Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, March 27, 2011 Health-care law promises more than it can deliver by Richard J. Grant William F. Buckley once asked, “Socialism has long since been discredited, but when did it get so creepy?” He was of course alluding to the term “creeping socialism,” which describes the gradual expansion of statist interventions and control over private lives and property. Historical attempts to create socialist societies have necessarily also tended toward totalitarian governance. Such governance always seems to imply the existence of a ruling elite that would decide what the rules would be and how they would be applied. Invariably, the rules were applied unevenly. The elites lived differently from the masses. When the state controls all production, then it also controls all employment. This gives a rather special meaning to the term “getting fired.” In a free society, if you can't get along with your employer, then you have the option of looking for a n...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, March 20, 2011 Reducing spending should be Congress' top priority by Richard J. Grant The continuing resolution just passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama will keep the federal government funded for another three weeks. It will also cut planned spending by $6 billion. But during the previous three weeks the national debt increased by more than $109 billion. At this rate of $6 billion every three weeks, it will take 825 weeks to reduce spending sufficiently to eliminate the deficit. That is 16 years. An increase in tax revenue will shorten the time, but if there is increased spending within entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, then it will take much longer. Expect entitlement spending to grow faster than revenue. House Republicans had originally proposed cutting about $100 billion, but Democrats control the Senate and seem to believe that cutting even $6 billion is too much. This means that the ...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, March 13, 2011 The "need" for unions isn't put into proper economic context by Richard J. Grant Some decades ago I went to work for a company that turned out to be a closed union shop. That meant that all non-management workers had to either join the union or not work for the company. The existence of a closed shop was not a manifestation of the exercise of workers’ natural rights: It was an outcome encouraged by the imposition of various labor laws upon workers and owners. The effect of these labor laws was to reduce the rights of both workers and owners while increasing the powers of those who wished to organize and lead trade unions. The effect of the closed-shop rules was not to empower individual workers but to grant monopoly powers to the union. Individual workers were denied the right to negotiate separately with the company owners. This meant that both the owners and individual workers had their individual rights to negotiate ...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, March 6, 2011 States press sovereignty by rejecting health reform by Richard J. Grant A law that is not enforced might as well not exist. We see this in property rights as well. An owner that fails to challenge those who use his property, whether land or trademark or any other form, over time risks losing control of that property. This is true for individuals, corporations, and sovereign states. The failure to live on or defend one's territory will result in its forfeiture to those who are willing and able to establish a presence there. The failure to enforce a law will lead people to believe that it will never be enforced and allow them eventually to forget that the law exists. In this regard, the U.S. Constitution is no different from any other law. The United States began as a decentralized federal republic within which the states retained sovereignty except for those powers specifically granted to the central government by the Constitution....