Thomas Sowell makes a great point in response to Obama’s rather bizzare statement that “at some point, you have made enough money”. Sowell address this rather benign-sounding remark by pointing out that:
There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.
Politicians with the power to determine each citizen’s income are no longer public servants. They are public masters.
…Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy — quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody’s rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to go.
Now, some of you may read this analysis and say: well, we limit rights of individuals all the time, just because we limit this one right doesn’t mean we put all of our rights in jeopardy. Well, you might be right. Maybe we can still have some rights and not others… but who will get to decide what rights those will be? And how many of them will we have?
If someone can just categorically say that he or she dislikes the freedom to earn the income you are capable of… and turn this personal preference into a moral axiom… what other personal preferences could just as easily be turned into axioms? Could the right to other personal property be repudiated? What about the right to political speech? What about the right to due process? Could we at some point have “too much” due process? What about Children? China already has proven THAT personal right can be trampled pretty easily if enough power is influenced on a population… what about our right to practice religion?
But these questions aside… assuming we got past the rather uncomfortable political conflict I just addressed; assuming we accepted that government SHOULD have this prerogative… How are we to weigh and evaluate the value of one right vs the other? Do we have a coherent framework to make this balancing process fair and equitable (and perhaps more importantly… subject to the will of society as opposed to the whim of those in power?) I ask this rather rhetorically to point out that for those of you on the left… who are comfortable with Obama’s statement… you had better have ready answer to this question because if you don’t… than you have lost the debate. If you don’t have a solution or a philosophy on balancing rights (and a way to enforce this process on those in power)… than we are not subject to anything other than the whims of those in power and Sowell would therefore be not only right but justified in his argument.
Now, philosophical arguments aside, I think the more important question is really this: what KIND of politicians do we want to be governed by? Public masters or public servants? I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer the latter.
via ‘Enough Money’ – Thomas Sowell – National Review Online.

It turns out that when you raise taxes on businesses… you push American jobs overseas. Here’s Steve Ballmer yesterday:
One of the major benefits of being done with lawschool and the bar exam is that I finally get to read — not what I HAVE to read — but what I WANT to read. This disconnect has been going on for so long now that I have (literally) 10 books in a stack just waiting for me to read.