Author: Redactor

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Programs for Peace

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, New Jersey, calls himself a “social media enthusiast,” and recently engaged Reddit.com’s public, for whom he clarified his stance on drug prohibition:Cory Booker

The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence. We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential. I see the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars being poured into the criminal justice system here in New Jersey and it represents big overgrown government at its worst.

Yes. Recreational drug prohibition has been and continues to be a horrifying example of “big overgrown government at its worst.”

My only qualm comes with the good mayor’s next sentence:

We should be investing dollars in programs and strategies that work not just to lower crime but work to empower lives.

The biggest reduction in crime would come from ceasing to criminalize peaceful behavior; the biggest relief from the drug war’s horrific consequences would be the war’s cessation itself. People “empower” their own lives, through peaceful work and family life. Are more programs really necessary? Wouldn’t individual freedom and personal responsibility be enough?

We don’t need “big overgrown government at its best.” We need streamlined, accountable government . . . that protects all peaceful folk. That would be far better. “Bestest.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

EPA Won’t Stop Polluting

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the country’s most dangerous polluters, striving to blanket our economic life in a suffocating ideological miasma.

The EPA’s poisonous ruling that carbon dioxide — “a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas” — constitutes a “threat” to public health and the environment has been endorsed by the Obama administration and now the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC. If it is never rescinded, economic growth will suffer. Representative democracy will also suffer, given how Congress has been bypassed here.EPA, polluting

Just FYI, we’d be dead ducks without carbon dioxide. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant must flabbergast all plants, which blithely use carbon dioxide as a critical component in photosynthesis, thereby making all carbon-based animal and human life possible. (Damn you, plants!)

Unproven assumptions regarding the extent to which industrial activity adds to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — even the extent to which the planet has warmed and will warm further, or to what extent any variation in average global temperature is even a special problem, let alone a catastrophic one — lie at the hemorrhaging heart of EPA’s hubris.

EPA officials suppose that they can smartly operate a globe-wide climate machine by increasing the expense or reducing the supplies of the fossil fuels that we use to warm our homes, drive our cars, operate our assembly lines. No, bureaucrats can’t centrally plan the earth’s atmosphere. But they sure can make it harder for people to survive and prosper.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

James Madison

Religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Categories
Thought

Milton Friedman

Nixon was a very, very smart person. In fact, he had one of the highest IQs of any public official I’ve met. The problem with Nixon was not intelligence and not prejudices. The problem with him was that he was willing to sacrifice principles too easily for political advantage. But at any rate, as I was getting up to leave, President Nixon said to me, “Don’t blame George for this silly business of wage and price controls,” meaning George Shultz. And I believe I said to him, I think I said to him, “Oh, no, Mr. President. I don’t blame George; I blame you!” And that, I think, was the last thing I said to him.

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video

Video: Why Stockton Went Belly Up

We’ve discussed the Stockton, California, municipal bankruptcy. It was brought about by a number of factors, but the highlights are (1) lavish and totally unsustainable public employee pay and benefits, and (2) the recession. Here is a detailed explanation from Vice Mayor Kathy Miller:

This sort of disaster may be coming soon to a city near you.

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Thought

Thomas Jefferson

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

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national politics & policies

The Realpolitik of Illusion

It’s a race against time. Obamacare is going into effect, piece by piece, link by link, yard by yard.

The idea when legislating big programs such as this is to push up as many benefits as possible early in the timeline, and shove the burdens as far down the road as possible. The strategy depends on enough voters noticing the benefits before the extravagant costs become clear. (And the full costs never become clear.) Once the program has been around long enough, the benefits will turn enough voters into special interests, and the costs will remain dispersed enough to discourage over-burdened taxpayers from fighting the inertial mass of the program.null

About the only thing that can go wrong is that the costs become all-too-clear all-too-soon.

That’s Nancy Pelosi’s realpolitik, as she honestly explained in her proud defense of “the health care law” (as if there were only one!):

We think the more people know about this legislation, you see it has changed even in the past week, the support for it has increased and as people understand what we all heard here today — how it affects their lives directly — that will even grow. So as I’ve said before, the politics be damned. . . .

That line, “the politics be damned,” is disingenuous in the extreme. The politics, here, is everything. And the Democrats have big government’s “home court” advantage, the illusions of interest-group cost-benefit analysis.

And against them? A Republican presidential candidate who had previously supported the same kind of law, supported by the same kind of illusions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought Today

Mark Felt (Deep Throat)

Follow the money.

Categories
Thought

Henry David Thoreau

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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Today

July 12

On July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born. He would go on to become one of the leading figures in America’s Transcendentalist movement, most famously writing Walden: or, Life in the Woods [cabin pictured]. His defense of John Brown deeply affected later interpretations of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and his “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” protesting the Mexican-American War, has become a classic not only of protest but of political theory.