ObamaCare Violates Centuries of Contract Law: The Mandate is Equal to Duress

It's so simple a child could tell you that, but to date no legal wizard from Harvard, Yale, Chicago, or Stanford has been able to put his finger on it quite so well as this wonderful stroke of genius distilled in a newspaper from the American heartland of genius, Virginia:

From Hugo Grotius in the 17th century through William Story in the 19th and up to the present, legal doctrine has held that contracts are not valid unless they are entered into by mutual assent. If one party signs a contract as the result of fraud or under duress, it cannot be valid. But if Congress compels people to buy insurance policies — not as a precondition of exercising a privilege such as driving, but as a consequence of having been born — then, the [I]nstitute [for Justice] argues, this would undermine centuries of contract law.

All those law degrees, wasted.

If they were smart they would ask for their money back.

Now why didn't The Heritage Foundation realize this back in 1989 and save us from all this trouble from HillaryCare through RomneyCare and ObamaCare?

After all this time America is still little more than a backwater in the intellectual history of the West. Progressivism. Bah! Humbug!

The Shiller Price to Earnings Ratio in the News

From Jack Hough for The Wall Street Journal, here:

The plain old trailing P/E—the one that suggests stock prices are normal—is at least based on known earnings, so it's a good place to start in deciding whether stocks are affordable. But it has a flaw: If the past year's earnings were unsustainably high, today's P/E might be deceivingly low.

One fix is to take an average of many years of trailing earnings. Yale economist Robert Shiller advocates using 10 years, adjusted for inflation. His "cyclically adjusted P/E" is 20.8, versus an average since 1881 of 16.4.

Mr. Shiller's measure suggests stocks are a bit pricey, and another signal agrees. According to government statistics, after-tax corporate earnings are near a record high relative to worker wages. In the past, similar readings have foretold sharp earnings drops.

Today, that scenario isn't certain, because companies make more of their money overseas than in the past. "The government data might be a warning," says Mr. Shiller.

So it is time to be cautious, but not necessarily to flee stocks. U.S. ones are priced to deliver long-term inflation-adjusted returns of 4 percent a year, including dividends, reckons Mr. Shiller, about double what the 10-year Treasury bond pays.

Unprecedented Weakness in Consumer Spending Growth in Post WWII Period

So says Stephen Roach of Yale, here, who can't call this is a depression evidently because such anemic growth is, afterall, growth. He must not dwell on the overall negative back to back GDP prints for 2008 and 2009.

He prefers "Great Crisis" and the term "unprecedented" to describe what many others have rightly identified as a balance sheet recession. He does not see this being repaired any time soon, however, because we're nowhere near the needed savings rate of 8 percent nor the 75 percent level of debt to disposable personal income:

The number is 0.2%. It is the average annualized growth of US consumer spending over the past 14 quarters – calculated in inflation-adjusted terms from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2011. Never before in the post-World War II era have American consumers been so weak for so long. This one number encapsulates much of what is wrong today in the US – and in the global economy.

There's hardly a more succinct and elegant framing of the issue to be found in what follows after that.

Thomas Jefferson Recommended Castration as Punishment for Buggery

Look it up, Ann Coulter, and maybe you can discuss it at your next council meeting with GOProud:

"Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them, strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime.

Death might be inflicted for murther and perhaps for treason if you would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature.

Rape, buggery etc. -- punish by castration.

All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies etc. a certain time proportioned to the offence. But as this would be no punishment or change of condition to slaves (me miserum!) let them be sent to other countries.

By these means we should be freed from the wickedness of the latter, and the former would be living monuments of public vengeance. Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with."

-- Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, August 26, 1776

Joe Miller Concedes to Leesah Mercowsky on Friday

There's a long re-telling of the saga here.

Alaskans get to keep their nepotistic senatrix, and are saved from the unlikely and imperfect Miller, who hails from Yale and West Point but was supported by the Tea Party.

The election will be remembered for the way a judge roughed up the English language, so that "writing in a name on a ballot as it appears on the candidate's certification of candidacy" became "appearing to write in on a ballot the name of the candidate."

