Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.
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Author: Redactor
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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H. L. Mencken
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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:
- Bailouts for the biggest fools and
- 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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H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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.
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H. L. Mencken
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air — that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
A new Pew Report tells us that Americans think that the rich got the biggest benefits — government handouts — after the collapse of financial markets in 2008. That’s my perception, too.
The banker class — including, perhaps focusing on, financial intermediaries on Wall Street — sure made out like the proverbial banditti, many of whom had their fortunes handed back to them after they lost billions and billions in 2008 and 2009.
Other programs bailed out Big Auto, to the advantage of stockholders and managers and union workers, but not to the discernible advantage of consumers or creditors or the bulk of non-union workers.
And yet, consider the extent to which government intervention in the labor market — including tax breaks, mortgage re-deals, and extended unemployment insurance — “helped” middle class and lower middle class workers and families. These programs had huge consequences, leading hordes to forego (hard-to-find) paid work for (comparatively easy-to-find) paid inactivity.
Americans are split on the lesson to be drawn from what they perceive as “scant signs of recovery” and government’s apparent lack of interest in “helping the poor”:
Although Americans were worried about the economic system, they remain starkly divided over federal regulations to control it. Nearly half thought that government regulation of markets did not go far enough, while almost as many said government regulation had already gone too far.
I’m in the latter camp. Government as Big Brother Bailout for businesses and families and individuals seems to just scuttle the necessary reshuffle our economy needs.
We don’t need more of the wrong response. We need less.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The First and Second Amendment are very good friends. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re close, one always protecting the other, as we witnessed again last week in Colorado.
For more on the big Rocky Mountain State recall vote, click on over to Townhall.com. And then come back here for a few more links.
- Basic Freedom Defense Fund
- Pueblo Freedom & Rights: Facebook page
- Colorado Statesman: Giron Recalled; Pueblo Voters Ambush Pundits
- Townhall: Colorado Senators Were Only Recalled Because of Voter Suppression, Or Something
- KRDO: Morse Supporters’ dirty tricks
- Devil’s Advocate: Jon Caldara interviews Laura Carno of “I Am Created Equal” about the Morse Recall
- National Conference of State Legislatures: Recall Statistics
- Washington Post: Recall Votes Are No Way to Run a Government
- Washington Examiner: Mayors fighting epidemic of recall fever
- Common Sense: Not-So-Total Recall (on Michigan)
- Common Sense: A Right, Yet Wrong (on Wisconsin recall)
“The fuse that lit the powder keg,” states Tim Knight of Colorado Springs, a leader of the pro-Morse recall group Basic Freedom Defense Fund, “telling his party caucus he was proud of his fellow politicians for ignoring their constituents.”
“You’re elected to represent us, not to dictate to us,” explains El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, a supporter of the recall of Sen. Giron.
Victor Head of Pueblo Freedom & Rights notes, “We’re thinking of kinda taking the plumber’s wrench as our new logo and saying, ‘Don’t mess with regular people or we will throw a big wrench into your well-thought-out plans.’” (NRA News)