Author: Redactor

Categories
political challengers property rights

Trump vs. Private Property

If real-estate magnate/pink-slip impresario Donald Trump can’t comb over his hair plausibly, how does he expect to convincingly coif his wheeler-dealer track record?

Over the past several months, Trump has been making disturbing noises about pursuing the GOP presidential nomination. Perhaps those encouraging him want the Republicans to remain almost as unpalatable to freedom-loving folk as the Democrats.

Trump has an atrocious track record when it comes to limited government and private property. Like many developers in collusion with bureaucrats and the tax man, he doesn’t hesitate to use eminent domain to steal what ain’t his. All in the name of the so-called  “public good,” of course, a catchall concept used to excuse almost any kind of ruthless predation.

Michelle Malkin reminds us that in the 1990s Trump  “waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City. . . . The real-estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limousine parking lot—Coking’s private property be damned.” Fortunately, the valiant Institute for Justice took up her cause. She prevailed.

Trump’s comments on the 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo v. City of New London are candid enough. The justices ruled that government officials could treat the Constitution as irrelevant with respect to property. Trump says he agrees  “100 percent “ with the Kelo decision.

That confession alone makes the idea of a President Donald Trump 100 percent repugnant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

A Fairy Tale Day

Aren’t weddings fun? And romantic, don’t forget.

That’s why I’m excited about the wedding of two young people I don’t even know: Gladys Smith and Fred Klinkle. Yet, you won’t see their wedding on your television today. Instead, the tube will revel in the wedding of Britain’s Prince William and “commoner” Kate Middleton.

Too bad. Neither Gladys nor Fred are known to benefit from unjust privilege or to have been enriched through centuries of their family’s tyrannical rule.

Not to be the skunk at the royal party, but I have a slight problem with those who live off the involuntary sweat and toil of others. Granted, to her credit, Miss Middleton has not been a leech on the British people . . . until today.

Sure, princes and princesses are just precious when animated by Disney. And it’s nice to know that in today’s real-life Britain the royals can no longer separate the heads of “subjects” from their shoulders. But still I find it hard to get in a celebratory mood for the activities of a family that represents the most rotten aspects of our unfree past.

Why do the Brits put up with the royals?

Inertia, perhaps.

Why would any liberty-loving American be caught fixed to today’s TV spectacle?

Beats me!

To Gladys and Fred and other loving non-monarchical couples, best wishes: live long and multiply. To William and Kate? Once you renounce your position and stop fleecing the taxpayers, same to you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism too much government

Bloated Government Makes Us Fat?

Since the 1980s, America has undergone an epidemic: We’re fatter than ever. And a lot of people look to the government to solve it.

But what if the government itself jump-started the epidemic?

According to a growing number of researchers, doctors and successful dieters, the usual cause of obesity has long been known, but government-supported science, backed by Congressional committees and official dogma, inverted that wisdom. What government sparked was the “low-fat revolution,” which basically said that eating fats made you fat. Government propaganda and funding set industry off to replace fats in foods with . . . sugars.

And thus began a movement that ran right up against our endocrine systems, making us hungrier the more carbohydrates we ate, fatter the faster those carbs were turned to blood sugars, and diabetic in increasing numbers.

This is the point science Gary Taubes has been making for a decade, famously starting with a New York Times essay, “What If It Has All Been a Big Fat Lie?” He defends the approach of Dr. Atkins, famous for his high meat-and-fat/low-carb diet.

Since that essay, similar diets and research have pointed in that general direction. An economist has even touted a “cave man” diet.

You don’t have to turn to government to lose weight — though, interestingly, the USDA’s current advice isn’t as crazy as it once was, and the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign appears reasonable.

Ignore, instead, the government’s past bad advice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people

Pogue Privacy “Paranoia”

Apple customers recently learned that the cellular versions of their iPhones and iPads are storing detailed tracking information about users in an unencrypted format.

Ace New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue belittles anyone concerned about the threat to privacy. He himself has “nothing to hide,” lacks the “paranoid gene.” In conclusion, “So what?”

