JUDGE JOHN GRIMM, THE MICROSOFT CASE AND SOCIAL SECURITY

Congratulations to JUDGE JOHN GRIMM for his well-deserved selection as the 1999 Cape JAYCEES Distinguished Service Award winner. This is one of Cape's most prestigious awards, and John's previously printed accomplishments certainly support his selection.

I'm in a Bible-study group with John and some previous DSA winners, and his biblical principles and church service are quite comforting when one considers the many judgments he makes in his judicial capacity.

He's following in the footsteps of his father, Judge STAN GRIMM ... a former neighbor.

Jaycee president DEAN REEVES did an excellent job of presenting the award and introducing guest speaker DAVID LIMBAUGH ... whom I always enjoy hearing and following his remarks and logic.

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Bill Gates fails to make a moral self-defense: In an open letter to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Rand Institute senior writer Edwin A. Locke agreed with Gates that Judge Thomas Jackson's decision was a travesty of truth and justice. However, Locke blamed Gates for not defending his right to own life and property.

"The fundamental value our country was founded on is the right to one's own life, which includes the right to one's own property," writes Locke. "This means that you have the right to trade freely with others, neither forcing others to accept your terms nor being forced by others to accept theirs. And it includes the right to make a profit, as big a profit as you are able to earn in a free, unregulated market."

Locke took Gates to task for accepting the premise expressed by the Microsoft chairman that he is a servant to society.

"If the existence of your superbly productive company can be justified only in terms of a duty to serve the public interest, then the government as the representative of that public and the definer of its indefinable interests has the right to dictate to you the terms of your continued existence," Locke writes. "The government may claim the right to regulate your prices, your products, your contracts, and your methods of competing with your rivals. If you are only a servant of society, then nothing you do can be free of government controls."

Locke charged that the government's primary concern is getting Microsoft and Gates's capitulation to the government and making Gates and Microsoft into servants who will take orders.

Locke writes that the only way to defeat the government prosecutors is for Gates to "assert proudly your right to your own existence which means: the right to do business, not as a public servant but as an autonomous entity with inalienable rights.

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FLASH! The Great Depression is over: The House of Representatives unanimously voted to end the earnings penalty on Social Security benefits. The Senate will likely follow suit. It's high time.

The House did not go far enough. People between ages 62 and 64 who take early retirement benefits from Social Security are hit with severe penalties, losing $1 in benefits for every $2 in annual earnings above $10,080. Acting like social engineers who know what's best, legislators say that people who retire early are more likely to end up in poverty, and so, by Washington's perverse logic, they should face a ferocious tax if they take reduced Social Security benefits and continue to work. In other words, if they don't impoverish themselves, let the tax code do it to them.

The House also left untouched another draconian tax that subjects up to 85 percent of your Social Security benefits directly to the income tax, even if you are not working, and your income from a private pension or your savings exceeds a certain level.

All of which argues for aggressively phasing in a new system for working Americans, where, if you chose, the bulk of your Social Security taxes would go directly into your own personal retirement account, which would grow tax-free. That way you would choose your retirement age, you would have far more in retirement income than the current system can possibly pay and the politicians couldn't mess around with it.

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How to win tax cuts: House Republicans are finally wising up on how to fight President Clinton on the tax issue: pass popular reductions in separate bills, as was done with the Social Security earnings penalty last month and with the marriage penalty in February. That way people can understand what's at stake for them, and it will put President Clinton in a difficult position if he blocks the cuts. After hemming and hawing, the White House declared that Clinton would sign the bill ending the Social Security earnings limit.

Last year Republicans passed a small tax cut, which the President promptly vetoed. How did Clinton get away with that? Because hardly anyone knew what was in the package. Voter ignorance is tax-and-spenders' bliss.

The GOP should go with the piecemeal approach and pass bills to abolish the death tax; to provide tax deductibility for health insurance to the self-employed and to individuals whose employers don't provide insurance; to set up tax-free education accounts; to reduce the capital gains levy; to expand Roth IRAs; to liberalize depreciation schedules for small businesses and to eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which is punishing more and more middle-income Americans. Such unbundling will put Beltway tax-lovers on the defensive -- where they richly deserve to be. -- Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine

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That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world is a picture in a museum. -- Edmond and Jules DeGoncourt

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. -- Fulton J. Sheen

A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner. -- English Proverb

There are few, if any, jobs in which ability alone is sufficient. Needed, also, are loyalty, sincerity, enthusiasm and team play. -- William B. Given Jr.

For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything. -- Martin Luther

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Gas attack: The internal combustion engine may be enjoying the last laugh. In his 1992 manifesto "Earth in the Balance," the father of the Internet declared the internal combustion engine to be a graver threat to civilization than war, and proposed to starve the beast through a global tax on fossil fuels until such time as we realized the "strategic goal" of "completely eliminating" it altogether.

Cut to election year 2000, a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna this week and prices threatening to break the $2-per-gallon barrier at the pump. Mr. Gore's green dream is becoming a political nightmare, especially with the Vice President on record as opposing two things that might ease the crunch: a rollback of government taxes and the kind of regulations that discourage domestic production.

Mr. Gore, recall, cast the tie breaking vote on the 4.3-cent a gallon increase in the gas tax, which some Republicans would now like to repeal. And he also stands against repealing the prohibition against drilling on what may be America's largest repository of oil: the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On Friday Mr. Gore attacked GOP proposals to allow drilling in the barren Arctic as an effort "to enrich their friends in the oil industry." Refusing to lift the ban on drilling and the other regulatory disincentives for domestic production, of course, only strengthens OPEC's grip over the U.S. economy.

If we are to take Mr. Gore and his friends at their word, that may be just what they want. Presumably, after people are forced to spend $50 a week to fill up two family cars, they'll scream uncle and sign onto a U.N. protocol and tax that would kill off cars and create a groundswell for mass transit. -- The Wall Street Journal

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.