Watch Live: Jeb Bush Announces Presidential Run in Miami
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WATCH LIVE: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announces presidential run in Miama, Florida.
WATCH LIVE: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush
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WATCH LIVE: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announces presidential run in Miama, Florida.
WATCH LIVE: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush
North Korean soldiers parade to mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of a truce in the 1950-1953 Korean War at Kim Il-sung Square, in Pyongyang. (Photo: Reuters)
A North Korean soldier defected to the South by crossing the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ), South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense confirmed. According to the South Korean government, 1,396 North Koreans defected to the South in 2014 and it is estimated that more than 28,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the onset of a famine in the late-1990s.
An official from South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense told the Yonhap News Agency on condition of anonymity that the soldier crossed the border near the town of Hwacheon in central Gangwon Province, which is located northeast of Seoul. The official said the defector was under investigation, but did not give the man’s name or elaborate on a motive for his crossing over.
“A North Korean man presumed to be a serviceperson defected to our side earlier this morning,” the official said. “He crossed the border in Hwacheon, Gangwon Province, on foot, and expressed his will to defect.”
It is unclear how the North Korean soldier, who is reportedly in his teens, crossed the DMZ by presenting himself at a South Korean guard post. An official told the Associated Press that the soldier told the defense ministry that he was beaten regularly and had grievances about the North Korean regime.
Though there have been thousands of defections to the South, the last North Korean soldier to defect by directly crossing the DMZ did so in 2012. He scaled three barbed-wire fences and knocked on the first door of the first South Korean barracks he stumbled upon, an embarrassment to the Southern country, which should be far more secure considering their circumstances.
Most North Korean soldiers and citizens who attempt to leave the communist country try to cross the border with China. From the North Korean ally’s territory, they attempt to arrange travel to South Korea via other Southeast Asian nations.
Yonhap had reported Sunday that North Korean soldiers were planting anti-personnel mines on their side of the DMZ in an effort to discourage their comrades from defecting. The agency reported that patrols of approximately 20 soldiers were gathering military intelligence and restoring signposts marking the DMZ.
A North Korean soldier defected to the
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers her “official launch speech” at a campaign kick off rally in Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City, June 13, 2015. (Photo: AP)
The proper view on inequality is that it doesn’t matter. That assumes, of course, that people are earning their income honestly rather than via government-enabled cronyism.
To elaborate, some people will become rich in a system of honest and competitive markets, but that’s not at the expense of the poor. Indeed, the talents and skills of top investors and entrepreneurs generally make life better for the rest of us.
So if we want to help the poor, we shouldn’t attack the rich. Instead, we should pursue policies that will allow faster growth. That benefits everyone, particularly those on the bottom of the economic ladder (though there also are some specific policies that are disproportionately helpful to the less fortunate, such as school choice).
Unfortunately, there are many leftists who genuinely seem to think the economy is a fixed pie. And they seem impervious to all the evidence that free markets and small government are the way to achieve broadly shared growth.
In hopes of reaching these folks, let’s look at some recent academic evidence on inequality. We’ll start with some new research from scholars at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Bank of France, University College London, and the Center for Economic Policy and Research.
They found that top incomes rose because of innovation, which is noteworthy since every rational person should welcome the prosperity fueled by innovation.
In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in the United States over the past decades. …this correlation (partly) reflects a causality from innovativeness to top income inequality, and the effect is significant: for example, when measured by the number of patent per capita, innovativeness accounts on average across US states for around 17% of the total increase in the top 1% income share between 1975 and 2010. …from cross-section regressions performed at the commuting zone (CZ) level, we find that: (i) innovativeness is positively correlated with upward social mobility; (ii) the positive correlation between innovativeness and social mobility, is driven mainly by entrant innovators and less so by incumbent innovators, and it is dampened in states with higher lobbying intensity. Overall, our findings vindicate the Schumpeterian view whereby the rise in top income shares is partly related to innovation-led growth, where innovation itself fosters social mobility at the top through creative destruction.
I particularly like that these scholars found that lobbying leads to less innovation, which presumably is a proxy for the degree of government intervention (there’s no need to lobby – on the good side or bad side of an issue – if government doesn’t have power to interfere with market outcomes).
