Author: CS Admin

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crime and punishment general freedom media and media people moral hazard too much government

Governments Gone Wilding

South Africa, land, expropriation, reform, genocide, refuges, media, racism

I was late to the story, and had a hard time finding information on the anti-white violence in South Africa — farm families raped, pillaged, slaughtered, beheaded.

And I wasn’t at all aware of the “land reform” that South Africa’s Congress is voting on, the explicit aim of which is to expropriate white farmers without compensation.

Every day, I read through The Washington Post but noticed no articles there. Or elsewhere — until a fleeting Facebook post sent me to Lauren Southern’s video documentary, “Farmlands.”

The Wall Street Journal did cover the farm expropriation story — on its editorial pages. “No country ever became rich through its government’s seizure of private property (exhibit A: the Soviet Union), but politicians in South Africa want to give it another go.”

Zimbabwe on repeat.

Worse yet, it is being argued for on racial grounds, and some of its proponents are notoriously . . . genocidal?

Quartz takes a different approach, in an article charmingly titled “South Africa’s much needed land debate is being turned into an international racist rant.” The Leftwing publication appears to be gearing up to defend mass theft as “land reform,” heedless of its long, violent, destructive history.

Meanwhile, Ms. Southern, the “gonzo journalist” who detailed the ongoing race-based murder spree in South Africa* that Quartz failed to mention, found herself detained in Calais, France, prevented from entering Britain. Why? In part for “being racist.”

Southern had once engaged in a stunt pitching the provocation that “Allah is a gay god” — to seek reactions from people after a major news source produced an article claiming Jesus was gay.

Islam is a religion, not a race, of course, but it’s racial collectivism that still unhinges minds.

To what extent? Socialist expropriation, at least.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “According to the best available statistics,” the BBC relates, “farm murders are at their highest level since 2010-11.”

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Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders political challengers Regulating Protest too much government

New-Fangled Vote Counting

Florida, Proposal 97, Constitution, democracy, voting, initiative, Constitution Revision Commission

Call me old-fashioned, but when you go to the pols to cast your vote on a ballot measure, your Yes vote should count for yes and your No vote for no.

And if you choose not to vote, your non-vote should count for neither yes nor no.

That’s just common sense. Right?

Well, meet its antithesis: Proposal 97, now being considered by Florida’s powerful Constitution Revision Commission (CRC).* Proposal 97 would count all those who do not cast a vote for or against a ballot measure as a No vote against it.

To pass a constitutional amendment in the Sunshine State already requires a supermajority vote of at least 60 percent of those who do cast a vote on the measure. Under Proposal 97, counting all those not voting on it as No votes, that percentage would necessarily go even higher. If 10 percent don’t vote, Yes would have to come in at 67 percent to win.

This is minority rule . . . with an extra perverse twist.

The supermajority requirement encourages big money interests to spend heavily against ballot initiatives — even when the issues have clear majority support — because if they can manage to lose by less than 20 points (60–40 percent), they win. Now all opponents need do is poison the water with the nastiest campaigning imaginable, causing more voters to throw up their hands or pinch their noses and avoid the issue . . .

. . . thus, being counted as voting No.

Don’t abstain. Stop Proposal 97. Tell them NO here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* How powerful is the CRC? Every 20 years it meets with the awesome authority to refer constitutional amendments directly to the ballot — as many as it wishes and the amendments can be packaged to include several different subjects. No other state has a similar body. Of the 37 commission members, the governor appoints 15, the Senate president and the House speaker each appoint nine, the chief justice of the state supreme court appoints three and the attorney general is an automatic member.

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general freedom meme

Equality vs. Freedom

equality, freedom, Milton Friedman

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”

—Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 148.

 

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government

Civic Engagement Activities

blackboard, sheep, public schools, indoctrination, protest, guns

I love a good protest.

My first was in Mrs. Grubb’s third grade class, after a substitute teacher gave us a ton of math homework. During recess we organized and delivered a written statement  announcing a student strike against doing the math.

Believe it or not, the assignment was withdrawn, called an April Fools joke . . . but boy did we catch hell when Mrs. Grubb returned.

This week, with the school walkouts across the country to protest “gun violence” and demand “gun control,” some older kids finally got in the game. I may disagree with their public policy shibboleths and disdain their tone, but I would defend to the . . .

Well, you know.

The problem isn’t students or protests. It is the partisan government school system. The system’s taxpayer-paid agents — teachers, administrators — believe they can support student protest movements for changing laws they want changed, but block and punish protests on issues they do not favor.

And, especially, bring the hammer down on anyone who dares notice the double standard out loud.

