan Filaments on Wednesday said it will layoff 54 employees, or more than half of its Middlebury workforce, by late June. When the layoffs take effect, the company’s workforce will have fallen by around 100 employees in a year, leaving between 30 and 40 workers at the Case Street plant, which makes synthetic monofilaments for household, janitorial and industrial brushes and other applications.

"It’s the economy," said Jon Monahan, president of Monahan Filaments in explaining the reason for the job cuts. "Orders are down more than 50 percent from last year.

Assisted Suicide Resuscitated
From the Caledonia Record,. April 29, 2009

Like a bad dream, the effort to legalize assisted suicide is back on the docket of the Vermont Legislature. However its proponents choose to euphemize it, assisted suicide is still euthanasia, mercy killing, and, if it is passed, it is a door swung open to half a dozen pernicious kinds of justification for putting people out of their misery, beginning with their own desire to die, progressing to somebody else's desire that they die, and, finally, to a government decision that they ought to die. The movement ought to be snuffed, itself, before it goes anywhere in Vermont.

From Elsewhere

Jack Kemp, R.I.P.
By Rick Brookhiser, The National Review, May 3, 2009

Was there ever a man of such high spirits as Jack Kemp? Reagan was sunny; Kemp was a perpetual solar flare. He had an athlete's energy and an optimist's expectation that all would come out well. He also felt the respect for learning that only those who come to it late and under their own steam have. Ideas, he believed, really could save the world.

Related: Jack Kemp in His Own Words

Social In-Security and the Economic Crisis
By Dr. Jonathan Witt, Acton Institute for Religion and Liberty, April 29, 2009

The federal program had a worthy goal—to care for our nation's elderly during an economic crisis. At the same time, however, the program allowed many more people than before simply to skip the hard work of raising responsible children who would look after them in their declining years. Cashing a check is easier than rearing children; to believe that Social Security had no effect on the fertility rate is to believe that humans are not affected by incentives.

What does all this have to do with the economic crisis? While the causes of the crisis are complex, at its foundation is a supply/demand problem brought on partially by a demographic shift. As David Goldman explains in First Things, "The collapse of home prices and the knock-on effects on the banking system stem from the shrinking count of families that require houses. We are now a mélange of alternative arrangements in which the nuclear family is merely a niche phenomenon."

This demographic trend undermined the housing market. It undermined the financial system that came to depend on the housing market. And in the wider picture, it undermines the long-term solvency of Corporation USA, beginning with its pension plan.

Black-Market Schools
By James Tooley Cato Institute April 29, 2009

But is it really so grim? After all, my research had shown that significant numbers of parents had tried free primary education in the public schools but had decided to move their children back to the private schools. Surely, they weren't doing something so counterintuitive if they thought that the private schools really were hopeless? My research assistant from Newcastle, James Stanfield, and I decided to interview groups of parents in four schools that had reported parents' returning their children, having moved them first to the government schools. These parents at least were clear that they had behaved rationally moving back to private school.

In each discussion, parents eagerly told us how the education being offered in the slum private schools was higher quality than in the neighboring government schools — however much the buildings' appearances might suggest the contrary. Not one parent expressed the opposite view.

Despotism – The Soft Way
By Samuel Gregg D.Phil., Acton Institute for Religion and Liberty, April 22, 2009

Democracy, Tocqueville argued, encouraged this fixation with equality because it requires people to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. This encourages us first to ignore, then to dislike, and finally to seek to reduce all differences that contradict this equality -- particularly wealth disparities.

This is key to what Tocqueville considered democracy’s tendency to "soft despotism." Democratic despotism, Tocqueville thought, would rarely be violent. Instead it would amount to a Faustian bargain between the political class and the citizens. He predicted that "an immense protective power" might assume all responsibility for everyone’s happiness – provided this power remained "sole agent and judge of it." This power would "resemble parental authority" and attempt to keep people "in perpetual childhood" by relieving them "from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living."

Sound Science Battles Alarmist Politics
By Jay Lehr, Ph.D, Environment & Climate News, May 2009

Political Indoctrination: The Climate is an extraordinary account of both the science contradicting the anthropogenic global warming theory and the fraudulent manner in which activists have vested themselves in a life-and-death struggle for control of the future of the human race.

The book focuses primarily on these experiences in Sweden and Norway, where the alarmists have particular political clout. Those two countries are on the brink of economic disaster because of their limitless adherence to the false credos of climate alarmists.

Obama Sows Seeds of Demise
By Dick Morris, The Hill, April 28, 2009

When the Obama administration crashes and burns, with approval ratings that fall through the floor, political scientists can trace its demise to its first hundred days. While Americans are careful not to consign a presidency they desperately need to succeed to the dustbin of history, the fact is that this president has moved — on issue after issue — in precisely the opposite direction of what the people want him to do.

Right now, Obama’s ratings must be pleasing to his eye. Voters like him and his wife immensely and approve of his activism in the face of the economic crisis. While polls show big doubts about what he is doing, the overwhelming sense is to let him have his way and pray that it works.

But beneath this superficial support, Obama’s specific policies run afoul of the very deeply felt convictions of American voters. For example, the most recent Rasmussen Poll asked voters if they wanted an economic system of complete free enterprise or preferred more government involvement in managing the economy. By 77-19, they voted against a government role, up seven points from last month.

School Choice for the Few
The new do-as-I-say double standard
By William McGurn, The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2009

Some hypocrisies are apparently more equal than others. If, for example, you are a politician who preaches "traditional values" and you get caught in a hotel with a woman who is not your wife, the press is going to have a field day with your tartuffery.

If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer -- and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven -- the press corps mostly winks.