Sticking with the main issue of inequality, we also have a recent study from a couple of German academics.
Here are the key results.
This paper offers a comprehensive econometric investigation of the impact of income inequality… Using survey data from all thirty-four OECD countries over a period of almost thirty years, …there is evidence that a more unequal income distribution strengthens the work ethic of the population. Thus, income inequality seems to generate work incentives not only via the pecuniary reward of work but also through the symbolic reward it receives.
Gee, what a shocker. If people are allowed to enjoy the rewards that accrue from serving the needs of others in the marketplace, they’ll have more incentive to be productive.
That sounds like a good system, particularly compared to places where success is penalized.
Now let’s consider some caveats. While these studies have results that I like, I confess that a certain skepticism is warranted with this kind of research.
Measures of inequality don’t really tell us anything unless we know why there are differences in income.
In jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Singapore, there may be a significant amount of income inequality simply because some people are getting richer faster than other people are getting richer.
That’s a nice problem to have, though it’s important to understand that inequality doesn’t drive growth. It’s simply an outcome of growth.
But in cronyist jurisdictions such as Argentina or Greece, there may be lots of inequality because corrupt insiders are using their connections to obtain unearned and undeserved wealth. And that means labor and capital are being misallocated, which is bad for ordinary people.
Once again, inequality is a result of policy, but in these cases, the inequality is bad because it’s the consequence of misguided intervention.
The bottom line is that policy makers should focus on growth rather than inequality. At least if their goal is to help poor people enjoy higher living standards.
P.S. Fans of Jonathan Swift will enjoy this “modest proposal” to reduce inequality.
P.P.S. Fans of honest research will be horrified by the OECD’s tortured attempt to show that inequality is associated with weaker performance.
P.P.P.S. If Margaret Thatcher is right, leftists are motivated more by hatred for the rich than by love for the poor.
The proper view on inequality is that
FNS panel, including Brit Hume, Susan Page, George Will, and Charles Lane, discuss Hillary’s campaign speech and Jeb Bush’s upcoming announcement, Obama’s ineffective and unplanned strategy to combat ISIS and the showdown on the trade deal. Hosted by Chris Wallace.
(PLEASE NOTE: See playlist for Part II on 6-14-15 and past weeks’ panels.)
FNS panel, including Brit Hume, Susan Page,
Hillary Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign on Friday June 12, 2015.
Hillary Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign Friday in an effort to stop the bleeding in the polls, but it didn’t satisfy a frustrated media. Growing concerns over honest and trustworthiness, unanswered questions surrounding the Clinton Foundation and deleting of state department emails, as well as Clinton’s refusal to weigh in on the big issues of the day all helped to overshadow the candidate’s message over the weekend.
“If you distill what people are looking for now in a president, it is somebody who can govern and who thinks about them, and Hillary Clinton made a credible case for that, but they want somebody who is a truth teller,” Bob Woodward said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And they have got some distance to cover on that. I did books and involved her, one of her little mottos, her personal motto was, ‘fake it until you make it,’ and that’s clever, but you can’t fake your way into the presidency.”
Woodward’s comments echoed previous claims made in reports by National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who was one of the first to make public Democrats’ very real concerns over Hillary’s falling popularity, likability and support among the general electorate.
“Most of this country right now is populist, I think a populist message would be successful,” Fournier said. “Her problem is nobody knows what her position is and nobody trusts her to come forward with an authentic message.”
Populism is a central tenet in the message voiced by all of the candidates in the crowded GOP field in 2016. And although the campaign and their partisan surrogates frequently tout the former secretary of state’s experience, Republicans’ choices for criticizing her foreign policy record are numerous. Despite the public comments to the contrary, this is something the Democratic frontrunner and her advisors are keenly aware of, which is why they largely ignored the record during her tenure at state during the rollout speech.
“This was a speech with a lot of domestic policy, as you point out, wrapped around what to do with the middle classes, what to do with wages. But almost nothing specific about foreign policy, which is surprising for a former Secretary of State,” said Ryan Lizza of the very-liberal New Yorker. “I think there will be some pressure — maybe not from voters, there is really not a clamoring for talk about foreign policy right now, but certainly from the press. But there are big issues on foreign policy that she needs to clarify… What to do about these free trade agreements, what to do about Iran, the Keystone pipeline, these big issues that she needs to explain her position.”
