Weekend reading

Samples of stumbled-upon scribblings:

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"We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit... We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease.
Washington is totally out of touch and out of control. There is political courage there, but there is far more political careerism and people dodging real solutions. Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them. If people can't vote in a district not their own, should we allow them to spend unlimited money on behalf of someone across the country?"

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Update: just as anticipated, ("Green jobs czar") Jones resigned late Saturday. The question remains: how did he get hired?

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So much of “security” is so obviously pointless that one wonders why it exists. If you randomly search one in fifty passengers boarding Amtrak at rush hour, you do not detect the terrorist ninety-eight percent of the time. In the case of a suicide bomber, the detection leads to an immediate explosion and, unless you conduct the inspection robotically in a blast-proof room, several dead. ... Walking through Penn Station in Baltimore does not meet the definition of probable cause, yet the PA system constantly announces that people are subject to random search. The knowledge that one may be searched at any time is intimidating, and being searched, humiliating. Yes, it is legal. A judge can always be found who will find constitutional almost anything. Yet the ability to say “no” to causeless searches was a thing that distinguished America from the Soviet Union. It no longer does.

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It’s a mistake to think of health care as a right. It is not a right; it is a good. Freedom of speech, by contrast, is a right, as is freedom of religious belief. They are privileges that inure to individuals as a consequence of the primordial right, free will. That is why we see them as inalienable. The exercise of these rights does not depend on any action of government, but rather on its inaction. Government may not legitimately interfere with their exercise, but nothing mandates that the government provide us with printing press or chapel.