Author: Redactor

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Townhall: The Logic of Atrocity

How not to do foreign policy? How it is now done, in Washington, DC.

Click on over to Townhall, where we take the time Putin has given us for calm reflection on the continuing crisis in Syria. Then click back here for more links, for more thoughts, for less of a crisis.

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video

Video: War Follies and War Powers

Some skepticism about blowing things up to make a point, or to draw a line in someone else’s sand, to establish a principle:

But then look at the bigger picture:

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Thought

H. L. Mencken

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

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free trade & free markets

Dis-united We Stand

In 2011, when the battle in Wisconsin raged between Governor Walker and his allies on the one hand and the public employee unions on the other, the two sides seemed monolithic. Especially the union side, with thousands of members swarming the state capitol to march in angry protest.

It would be calamity, union reps declared, were any concession made to the requirements of fiscal sobriety. Union members should not be required to contribute more to their health care or pension costs; suffer any limits on pay raises or collective bargaining; and certainly not be required to let their own members decide whether they wished to remain in a union.

It’s this last point that suggested a not-so-very-monolithic union force after all. Now that members are being asked whether they want their unions, the state’s public employee unions are losing between 30 to 60 percent of their members in various cities and counties.

In the Kenosha Unified School District, Wisconsin’s third largest, only 37 percent of the membership voted to re-certify their union. An official with the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) trade union admits that “the majority of our affiliates in the state aren’t seeing re-certification, so I don’t think the KEA is . . . unique in this.”

“As it turns out,” writes blogger Brian Fraley, “Act 10 was the largest anti-bullying initiative in the nation. Who knew?”

Well, now, we all should.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

H. L. Mencken

Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.

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ideological culture Second Amendment rights

The Gun Anti-Fetish

Would-be gun-grabbers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and CNN’s Piers Morgan don’t just hate and fear all guns. They fear some scary-looking guns more than others, and keep bringing them up even when not appropriate.

Take America’s most popular rifle. After every horrific mass shooting Feinstein and Morgan call for banning (or at least heavily regulating) these “assault weapons.”

Following the naval yard shooting the other day, Feinstein pronounced, “There are reports the killer was armed with an AR-15, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol when he stormed an American military installation in the nation’s capital and took at least 12 innocent lives. This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?”

It turned out that the killer brought only a shotgun to the massacre — a weapon endorsed by our current Vice President, as Jacob Sullum reminds us — and used two handguns acquired during the spree. No AR-15 in evidence.

Sullum also notes that CNN justified Morgan’s post-naval-yard-shooting anti-AR-15 diatribe in an off-hand way, as if facts didn’t matter.

So, what matters?

The taboo. The anti-fetish, the magical thing reviled — the obsession with the scary look of an evil gun, over its actual use.

Why?

For lots of politically-centered people, policy is more about symbolism than anything else. For such folks, talk of principles or about overall crime statistics or unintended effects means nothing. To understand their notions, bring in the anthropologists.

Or the shamans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

H. L. Mencken

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Bailout Follies

Economic news, these days, seems to be driving home some very old economic wisdom — about foolishness.

In an essay on banking from the 19th century, a writer quipped, “The ultimate result of shielding men from folly, is to fill the world with fools.” This basic lesson — that it is dangerous to shore up bad practices with bailouts and specially tuned central banking policies — is being borne out, once again, in the American economy. Thank the L.A. Times’s sad, sad article “Forget too big too fail: some banks now too small to succeed.” The article’s blurb nicely synopsizes smaller, non-bailed-out banks’ plight: “Small banks are finding it increasingly tough to survive, in part because of the cost of complying with regulations stemming from the financial crisis.”

Remember that 2008’s financial implosion led to a double whammy of governmental overkill:

  1. Bailouts for the biggest fools and
  2. Regulations for everybody, including the wisest players.

The former kept the fools in place and ready to do more damage, since their folly had basically been rewarded. The latter burdens all players, but the costs are hardest for smaller outfits to bear, while bigger outfits can easily jump those regulatory hurdles.

The details of all this constitute “news,” but the principles are old (I’ve discussed them here many times). Bailouts reward the biggest fools, and regulations protect the biggest players from competition from smaller ones.

Yes, indeed, the ultimate result of shielding bankers from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with foolish bankers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

H. L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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First Amendment rights media and media people

Journalism Codified

The great revolutionary idea at the time of our nation’s independence rubs against the grain of politics and “statecraft,” as practiced by khans, kaisers, and kleptocrats: divide and conquer, divide and rule. It is no wonder that the art of making legal distinctions is so often based not on human rights but governmental convenience.

Take the right of a free press.

The notion of open government has it that the right to participate in the dissemination of knowledge (particularly information about government) is to be an individual right. Modern Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws are a great example of government accommodation of this right.

But the Michigan House is now attempting to restrict access to state information by trying to set up a definition of journalist, making it easier for journalists to finagle data from government, harder for lone individuals. The state’s House Judiciary Committee just approved HB 4770, which does a number of things, including setting very particular definitions of terms like “newspaper” and “journalist.”

All the better to make the practice of publishing information about government more of a privilege than a right.

This was made even clearer at the federal level, by Senator Diane Feinstein, whose support for a new “shield law” to protect journalists is best understood by its limitations: bloggers, you don’t count. And she actually referred to a “special privilege” to publish. Not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Politicians like it when they have credentialed, easy-to-identify (and easier-to-manipulate) professional journalists to contend with.

Citizens with those rights? Why, it drives them crazy.

Crazy enough to try to codify what a “journalist” is, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.