While it has long been obvious that the Clinton camp wants to avoid hot potatoes on foreign policy — such as Russia, the attack on the Benghazi consulate and annex, or even her support for toppling former dictator Muammar Gaddafi — they also don’t want to drum up the shady circumstances surrounding the Clinton Foundation and the Keystone pipeline.
The now-infamous iconic imagery of the former first lady and secretary holding a prop reset button with her Russian counterpart in light of Vladimir Putin’s aggression — namely seizing control of the strategically vital Crimea, and efforts to depose the Ukrainian government — is a picture the campaign hopes American voters soon forget.
But, attempts by Clinton to rewrite history during the speech didn’t go unnoticed.
“It struck me as well that it is not much to brag about in terms of Putin,” said Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace. “I think most people are not going to remember her standing up to Putin, but instead giving that red reset button and talking about the Russian Foreign Minister. In terms of being in the situation room, that’s an odd thing to cite as an accomplishment.”
Wallace’s guest earlier in the show, USA Today columnist Susan Page, also weighed in on the challenges Clinton will face on the campaign trail, calling her “aloof, powerful and disconnected.”
Further, the presumed frontrunner hasn’t uttered a single word on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the top issues for her party’s base. Despite an alliance between President Obama and GOP congressional leaders, the House overwhelmingly rejected giving the president the authority on the deal conservatives and liberals alike say will hurt American workers. Primary rival, the self-proclaimed Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, has been demanding Clinton maker her position on TPP known to the party’s primary voters.
“We’re going to win this nomination because we are talking about issues that American families want to hear discussed and want us to deal with,” Sanders said Sunday. “For example, we have got to create millions of decent-paying jobs in this country, because real unemployment is close to 11 percent. That means rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. We’ve got to raise the minimum wage, we need pay equity for women.”
Sanders, who is rising in the polls in early voting states, will assuredly force Clinton to the left, which some in the Clinton camp worry may be too far for a general election. So, they have decided to avoid answering the difficult questions for as long as possible. But scrutiny is building and whether the candidate can afford to continue to remain silent is becoming a growing worry among donors and supporters.
CNN’s Jake Tapper ripped into campaign spokeswoman Karen Finney on the Friday broadcast of his show over Hillary’s inability to give a straight answer on TPP.
“Isn’t this exactly what people hate about politicians?” Tapper flat-out asked. “That they won’t take a position because as soon as they take a position they are so fearful of what the response is going to be.”
“She was part of this administration,” Tapper said to Finney. “This administration supports this trade bill. What I don’t understand is why you won’t just say we oppose it now. In it’s current form we don’t support it anymore?”
Hillary Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign
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The McLaughlin Group panelists Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Swift, Mort Zuckerman, and Clarence Page join Jim McLaughlin to discuss the week’s events.
The McLaughlin Group panelists Pat Buchanan, Eleanor
Joyce Mitchell, 51, left, and David Sweat and Richard Matt, the participants in the NY prison escape. Mitchell is accused of aiding Sweat and Matt in their break from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York last week.
Joyce Mitchell, the prison seamstress charged with aiding the inmates involved in the NY prison escape last week, has provided new details about the plot. Mitchell, 51, who pleaded not guilty in court Friday, said the two fugitive murderers, David Sweat and Richard Matt, planned to be 7 hours away from the Clinton Correctional Facility soon after tunneling under its outer wall.
“She was going to meet them at the power house,” Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie told FOX News, referring to the nearby power plant that is in view of the maximum-security facility. “They were going to pop out of the manhole, they were going to take off, and the three of them would be, you know, leaving the area.”
According to officials, Mitchell has yet to share the next step in their planned escape, offering little detail except for a claim that the location was far away.
“They were planning on driving approximately seven hours away in a wooded area where her vehicle would be needed — a four-wheel-drive jeep,” Wylie says.
However, at the last minute, Mitchell had a change of heart and checked herself into a hospital located roughly 40 miles away from the prison, complaining of panic attacks. She joined the prison staff in March of 2008 and earned $57,697 a year, but has since been suspended. The judge ordered her to be held in jail on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 bond on felony county and she is due back in court Monday morning.
