Saturday roundup

Still need convincing that the EPA is a poisonous body that needs to be dismantled pronto? Look at it this way:

The new implementation of EPA rules on heavy trucks has boosted the 10-year regulatory burden on America past $1 trillion, 75 percent of which have been imposed by the Obama administration.

That amounts to a one-time charge of $3,080 per person, or an annual cost of $540, according to a new analysis from American Action Forum.

LITD wrote Sarah Palin off last year as one of those Squirrel-Hair Kool-Aid guzzlers like Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Conrad Black, Wayne Allen Root, Ann Coulter - you know the crowd I'm talking about - and it's hard to imagine any such people ever being able to redeem themselves. But Palin just may have made a first step with an op-ed in which she says that the Carrier deal, in its details, had better not  be a one-time package of sweetheart incentives to one particular company, or it's crony capitalism rather than free-market economics.

Walter Hudson at PJ Media offers an argument that is at least worthy of consideration: that conservatives should stop talking about equality of opportunity:

We cannot guarantee equal opportunity for the same reason that we cannot guarantee equal results. Opportunities emerge from a vast array of circumstances, many of which government has no rightful ability to control. If your father is rich, and mine is poor, how can we be born to equal opportunity? What must be done, in practical terms, to equalize those circumstances? It takes us full circle, doesn't it? To provide children with equal opportunity, you must redistribute their parents' wealth. It's the same effect as if mandating equal results, just applied at a different point in the process. Thus, every time conservatives talk about "equal opportunity," they provide rhetorical ammunition to the left. Like results, opportunities are not equal and never will be.

Consider the concept of "white privilege." The complaint regarding privilege is that certain people are afforded unequal opportunity on account of factors beyond merit. If you're a white heterosexual male, you will generally have an easier go than a black lesbian. We often get stuck arguing whether or not such generalizations prove true. But that's the wrong argument.

The real question is: Why does privilege matter? Why should we care whether certain people have it easier than others? Does the mere presence of unequal opportunity present a problem that needs to be solved?

It matters not whether people proceed from unequal opportunity. What matters is why opportunities prove unequal. If the inequality manifests from accidents of nature and the exercise of rights, then there is nothing which government should do about it. Being born to a rich father should not be a crime. Neither should being rich and having a child. People should not be penalized because they were born white, or straight, or with the genes for height or beauty. They should not be punished for having means which others lack, unless it came through force or fraud. Nor should they be punished for being something which others are not. Existing is not a crime.

Is it true then that "all men are created equal?" Yes, but only in the true sense which Jefferson actually meant. Jefferson was not implying an equality of attribute. The equality he noted was legal. Each man should be treated the same under the law, not be made the same by the law. All men have equal right to their life, not the lives of others.

Elliot Abrams, writing at The Weekly Standard, offers, for my money, the best summing-up of the arc of Fidel Castro's evil career, as well as the motivation behind the Left's adoration of him over these past 57 years.

John Hawkins, writing at Townhall, gets a parlor game going in my head. He lists five reasons why the Most Equal Comrade will be viewed as one of the worst presidents of all time. He admits in his opening paragraph that "compiling [such] a list . . . seems like a project for a book rather than a column." Which leaves readers free to come up with additions. Still, his five are biggies that belong on any compilation: nearly doubling the national debt, unleashing the genie from the nuclear weapons bottle in the Middle East, facilitating illegal immigration, encouraging racial polarization, and losing a war we had already won in Iraq.

Seems to me that taking a crowbar to the American health-care system would be the next addition to the list. And then imposing tyranny in the name of an utter fiction (anthropogenic climate change).