Chiming in online, reader “Diana” avers that “Privacy is dead. It is time to get over it” — a familiar yet incoherent sentiment which assumes that privacy is an all-or-nothing commodity.

If there were a spate of break-ins in a neighborhood, would anyone feel justified in blithely asserting, “Security is dead. It is time to get over it”? Would you be making a pointless fetish of security by continuing to lock your front door or improving the lock? Should everyone suffering under dictatorship be instructed that their freedom is dead, get over it?

The costs of breaching privacy can be minor or great. With respect to unencrypted and archived tracking data, the practical costs of the vulnerability may be zero until the wrong person with the wrong motive exploits it. The danger may be a lot greater in other countries.

It’s appropriate to debate how great an apparent threat to privacy may be, and the best way of countering that threat. But it is wrong to assume that institutionally persistent but unnecessary assaults on personal privacy are either irreversible or silly even to notice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

At Risk of Drowning

To those who hold that government should be all things to all people at all times, the prospect of cutting back the ever-escalating level of government spending is a non-starter. Like their chief spokesman in the White House, they propose a different solution: Make “the rich” pay more.

Never mind that while President Obama talks about socking “millionaires and billionaires” who “can afford it” with higher taxes, the hikes are actually designed to wallop folks making $200,000 a year. That’s actually a tad less than a million. In many areas, such a salary hardly qualifies one as rich.

We’re supposed to ignore the fact that federal income taxes remain progressive. The richer you are, the more you pay. That’s why the top five percent of earners pay 59 percent of federal income taxes, while roughly the bottom half pay nothing at all.

“Fair” becomes slippery.

Also slippery? The real-world outcomes. Say tax rates were raised enough that deficits might be covered. What would happen?

Just recently I had dinner with a couple of millionaires. “You know, we don’t have to work,” they told me. “We already have enough money to live out the rest of our lives, so if we’re going to be punished tax-wise, we’ll simply retire.” Comfortably, in fact.

But what about those they employ? What about the enterprises and jobs they won’t create?

Maybe punishing productive folks with even higher taxes isn’t such a great idea.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Competition Works Even With Limited Info

Few of us understand all our options when we shop for homeowners’ insurance.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman riffed on this, arguing that “When people call for ‘consumer choice’ in health care, what this mainly comes down to isn’t comparison shopping on actual care . . . but rather comparison shopping on insurance policies. And that’s basically impossible even for home insurance, which is a lot simpler than medical insurance.”

Krugman calls a free market in medical insurance “fantasy.”

Yet the illusions involved in buying insurance also apply to non-market medical coverage.

Consider: Most people with low-price insurance like their coverage at least so long as they don’t have to make many claims against it. That’s because insurance is one of those things you buy hoping not to have an occasion to require it.

Something similar happens in single-payer medicine. Some Europeans (especially the young and healthy) praise their state systems that cost them next to nothing out of pocket, patching up their scrapes, mending their bones “for free.”

But wait till they are old and really sick, and on a multiple-month waiting list for an MRI or cancer treatment. Rationing-by-waiting can be a killer.

Bottom-line this: In a competitive insurance market, on learning of poor performance by your carrier, you can drop your insurer like a hot potato. In single-payer systems, you’re stuck. In line. Hoping not to get something too taxing on the system.

But you do have a choice in coffins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets media and media people national politics & policies

What’s Going Up

When it comes to government policy and the politics that supports it, why people advocate what they advocate can get complicated.

It’s obvious that people don’t always vote their wallets, their narrowly perceived “self interest.” But it’s just as obvious that even the biggest advocates of “sacrifice” and “public spirit” often come off as greedy and narrowly pandering to at least some interests.

And then there’s the issue of fuel to throw on the fire of ideology.

Gasoline, especially, leads to some bizarre expressions of opinion.

When gas prices rise, people talk “conspiracy.” Chris Cuomo makes the case that “speculators” drive fuel prices up — though I notice that neither he nor his guest seemed much inclined to use actual economic analysis to explain anything. “The facts” Cuomo makes much of are embarrassingly superficial.