A big surprise for Wylie so far has been the lack of positive leads, in a search that costs $1 million a day. But he says that briefings with agencies leading the search have suggested that unless and until traces of Sweat or Matt turn up elsewhere, full efforts here will continue.
Police say Mitchell’s husband Lyle, who told media that his wife has committed adultery in the past multiple times, did not know much about the scheme.
“Based on the circumstances that we know, it doesn’t seem probable that he was involved or was going to be involved in the escape,” Wylie said. “Why would you be involved in an escape where your wife is going to be leaving you with these two convicted felons?”
Joyce Mitchell, the prison seamstress charged with
Constitutional Convention 1787.
If you want to go to a Presbyterian church instead of a Baptist church, should the government be able to interfere with that choice? Even if, for some bizarre reason, 95 percent of the population doesn’t like Presbyterians?
If you want to march up and down the sidewalk in front of City Hall with a sign that says the Mayor is an idiot, should the government be able to throw you in jail? Even if 95 percent of the population somehow has decided the Mayor is a genius?
Most Americans instinctively understand that the answer to all these question is no. Not just no, a big emphatic NO!
That’s because certain rights are guaranteed by our Constitution, regardless of whether an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens feel otherwise.
And that’s what makes us a republic rather than a democracy.
But the bad news is that many of our rights in the Constitution no longer are protected.
For instance, Article I, Section 8, specifically enumerates (what are supposed to be) the very limited powers of Congress.
Our Founding Fathers thought it was okay for Congress to have the power to create courts, to coin money, to fund an army, and to have the authority to do a few other things.
But here are some things that are not on that list of enumerated powers (and certainly not included in the list of presidential powers either):
And the list could go on for several pages. The point is that the entire modern Washington-based welfare state, with all its redistribution and so-called social insurance, is inconsistent with the limited-government republic created by America’s Founders.
These programs exist today because the Supreme Court put ideology above the Constitution during the New Deal and, at least in the economic sphere, turned the nation from a constitutional republic into a democracy based on unconstrained majoritarianism.
Here’s some of Walter Williams wrote on the topic.
Like the founders of our nation, I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government. …James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” …John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” …The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
…the Constitution’s First Amendment doesn’t say Congress shall grant us freedom of speech, the press and religion. It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” …In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. …Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government. …ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner?
And click here for a video that explains in greater detail why majoritarianism is a bad idea.
But perhaps these cartoons will make it even easier to understand why 51 percent of the population shouldn’t be allowed to rape and pillage 49 percent of the population.
We’ll start with this depiction of modern elections, which was featured on a friend’s Facebook page.
And here’s one that I’ve shared before.
It highlights the dangers of majoritarianism, particularly if you happen to be a minority.
P.S. George Will has explained that the Supreme Court’s job is to protect Americans from democracy.
P.P.S. Here’s more analysis of the issue from Walter Williams.
P.P.P.S. Some leftists are totally oblivious about America’s system of government.
P.P.P.P.S. Though Republicans also don’t really understand what the Constitution requires.
P.P.P.P.P.S. Looking at the mess in the Middle East, I’ve argued we would be in much better shape if we promoted liberty instead of democracy.
CATO Institute economist Dan Mitchell explains why
Dallas police chief David Brown in an early morning press conference on Saturday June 13, 2015.
Dallas police chief David Brown gave an early morning press conference on Saturday June 13, 2015, to provide an update on the shooting earlier that morning. For the latest on the shooting view full article.
Watch Press Conference Below:
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Dallas police chief David Brown gave an
Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank speaks during a press conference. (Photo: REUTERS)
One would think that Europeans might finally be realizing that statism, an ever-growing welfare state and an ever-rising tax burden are a form of economic suicide.
The most obvious bit of evidence is to look at what’s happening in Greece. Simply stated, public policy for too long has punished workers and producers while rewarding looters and moochers. The result is economic collapse, bailouts, and the destruction of cultural capital.
But Greece is just the tip of the iceberg.Many other European nations are heading in the same direction and it shows up in the economic data. Living standards are already considerably lower than they are in the United States. Yet instead of the “convergence” that’s assumed in conventional economic theory, the Europeans are falling further behind instead of catching up.