Rocklin High School teacher, Julianne Benzel, “has been placed on paid administrative leave due to several complaints from parents and students involving the teacher’s communications regarding today’s student-led civic engagement activities,” the California school district said in a statement.

Benzel told CBS in Sacramento that she did not discourage her students from joining the protest — er, I mean, civic engagement activity. But in class, she did raise the issue of whether the school administration would similarly allow (much less facilitate, dare we say, encourage) student protests against abortion, instead of guns.

Let’s protest what we can actually change: public schools engaging in partisan political activity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
general freedom individual achievement local leaders political challengers responsibility

Liberty Rising?

Nick Freitas, Republican, Virginia’s House of Delegates, libertarian, conservative freedom

“Let me make something very clear,” Nick Freitas stated unequivocally. “I don’t have a political career.”

Freitas, a Republican member of Virginia’s House of Delegates announcing his candidacy for the United States Senate, was responding to advice that running against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine “could hurt [his] political career.”

It’s music to my ears. And to Matt Kibbe’s. The leader of Free the People calls Freitas “the most interesting liberty Republican you’ve never heard of.”

Yet, in Virginia’s conservative networks, Freitas has made quite a name for himself, defending the Second Amendment and fighting Medicaid expansion in a one-seat GOP-majority House.

“You can’t fix everything through government force and coercion,” he explained to Kibbe. “If the path we’re going down, which is just ‘let us manage the federal government as it continues to expand, as it continues to increase debt,’ that’s just not a Republican Party I’m interested in.”

Del. Freitas added that the American people seem similarly uninterested.

Perhaps he is simply telling us what we want to hear. He wouldn’t be the first bait-and-switch politician. But Freitas isn’t exactly playing for the bleachers by naming Calvin Coolidge rather than Ronald Reagan as “the best president of the 20th century.”

And he talks about individual liberty, which, he explains, is “based off the premise that I have a right to pursue happiness in accordance of what my definition of happiness is, so far as it doesn’t infringe on your right to do the same thing.”

He had me with “I don’t have a political career.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

The Critique of Pure Intolerance

Christina Hoff Sommers, Lewis & Clark Law School, Federalist Society, fascism, free speech, censorship, no platform

If you are older than 50, you probably remember when “liberal” meant free speech advocacy to the point of absolutism. “I may disagree with what you say,” stalwart liberals pledged back in the Sixties, “but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Nowadays, if you are under 30 and have gone to college, you may not even have encountered this saw.

Which has consequences.

Nine student groups protested, last week, the Federalist Society’s invitation of writer Christina Hoff Sommers to speak at Lewis & Clark Law School. The groups called it an “act of aggression and violence” and smeared the philosopher and Democrat as “a known fascist.”

Bari Weiss, writing in The New York Times, calls this “the moral flattening of the earth,” the “main effect is that these endless accusations of ‘fascism’ or ‘misogyny’ or ‘alt-right’ dull the effects of the words themselves. As they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness — of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right.”

While this “flattening” does prevent the flatteners (bullies) from even seeing any gradations of threat or error, let’s not pretend to be surprised. Their techniques do not merely echo, but replicate exactly, neo-Marxist postmodernist philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s proposal, in “Repressive Tolerance,”* to censor writing and speech “from the right.”

Ideas have consequences. Just as Marxian socialism led to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, these tyrants led to Marcuse, whose thinking set much of today’s Academia into full tyranny mode.

It’s time for liberals “on the left” to repudiate explicitly the methods of tyrants . . . to their left.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Woolf, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). My college political theory professor, a proud communist, was a big fan of Marcuse.

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Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Why They Hate the First Amendment

Facebook, censorship, censor, first amendment, free speech, Citizens United, elections

Does banning Facebook in the weeks leading up to an election sound like freedom?

“The corrosive effect of social media on democratic life,” writes The New Republic’s Jeet Heer, “has led both French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make the same threat to Facebook: self-regulate or be regulated.”

But Macron doesn’t go far enough. “If fake news truly poses a crisis for democracy, then it calls for a radical response,” Heer insists.

“Many countries have election silence laws, which limit or prohibit political campaigning for varying periods of time ranging from election day alone to as early as three days before the election.” And Heer sees little reason not to apply such regulations to social media.

“What if you weren’t allowed to post anything political on Facebook in the two weeks before an election?”

This exactly parallels the prohibition of political spending “by corporations” before an election, as in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulation. Except here we have it directly affecting normal citizens.

The current excuse, “fake news,” appears to be defined by partisans almost entirely as the errors and lies and spin of their opponents’ side(s).

