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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture too much government

I Spy vs. They Spy

Flock, surveillance, traffic, police

There is an argument making the rounds: Flock cameras are good because cop cams have proven themselves so useful. More transparency!

Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision. 

The company contracts with cities and other governments. To surveil us. 

You know, “to protect us from crime.”

The fear — and I know it, because I fear it — is that this will lead to a total surveillance state where “innocent until proven guilty” has no real meaning. Watched and analyzed, our every action on the roads and sidewalks would potentially become ensnared in Big Brother tyranny.

A somewhat secondary fear is that police and other government workers — or hackers — would be able to access the database/a.i. for reasons of an, uh, extra-legal character.

And that has happened aplenty!

The latest tale comes from Sussex, Wisconsin, where our “public servants” tracked a specific person — Napoleon Jones, a Navy Veteran — after he had recorded a traffic stop that “just didn’t feel right” and had then been arrested and (understandably) filed a complaint.

While it is legal to record a public traffic stop, for some reason cops really don’t like “civilians” to record them.

In the course of reviewing the complaints, Jones’s lawyer discovered that the police had been tracking him through the Flock system.

Before you shout the now common protest of “What the Flock,” remember what we are up against: government workers using the system to defend their own misbehavior.

This is not the transparency we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

John Taylor

The appearance of virtue may be useful to the guilty; but it is less useful than virtue itself, and is frequently a snare to others.

John Taylor of Caroline, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA.: Green and Cady, 1814).
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Today

Alexander Hamilton

On September 11, 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

The date marks quite a few other, perhaps more memorable, events, too. But few Cabinet selections were more consequential to United States history than President George Washington’s appointment of Hamilton.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets international affairs

Reciprocal Rip-Offs?

Trump, free trade, protectionism, tariffs,

Making sense of the U.S. president’s trade-deal talk has always been difficult.

What is he really up to?

Most of the time President Trump talks protectionist, like a high-tariff man. Other times, he seems to be demanding reciprocal free trade.

Now, the classic free-market economics position is that unilateral free trade is better than managed, high-tariff trading regimes. But Trump never sounds forthright like an actual free trader.

Instead, he says stuff like “Canada has been ripping us off for years.” Classic protectionist jibber-jabber. When we buy and they sell, and vice versa, barring fraud, it is not a rip-off. 

Mr. Trump posted the “rip-off” comment Tuesday. While using the word “reciprocity,” he is talking about government procurement programs, claiming that “what many do not realize is that the Canadian Government, including Canadian Provinces, have banned American Small Businesses and Companies from selling into their Government Procurement Markets. This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam. From now on, NO RECIPROCITY — NO ACCESS!”

This was to announce a new retaliatory effort after ongoing trade negotiations broke down, both sides having immediately erected tariff barriers — and worse (the U.S. forbidding one Canadian airplane company from selling in the U.S. at all). “President Donald Trump directed the General Services Administration (GSA) on Tuesday to take steps to remove Canadian-origin products from a Multiple Award Schedule that accounts for more than $50 billion a year in transactions,” The Epoch Times explains.

This is not the reciprocity we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Alexander Hamilton

A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.

Alexander Hamilton, letter to The Daily Advertiser (February 21, 1797).
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Today

Missing Money

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning,” he said it “governs by dictating five year plans” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”

The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.

The next day, the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell, along with Building No. 7 of that complex, after those two major towers were hit with commandeered jet airliners. And the Pentagon was also hit with a major explosion. It just so happened that Rumsfeld’s big news was drowned out by the story of terrorism.

Categories
Today

Official Names

United States, US, U.S.

The Continental Congress officially named its union of seceding states the United States on September 9, 1776.

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, was named after President George Washington, on September 9, 1791.

Categories
ideological culture partisanship

Socialist Idiocracy

Democratic Party,Zohran Mamdani, socialism, DSA, Congress, capitalism

Old School Democrats are losing it.

Losing the young and, therefore, control of the direction of their party . . . to the Democratic Socialist of America.

Do they understand the dangers?

While it is expected that Republicans — such as Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) — would object to the rise of socialist agitation in the Democratic Party, getting Democratic leaders to object to the new radicalism has not proved quite so easy.

But James Carville, the strategist behind Bill Clinton’s victorious presidential runs three decades ago, is speaking out.

“What I would tell a Democratic socialist — ‘If you hate the Democratic brand so much, why use our words? Go call yourself something else. Call yourself the Socialists of America,” he said. “Don’t use our name. Make up your own name.”

The Fox News report elaborated, “Carville argued that the DSA’s values and policy positions, including defunding the police, do not align with those of the Democratic Party.”

Now, Carville’s not really in any position to demand that the ersatz “Democratic Socialists” strike the “Democratic” from their name. The Democratic Party — the party of Jackson and Van Buren as well as of Wilson and FDR — does not have a monopoly on the term. It is not Democratic® or Democratic™. And what with how Democrats in the Democratic Party are now scarcely committed to democratic processes at all — remember the stealing of Bernie Sanders’ nominations, or selecting a new presidential candidate without one vote of party regulars? — maybe the term should be up for grabs.

But not by socialists. 

Why? Carville called the hyper-successful and self-designated socialist “streamer” Hasan Piker an “idiot,” and his listeners “left-wing idiots.”

Yet they cannot call themselves “Idiot Socialists of America,” can they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Rubio

Marxism is not dead and it’s not an economic theory. What’s happened is that Marxists realize what the track record of Marxism is around the world, so they don’t want to call themselves Marxists any more. They have found new titles — things that, frankly, sound benign and you almost feel guilty being against: “social justice.” Who can be against “social justice”?  But that’s the terminology they come up with. “Equity.” Equity — who can be against “equity”? 

Marco Rubio, in a speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Kissimmee, Florida (June 2021), as posted by The Hill on YouTube.
Categories
Accountability subsidy

SNAP Accountability

Republican, Reconciliation Law, waste, Covid, SNAP

“The harmful Republican reconciliation law enacted July 4, 2025, poses great harm to families, including higher food costs, poverty, and hunger. It makes deep cuts to federal funding for food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), shifting significant new costs to states,” the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned, two weeks ago. “It dramatically expands SNAP’s already harsh and ineffective provision taking away people’s benefits for not meeting a work requirement.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Potomac Watch podcast highlighted this shift from a different perspective.

“[O]ne reason why food stamps ballooned during the pandemic and then still didn’t decline even as unemployment declined is because states didn’t have an incentive to actually police their roles and pare back people who were ineligible . . . because of their incomes or for other reasons,” explained Allysia Finley, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board.

“The second component” of the law, Finley continued, “was that it ended or banned these waivers that the Biden administration had provided to states to suspend the work requirements for these able-bodied people.

“Now, the third thing that the bill did was put states on the hook for a share of the benefits if they had improper error payment rates over six percent,” Finley elaborated. “Six percent was about the pre-pandemic average, but the improper payment rate actually ballooned again during the pandemic and was about 10.6% as of last year.”

“But that’s the whole point,” offered columnist Kimberley Strassel “because the feds traditionally pay a hundred percent of the benefit costs of SNAP, it’s free money. . . .”

The point being, what incentive could states have to police the program’s abuse? None. Until “this bill came along. . . .”

Disincentives matter. 

A whisper of accountability.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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