There are some officials sounding the alarm.
In a column for the Brussels Times, Philippe Legrain, the former economic adviser to the President of the European Commission, has a glum assessment of the European Union.
In 2007, the EU accounted for 31 per cent of the world economy, measured at market prices. This year, it will account for only 22 per cent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Eight years ago, the EU’s economy was a fifth bigger than the US’s; this year it is set to be smaller than America’s. …Continued economic decline seems inevitable.
But it seems that the folks who recognize that there is a problem are greatly out-numbered by those who want to make the problem worse.
For instance, one would think that any sentient adult would understand that theoverall burden of government spending in Europe is a problem, particularly outlays for redistribution programs that undermine incentives for productive behavior.
Yet, as reported by the EU Observer, some statists at the European Commission want to mandate the amounts of redistribution in member nations.
The European Commission is to push for minimum standards on social protection across member states… Employment commissioner Marianne Thyssen Tuesday (9 June) said she wants to see minimum unemployment benefits, a minimum income, access to child care, and access to basic health care in all 28 countries. …The commission will look into whether “enough people are covered in member states when they have an unemployment problem; how long are they protected. What is the level of the unemployment benefit in comparison with the former wage they earned,” said Thyssen. …”The aim is to have an upper convergence…”
This is a horrible idea. It’s basically designed to impose a rule that forces nations to be more like France and Greece.
Instead of competition, innovation, and diversity, Europe would move even further in the direction of one-size-fits-all centralization.
Though I give her credit for admitting that the purpose of harmonization is to force more spending, what she calls “upper convergence.” So we can add Ms. Thyssen to our list of honest statists.
And speaking of centralization, some politicians want to go beyond mandates and harmonization and also have EU-wide taxes and spending.
Here are some of the details from a report in the U.K.-based Guardian.
German and French politicians are calling for a…eurozone treasury equipped with a eurozone finance chief, single budget, tax-raising powers, pooled debt liabilities, a common monetary fund, and separate organisation and representation within the European parliament. …They call for the setting up of “an embryo euro area budget”, “a fiscal capacity over and above national budgets”, and harmonised corporate taxes across the bloc. The eurozone would be able to borrow on the markets against its budget, which would be financed from a kind of Tobin tax on financial transactions and also from part of the revenue from the new business tax regime.
By the way, this initiative to impose another layer of taxes and spending in Europe isn’t being advocated by irrelevant back-bench politicians. It’s being pushed by Germany’s Vice Chancellor and France’s Economy Minister!
Thankfully, not everyone in Europe is economically insane. Syed Kamall, a member of the European Parliament form the U.K.’s Conservative Party, is unimpressed with this vision of greater centralization, harmonization, and bureaucratization.
Here’s some of what he wrote in a column for the EU Observer.
The socialist dream that these two politicians propose would soon turn into a nightmare not just for the Eurozone, but for the entire EU. …Their socialist vision of harmonised taxation and more social policies sounds utopian on paper but it fails to accept a basic fact: that Europe is not the world, and Europe cannot close itself off from the world. …After several decades of centralisation in the EU, we have seen the results: …a failure to keep up with growing economic competitiveness in many parts of the world. …Specific proposals such as harmonised corporate taxes are nothing new from the socialists, but they would reduce European competitiveness. …With greater harmonisation Europe’s tax rate would only be as low as the highest-taxing member. …
Syed’s point about Europe not being the world is especially relevant because the damage of one-size-fits-all centralization manifests itself much faster when jobs and capital can simply migrate to other jurisdictions.
And while the Europeans are trying to undermine the competitiveness of other nations with various tax harmonization schemes, that’s not going to arrest Europe’s decline.
Simply stated, Europe is imposing bad policy internally at a much faster rate than it can impose bad policy externally.
P.S. Let’s close with some humor sent to me by the Princess of the Levant.
It features the libertarian character from Parks and Recreation.
And I even found the YouTube clip of this scene.
Which is definitely worth watching because of how Swanson explains the tax system.
I particularly like the part about the capital gains tax. It’s a good way of illustrating double taxation.
One would think that Europeans might finally
