How Smart Is Your Gun?

I remember reading a story when I was a kid, called "With Folded Hands," the theme of which was, in the author’s words, that "the perfect machine would prove to be perfectly destructive." Machines with humanity’s best interests at "heart" become an obstacle to mankind’s yearnings to strive and, unfortunately sometimes, fail. Their Prime Directive: ”To serve and obey and guard men from harm."

"With Folded Hands," published in 1947, may have been sixty years ahead of its time. Today’s nanny state is tirelessly striving to make that story a reality.  Herewith Exhibit A:

A recurring socio-political problem that plagues our advanced industrial society is that of technology as panacea—the idea that technology in and of itself, invoked in some vague, unspecified manner, will magically solve problems. Believers in this latter day deus ex machina somehow think that waving their hands and invoking "technology" or even "science" will address some issue regardless of context and without regard to the very nature of the problem to be solved. More importantly, whether the state of developed or even developing technology is actually up to the task is never considered. This type of ignorance, when coupled with governmental, bureaucratic fiat, results in mandates that are effectively impossible to fulfill. Never has this been more obvious than in the push to make deadly weapons less deadly. . . .

Because the technology of "smart" guns simply does not work, or does not work reliably, it would be inadvisable to attempt it on any sort of widespread scale (such as in police forces). The civilian firearms market surely would reject such gadgetry were it offered for sale. More insidiously, however, were government to mandate the use of such unproven, unreliable technology, the result would be a de facto gun ban. If the government can mandate the use of a technology that doesn’t work, after all, they have effectively infringed on your Second Amendment rights while maintaining plausible legal deniability. They didn’t ban gun ownership, after all; they merely told you that you would have to make your gun ‘safe.’

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Reaganomics, R.I.P.?

I’m not an economist (for which I am perennially grateful), but occasionally economists do get it right. (Remember the old saying about stopped clocks?) Ronald Reagan managed to meld sensible economic theory with sound political principles in a way that is still benefiting us two decades later.

So, can the current economic "crisis" really be laid at the foot of his grave, as many with axes to grind (including one presidential candidate) are inclined to do? At least one person thinks otherwise:

America’s liberals are gleefully pounding nails into Ronald Reagan’s coffin. His life is beyond their reach, but his legacy is not. Their goal is to destroy that legacy by convincing America that free markets and conservative principles created the economic crisis.

To them, Reagan’s vision belongs on the dustbin of history.

The liberal narrative is as simple as it is wrongheaded: The financial meltdown, they say, was brought on by deregulatory policies championed by Reagan, which allowed capitalism to run amok and, ultimately, destroy our economy. Nonsense!

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Paying the Piper

Is the current financial crisis an engineered event?  Just how does it benefit people who owe allegiance to no particular nation but instead to the anti-individualist socialist ideal?  

Here is yet another version of What Went Wrong with the Economy. Note that the relatively obscure word ‘communitarian’ makes an appearance:

The meltdown in the financial markets has caused the finger of blame to spin like a weathervane in a hurricane. The underlying cause of the debacle, however, has been largely ignored. Driven by "progressive" Democrats and Republicans, the cause is the relentless shift from a free market economy to a socialist economy. . . .

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were institutions that were neither purely socialist, nor purely free market – a blend that is best described as communitarian, in that they allowed private investors to buy and hold shares in the corporations, but were also guaranteed by the federal government. That is, until recently, when the federal government took over both institutions. Now, the federal government essentially owns all those properties—a result that is as socialist as had the government nationalized those properties by force.