On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. On Jan. 30, 1649, he was executed.
You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.
But did you know they deliberately waste our time?
Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.
But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”
So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”
The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”
It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A brief and brilliant span of existence may be attained by a Socialistic State by living on the moral and intellectual capital of its predecessors; but it soon runs through this capital, and goes out like a spent squib, and makes a nasty mell.
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States. On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Both were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
With congressional approval ratings at the lowest ever, it’s evident: the sclerotic old institution needs new blood.
But note what I’m not saying — that “Congress doesn’t do enough.”
As A. Barton Hinkle points out in a column, yesterday, complaints about the 113th Congress hail from “CNN to McClatchy to NPR to the L.A. Times,” one lamentation dominating: “the 113th makes ‘the infamous “do-nothing Congress” of the late 1940s look downright prolific.’”
But, as he makes clear, the complaint is witless.
Producing more bad legislation is certainly no improvement. And, as Hinkle observed, the most talked-about recent congressional responses to apparently real problems have been widely judged worse than the problems themselves. Almost everybody was glad that SOPA — the “Stop Online Piracy Act” — didn’t pass; vast majorities opposed and now regret Obamacare.
So, why is most new legislation bad? The reasons are legion, but one stands out: Congress doesn’t even have time to read the laws it debates and passes.
A British economist explained it like this:
[E]ven Members of Parliament find the burthen of reading through the multitudinous and mazy provisions of the Bills issued day by day . . . too heavy to be borne by mortal man.
That was over a hundred years ago. It’s worse in this new year of 2014, both in Britain and America. Today’s laws are cooked up in back rooms by legislative assistants and lobbyists. When such is “more,” less is better.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Our intellectual and moral natures come into play only when we discriminate and decide for ourselves. Just so far as this discrimination and decision are taken away from us, we are deprived of the most essential element of our manhood and womanhood, and are turned into mere tools propelled from without. That any community can, in the long run, gain by thus dwarfing and paralyzing the humanity of its members — that we could long succeed, even for administrative purposes, under such a system, is the notion of a moral spendthrift.
Joseph Hiam Levy, The Outcome of Individualism (Third Edition, 1892).
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.
A year after the IRS seized their bank account, Terry Dehko and his daughter have gotten their money back, thanks to a lawsuit they undertook with the help of the valiant Institute for Justice.
The IRS had looked at how the Dehkoses deposited revenues from their Fraser, Michigan store and decided, without further inquiry, that they were illegally “structuring” the deposits so that their bank would not have to submit currency transaction reports.
The reporting threshold is $10,000; most of the Dehkoses’ deposits were indeed less than $10,000. However, $10,000 is also the maximum loss that their insurance policy would cover in the event of theft! How hard would it have been to simply ask the reason for the deposit pattern?
Nor did the folks at the IRS ever show evidence of tax evasion or other illegality.
The Dehkoses have their money back. But they’ve lost a year. And lost any profits they might have earned by investing those unavailable funds, as well as any profits they might have earned by spending the time on their business that they instead spent trying to get their money back. Of course, the IRS will not be required to compensate the Dehkos for either psychic pain or lost opportunities.
There’s plenty more wrong with the agency’s conduct than is suggested by this case. At the least, though, it should be illegal to seize bank balances absent any showing of wrongdoing. And IRS officers who perpetrate such arbitrary seizures should be punished.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.