Two U.S. senators now push for regulators to “apply the breaks” on speculators. Current prices are, as one of them puts it, “unwarranted.”

In past decades, I remember some prominent politicians talk about adding huge taxes to gas, “just like in Europe,” to discourage consumption and “encourage green energy” and thereby “save the planet.”

I don’t hear those notions often, anymore. Could it be that none of us wants to pay more, so when gas prices rise, we forget our ideologies and other fine notions and just yearn (or scream) for cheaper gas?

Not exactly a rational attitude towards policy. But maybe not that mysterious, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Term Limits for Cuba?

You can’t cheer some victories — they just don’t seem real.

I mean, what can you make of the “victory” for term limits represented by Raul Castro’s endorsement of the reform during an endless speech at his country’s Sixth Communist Party Congress?

Castro told fellow commies that political officials, including El Presidente, should be limited to two consecutive five-year terms. Seems that with the Castro brothers about to shuffle off this mortal coil, decades of dictatorship have shrunk the pool of well-tested vicious ranters experienced maligning capitalist running dogs and running the country into the ground.

The dear leader’s speech touted a laundry list of proposed changes to Cuba’s socialist system, including legalizing the sale of cars and homes, a possibility the party has been “studying.” Some of these reforms might take effect and make life a little easier for Cubans.

Perhaps Raul Castro, 79, reflecting on his ailing fratello’s disastrous half-century dictatorship (1959 to 2008, more or less), has decided Cuba’s socialism and autocracy don’t really work after all.

It’s happened in other moribund societies.

But even if presidential term limits should (against all odds) be enacted before Raul kicks the bucket, they won’t mean much if his successor decides they don’t mean much. And like other critics of the regime, I doubt that Cuba will be the country to buck the trend of governments “restricted” by term limits that are not worth the tissue-paper constitutions they’re written on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

The AP’s Memory Hole

In our age of the Internet, cheap digital video recorders, etc., it’s harder than it once was to enforce an “official” version of an event . . . . the un-airbrushed knowledge of which might embarrass some potentate.

Memory-tweakers keep trying, though. Including Winston-Smith wannabes at the Associated Press.

An example is President Obama’s appearance at a wind turbine plant, where he made a pitch for “energy independence,” a concept presidents have been pitching at us at least since the long gas lines of the 1970s. One concern of attendees was the latest bout of high gas prices, caused by inflationary pressures and uncertainty about the Middle East.

According to an early version of the AP’s report, “Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle. ‘If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,’ Obama said laughingly, ‘you might want to think about a trade-in.’” The passage downplays how jovially patronizing the president was even after it became clear that the questioner had ten kids to support.

Obama’s unscripted condescension toward a struggling plant worker is not so outrageous as the AP’s strange memory-hole behavior. The incident was later scrubbed from their report. But InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds saved a screenshot of the original passage. And there’s video.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Tax Your Brain First

President Obama thinks that the federal government should tax the rich more, starting by closing itemizations “for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”

He says this will go a long way to reducing the deficit. But in the very sentence he advances it, he says it would “reduce the deficit by $320 billion over ten years.” Not in the first year, which might amount to something, but over a decade’s long stretch.

Big deal.

But, baby steps. Anything to raise taxes.

Democrats in Congress need to tax their brains, first.

Unlike the bulk of the population, the rich don’t have to earn more to retire. That’s what it means to be rich. So, the more you take from their incomes, the less incentive they have to go out earning incomes.

When tax rates rise, greater numbers of wealthy folk switch employment of their capital from productive enterprise (“making more”) to consumption. Not only are they then taxed less, but they employ fewer workers, who therefore pay fewer taxes.

This adds up, as can easily be seen by graphing tax revenue along with top marginal tax rates since World War II. Result? Tax revenues tend to hover just under 19 percent, despite radically different tax rates. As Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie puts it, “Any budget plan based on revenue being better than 19 percent of GDP is just blowing smoke.”

Which suggests where Obama’s audacious hope to resolve the federal budget crisis by raising taxes will end up — in smoke.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.