But since lying about one’s political enemies is at least as old as the Election of 1800, why is this different now?

Because, I submit, Facebook is just another area the folks pushing such obvious breaches of the First Amendment — politicians and most of the media — do not yet control.

Competition mustn’t be tolerated.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: by John Nakamura Remy

 

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Accountability incumbents local leaders moral hazard term limits

Too Ignorant to Lead

Oklahoma State Senator, Mike Schulz, term limits

I’m convinced.

Oklahoma State Senator Mike Schulz, leader of his chamber, has persuaded me that he just can’t do his job. He should have resigned years ago. Too late now, alas; he’s about to be termed out of office.

Well, better late than never, I always say.

Schulz burbles that he’s being ejected by Oklahoma’s lax 12-year legislative term limits just as he is on the verge of being almost about to begin to make a solid start toward concluding the commencement of embarking upon truly hitting his stride . . . and I believe him. He also accuses his colleagues of equal lethargy vis-à-vis learning their jobs.

Can such calumny be correct?

Lest I be accused of invidious paraphrase, which I would never, let me quote Schulz’s words in defense of even weaker term limits as transcribed by The Oklahoman: “At the four-year mark, you start feeling comfortable with what you’re doing. At the eight-year mark, you know a little bit more but you still don’t know it all. At the 12-year mark, you certainly know more but you still don’t know everything you need to know.”

Indeed, Schulz recently failed to steer to passage legislation that would have hiked taxes on Oklahomans, thereby demonstrating terrible deficiency in his grasp of tax-hike leadership.

Gentle Reader, listen to this man. At your next job interview, let your prospective employer know that you feel fully confident in your ability to do a darn good job . . . within 16 years.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

Georgia on My Dime

pig, pigliets, crony capitalism, Delta, NRA

After the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, followed by pressure from gun control advocates, Delta Airlines announced it would end its corporate relationship with the National Rifle Association, whereby NRA members were given discounts on travel.*

Meanwhile, Georgia legislators were in the process of passing legislation to give Delta a state sales tax break on their fuel purchases. That special legislative deal was worth a whopping $40 million to the Atlanta-based company.

Yet, when Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle heard about Delta dissing the NRA, he tweeted, “I will kill any tax legislation that benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA.”

The Lt. Gov. added, “Corporations cannot attack conservatives and expect us not to fight back.”

Everyone is familiar with the story. Those who favor gun rights were angry with Delta Airlines and ecstatic with the pushback from Georgia legislators. Those favoring new legislation to restrict gun ownership were thrilled by Delta’s break with the NRA and livid with those legislators.

But while cheering and jeering one side or the other, too many folks missed the 800-lb problem in the room. A letter writer to the Washington Post illuminated it: “The government can’t punish people or businesses for their political views. They can be punished only by the free market, in the form of lost business.”

True enough in the free market.

But when crony capitalism replaces free markets, the government certainly will punish or reward people and businesses — with millions and billions of our tax dollars — on purely political grounds.

Georgia government just did it to Delta Airlines.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* To be precise, reports claim a grand total of 13 NRA members availed themselves to the special rates once offered by Delta.

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Categories
Accountability incumbents media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

Like Motel Matches

matchbook, Congress, term limits, legislative, power

When President Trump announced he was slapping a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum, a friend asked me how the president could possibly possess such unilateral authority. 

That was my first thought, too, before surmising that Congress had again given away its constitutional power, as its habit, thoughtlessly — like motel matches.*

Writing in National Review, Jay Cost confirmed my suspicion, “Over the past 80 years, authority over tariffs, as well as over all manner of properly legislative functions, has migrated to the executive branch, away from the legislative.”

When FDR sought greater power over trade, Cost explained, “It was as if Congress threw up its hands in exasperation and said to the president, ‘We cannot handle our authority responsibly. Please take it off our hands, for we will screw things up and lose reelection.’”

Ah, the laser-like focus of modern career politicians . . . on what’s most important . . . to them.

“Nobody looks to Congress for redress of grievances anymore …” Cost wrote. “Congress has systematically shrugged power off its shoulders over the past 80 years, and it inevitably screws up the handful of authorities it retains . . .”

Why? What has led our first branch of government, over the last 80 years or so, to surrender its authority?

Congress has become much more “experienced,” evermore a career destination. And a lucrative one.

We desperately need term limits. And we need smaller districts where individual citizens matter more than money and special interests.

Save Congress from itself — before it sets the country afire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* My mind jumped to Elvis Costello’s song, Motel Matches: “Giving you away, like . . .” what, precisely, in this case? The authority in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises….”

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