Poor Alaska. It only appears to be a state.

College Education Does Almost Nothing To Improve Knowledge of American Civics

From Joe Wolverton, II at the New American:

Report Finds College Students Fail Basic Civics Test

Written by Joe Wolverton, II

Friday, 26 February 2010

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” is one of the most oft-quoted aphorisms of Edmund Burke, an 18th-century Irish-born member of the British Parliament and fearless friend of liberty. Judging from the results of a recent survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), most of the 14,000 college students who participated sadly will be repeating history.

Considering that most of the 14,000 students who completed the exam (7,000 seniors and 7,000 freshmen) scored an F on the portion of the test covering basic American history and institutions, not only will they be repeating history, but with test scores like that, they’ll be repeating history class, as well.

ISI, a conservative non-profit educational organization, has recently published the results of this sweeping survey in a 32-page report entitled “The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree and Civic Learning on American Beliefs.” Sit down before you read this report because the data will knock you off your feet.

In 2007, ISI administered a 60-question test to 14,000 students at 50 colleges nationwide. The questions were designed to measure the students’ aptitude in four areas: basic American history, government, foreign affairs, and economics. In a companion study, in 2008 ISI administered a shorter exam (33 questions) to a random sample of 2,508 Americans without a college degree in order to have a standard level against which the impact of a college education on a threshold level of familiarity with basic American institutions could be determined.

Here are a few frightening figures certain to keep you up at night:

71% of Americans failed the civics knowledge test;

51% of Americans could not name the three branches of government;

The average score for college seniors on the civics knowledge test was 54.2% (an “F” by any standard);

The average student’s test score improved only 3.8 points from freshman to senior year;

Freshmen at Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and Duke scored better than seniors on the civics knowledge test;

79% of elected officials that took the civics knowledge quiz did not know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits the government from establishing a religion;

30% of office holders did not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence;

27% of politicians could not name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment;

43% did not know the purpose of the Electoral College;

39% of lawmakers believe the power of declaring war belongs to the president;

The average score for college professors who took the civics knowledge quiz was 55%.

So, while our nation’s most elite colleges are not imbuing our children with a knowledge of our history and our government, the study makes it clear that those universities are becoming round the clock factories churning out poorly instructed liberals with little civic knowledge and even less faith and less devotion to principles of liberty than those Americans who didn’t go to college.

It’s not just ignorance of the founding and the structure of government that is being fostered at these so-called institutions of higher learning. The classrooms are becoming hothouses of left-wing opinions, as well. For example, according to the findings published by ISI, college graduates are more likely than non-graduates to favor legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. By contrast, college graduates are less likely to believe that the Bible is the word of God and that hard work and perseverance can make the American Dream come true.

Similarly, the study’s findings revealed that regardless of one’s formal education, one’s knowledge of basic American civics determined one’s faith in America and trust in the tenets of liberty upon which it was established. This shift is evident in the fact that non-college graduates who scored higher on the civics knowledge quiz than college graduates were less likely to believe that “America’s founding documents are obsolete.” Furthermore, the learned, though not college educated respondents are correspondingly less likely to agree that “the Ten Commandments are irrelevant” to the world today.

This research is, according to the organization’s website, the fourth such study conducted by ISI in an attempt to scientifically measure the impact of a college education on civic knowledge and citizenship. Unremarkably, the results have not changed much over the years and once the numbers are crunched it is irrefutable that having a college education does almost nothing to buttress one’s overall knowledge of the fundamental history and composition of American government.

In contrast, what a formal education at one of America’s university does so effectively, however, is engender doubt in the American way of life, incubate irreverence for the pillars of liberty upon which the nation was built, and perhaps most disturbingly, sap the faith in God and the institutions of religious worship.

The various interesting findings of the study, including the questions asked and the results, as well as the scientific analysis thereof, can be found here.

And, if you’re brave, test your own knowledge of America’s history, government, foreign policy, and economics by taking the quiz posted online here. Good luck! And remember, eyes on your own paper. Judging by the results of this study, many of you college graduates might be tempted to cheat!