Author: Redactor

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links

Townhall: Debtroit — coming to a city near you

This weekend’s Common Sense Townhall.com column wades into the depths of America’s government pension debt problem — not Social Security, but the pensions for government workers ranging from governors to dog catchers. Click on over, and come back here for more reading:

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video

Video: The Comedy of Politic “Economy”

I am pretty sure this is satire, perhaps parody:

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general freedom ideological culture nannyism

Forced Visits

When I’m ancient and stuck in a nursing home, I’d like my children to visit me.

But would I want them to visit only because they’re being forced to? So they resent every minute subtracted from something they’d rather be doing? No.

While I don’t want that kind of world, Barry Davis seems to. Davis, a New York Times reader, says that he and his friends don’t hear from their kids as much as they’d like.

He praises a new Chinese law ordering children to visit aging parents. Nothing he has seen “in recent times so manifests our common humanity” as this facile compulsion. “We need Congress to pass an American version of the ‘Protection of Rights and Interests of Elderly People’. . . .”

“We,” kemosabe?

I’m in favor of children, however old themselves, visiting their aging parents. I’m also in favor of a free society in which everyone respects the rights and sovereignty of others — including those of children who have left the nest and now live as independent adults. In such a society, relationships are voluntary, whether we’re exchanging money and goods or time and attention. Persons respect the fact that we each have our own lives and priorities. We deal with each other because we want to; we’re not outlaws if we don’t.

That’s a basis for good will. Things are different if every time we interact with another person, it’s at the point of gun, with every participant’s actual judgments and desires treated as irrelevant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

William Ewart Gladstone

At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come… “unmuzzled.”

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Thought

William Ewart Gladstone

I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

We the Congress

Grumpy. Nervous. Fearful.

That’s not how members of Congress look in TV interviews.

But if their attitudes matched their job approval ratings that’s how they should look, right?

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that a mere 7 percent of likely U.S. voters “think Congress is doing a good or excellent job.” The national telephone survey shows 65 percent of American voters marking Congress as doing a poor job. Real Clear Politics, averaging out the polling of a number of different researchers, asking slightly different questions, places the job approval by Congress at 13.6 percent, with disapproval at a whopping 78 percent.

And yet, Congress remains unfazed.

A joint study by the Congressional Management Foundation and the Society for Human Resource Management, “Life in Congress: The Member Perspective,” shows how unfazed folks in Congress are.  We learn how these public servants spend their time, how they prioritize their activities, what they see as their challenges, and, indeed, how they feel about their job performance.

They think they’re doing a bang-up job.

So why the differing evaluations? The report hands us the general view of the membership: Congress blames the media — because of the media, We, the People, misperceive what Congress does.

Another possible explanation, not aired by the report, goes like this: Congress and the citizenry have radically different views of what “doing a good job” is, and these differences may be the result of that most ancient of class divides, between the rulers and the ruled.

We modern folk tell ourselves that this ancient divide is passé, in a democracy. Not possible. “We are the government.”

But we certainly aren’t Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall

Division and Democracy

Recalls of elected officials are said to be “divisive.” And, I guess, to an extent they are. The elected official being recalled seems to take it personally.

At times, democracy can be messy and unpleasant, since we don’t all agree on everything, including whether the guy or gal the majority of us reluctantly agreed to in the last election deserves to finish out his or her term of office. Across America, where citizens have access to the process, elected officials are recalled pretty infrequently, though more often recently than in yesteryears.

Politicians with power are more often running amok, so no wonder citizens exercise this democratic check “more often.” What’s the alternative?

Some would say wait until the next election. But sometimes waiting years for the next election is potentially too damaging or dangerous. This is even more so where democracy is more fragile, say in Egypt.

In this most populous Arab nation, street protests against the elected government were followed by a military coup d’état, tanks thundering down Main Street, the arrest of the president and other government officials, violent street battles and shootings of unarmed citizens protesting the government’s removal.

As official Washington decides whether or not to call it a coup — in effect, whether to fund those who carried out the overthrow —  it dawned on me that a democratic process whereby elected leaders can be peacefully removed — i.e., recall — is a whole lot better and safer than street protests and military coups.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Max Stirner

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.

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national politics & policies too much government

Cash and Consequences

One fine Saturday morning you go shopping and buy a TV, a PC, and other household appliances. Though the bill comes to around $13,000, you pay with cash, having had a recent influx of the green stuff. The next day, the police knock on your door. You immediately fear for your older relatives, thinking this may be bad news.

It is bad news. For you.

The police say they have a warrant to search your house, and proceed to ransack it. You ask why, and they tell you that your large cash purchase was “suspicious” of criminal activity.

They are not interested in your protests . . . until after they had done a lot of damage.

This didn’t happen to you — at least, I hope it didn’t. It happened to Jarl Syvertsen, a 59-year-old Norwegian man. In this case, it turned out that the police didn’t have a warrant at the time of the search. They’d lied. And Mr. Syvertsen notes that, had the police waited till Monday, when the banks were open, the whole issue could have been resolved with a phone call.

You see, Mr. Syvertsen had just received an advance on an inheritance. Quite above-board.

Economist Joseph Salerno relates this story to the “global war on cash,” undertaken to counter drug trafficking, which in turn has eroded civil liberties and privacy.

Some of my friends think that real Americans carry guns. If you want a truer and bluer (or greener) expression of your freedom and opposition to big government — and in general avoid spies in the NSA and elsewhere — there may be no better way than to pay cash.

But guns may be involved, later.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people

Bees’ Knees News

Though the George Zimmerman trial ended in an acquittal, many folks are still confused as to the facts. One thing we learned during the case is that journalists are not always reliable, the infamous NBC redaction of the 911 call being only the most obvious example.

But if you are looking for media’s systemic failures, you don’t need to bring in race and shootings and Skittles. Look no further than stories about bees.

I’m not talking about “killer bees” of my youth — supposedly coming up from South America to “take over” the continent, and sting, sting, sting and kill, kill, kill.

Didn’t happen. Simple extrapolations based on movements of some bee populations did not spell eco-disaster for the good ol’ USA.

But another bee story, much hyped, also turns out to be false, or at least only half, or quarter, true: “Bee-pocalypse!”

Since 2006 we’ve been hearing how Colony Collapse Disorder has destroyed bee hives, vast populations of the insects, and worse, continues to threaten both natural and contracted pollination, and thus agriculture . . . and Life on the Planet.

Shawn Regan, writing for the Property and Environment Research Center, says that this story, once the media’s veritable bees’ knees, setting people “in the know” all abuzz, was mostly just bad reporting. U.S. honey bee colony numbers are stable, he shows, explaining that commercial beekeepers, “far from being passive victims, have actively rebuilt their colonies in response to increased mortality from CCD.”

Yes, capitalism has adapted.

If you had been suckered into this story, maybe you should have looked at the local supermarket: honey production has remained stable.

As has bad environmental reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.