“My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years rather than for life was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governor, which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhapsbe induced by their independenceto forget.”
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How can this society deny the right of dying patients to try new medicines? Watch this powerful video by Reason TV.
Bernie Sanders is many a progressive’s fairy-tale candidate.
Well, yeah.
Not “once upon a time,” but today … the federal government’s public debt is in the double-digit trillions. The total debt — consisting also of unfunded/underfunded welfare state “promises” — may be in the triple digits. Still, politicians pat themselves on their backs when they deliver annual deficits under half a trillion per year.
Meanwhile, Senator Sanders, former member of America’s Socialist Party and current caucuser with the Democrats, is running on the “freebie” platform: let’s spend more!
He serves as the pusher of a very old folly: thinking that good things come to us without cost.
But the costs have to be paid.
And will be.
That’s the essence of common-sense wisdom since ancient times. Usually I conjure up an accountant or an economist to explain this, but why not go back to folklore? Folk and fairy tales, along with myths both ancient and modern (remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?), tell us that magic powers come at a price.
And those costs can be killer.
Far-left-of-center magic pretends that not only can Bernie provide “free” stuff for everyone (including those of us in his “hard-working middle class”), but also that the wherewithal for these goodies (college, medicine, food, shelter, meaningful work) can easily come from … three pot-of-gold sources: “the rich,” “print more money,” and that least plausible sprinkle of fairy dust, “government efficiency.”
We tell children fairy tales not to make them wish for magic solutions, but to illuminate the logic of responsibility.
Bernie didn’t get that lesson.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Good people can disagree about term limits.
It’s not a moral issue, but about practical governance.
I love term limits, while my friend Lew Rockwell, the former Ron Paul aide who started the Mises Institute and runs the popular website LewRockwell.com, isn’t a fan.
In a brief post to his site, entitled “The Term Limit Hoax,” Rockwell lamented that “Term limits apply only to the institutionally weakest branch of government, the legislature, to further weaken it, and never to the presidential bureaucracy, which actually runs the government, nor to the judges. It’s why neocons, those ultimate presidential supremacists, love term limits.”
This is the classic logical fallacy of guilt by association. Neoconservatives breathe air, too. Should the rest of us turn blue?
Usually if politicians — neocon or otherwise — claim amorous feelings for limits, as the late Bob Novak warned, “They’re lying.” Yet, most regular folks — all races, genders, political parties, levels of neocon-ness, you-name-it — actually do want term limits.
Lew’s correct: Congress is weak. It was designed to be the strongest branch, holding the all-important purse strings and a law-making monopoly. Yet, career politicians have shrunk from fulfilling the First Branch’s constitutional role, consistently handing more and more power to the executive branch and the courts.
That’s not the result of term limits, but a lack thereof.
Why is there “never” a push for term limits on the “presidential bureaucracy”? Well, those bureaucrats don’t even have terms as such. And any limits would have to be legislated by Congress. Congress enacted that bureaucracy, every cubicle of it, and the longer congressmen stay in Washington, the more they champion it.
Limit judges? A term-limited Congress might help there, too.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“You have signed the death warrant for science,” scientist Peter Webster wrote to a colleague, recently.
The recipient of this charge had signed onto an entreaty to President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren — along with 19 fellow climate scientists. They asked for an investigation into companies and organizations that publicly express doubt about predictions of impending catastrophic man-made global warming. Specifically, they urge the administration to pursue this line of assault using the oft-abused RICO statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
Yes, the scientists are calling for harassment of dissenters and straight-out censorship.
Ronald Bailey, over at Reason, calls this a “new low in politicizing science.” Climatologist Judith Curry, who quoted Webster’s above judgment as an epigraph to her post on the subject, colorfully characterized her reaction: “When I first spotted this, I rolled my eyes — another day, more insane U.S. climate politics.”
The 20 alarmists, for their part, draw a parallel to the tobacco RICO investigations that were so influential a few decades ago. But that original case was badly decided. Moreover, RICO laws are themselves an affront.
The anthropogenic global warming catastrophists have previously undermined their case — lies, conspiracies to hide data, misleading use of computer models, and a relentless campaign to turn scientific inquiry into “settled science” will do that. But now, the grotesque spectacle of scientists demanding that the full weight and force of coercive government come down on their “opponents” completely destroys any remaining shred of credibility.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Black teachers flee schools, leading to concerns about diversity,” warned the Washington Post headline. I’m less concerned about “diversity” and more about why teachers — black or otherwise — would “flee.”
The study found a significant drop between 2002 and 2012 in the percentage of teachers who are black in nine large city public schools systems — Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
In New Orleans, the percentage of black teachers fell from 74 to 51 percent, while the percentage of white teachers rose from 25 to 43 percent. In the nation’s capital, black teachers tumbled from 77 to 49 percent, while white teachers went from 16 to 39 percent.
“The whole effort … toward minority-teacher recruitment … [has] been an unheralded victory, really,” argues the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll. “The problem is with retention. Minority teachers have significantly higher quit rates than non-minority teachers.”
Some argue the problem is a system that micromanages teachers. Others cite the expansion of “teacher evaluation systems.” Neither reason explains the racial discrepancy.
However, black teachers do appear to be overrepresented in rougher, lower-performing schools — often with large minority populations. That may be causing a higher “quit rate.”
It may also be purposeful. As The Post article informs, “[R]esearch has suggested that students who are racially paired with teachers — black teachers working with black students and Hispanic teachers working with Hispanic students — do better academically.”
So, all the talk of diversity is aimed at keeping students and teachers with their own race?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: My Townhall column last Sunday was a longer treatment of this subject.
