Author: Redactor

Categories
free trade & free markets

Closed: No Competition

Ancient societies were mostly closed societies. Modern society (at least as conceived by most of America’s “founding fathers”) was to be something very different: open.

But today there’s way too much “managed” competition, basically closing out businesses not on some insider list.

Julie Crowe, a veteran of the armed forces and lifelong resident of Bloomington, Illinois, wanted to start up a van ride service, mainly to drive party-going Illinois State students safely home. There are big buses for Bloomington revelers, but no vans.  Her new service would have provided interesting competition for existing outfits, and her idea of providing safer, more personal, comfier rides home — arguably better than taxicabs, and certainly better than the buses — smacks of a plausible business plan.

But the city denied her a permit to even try, on the grounds that her proposal wasn’t “in the public interest.”

Preposterous, of course. Or, as her lawyer, Jacob Huebert, puts it,

How can city planners know the “right” number of vehicles to serve the community? They can’t possibly know that, any more than they can know the right number of supermarkets or the right number of restaurants.

Huebert is associate counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute, which has as its stated goal ensuring “that the rights to earn a living and to start a business, which are essential to a free and prosperous society, are available not just to a politically privileged few, but to all.”

A great cause. The “eternal vigilance” required to establish and maintain a free, open society means challenging idiotic government encroachments one case at a time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Democracy Sans Factions?

It’s worth remembering, as Democrats proceed with programs that have failed in the past and as Republican insiders strive to rig their own nomination process, that the political parties are private organizations. They are not governments.

They are groups of people working to gain control over government — and that control can only ever be temporary. Let us hope.

Over many years of activism in politics I’ve supported openness in elections and ballot access, working for a variety of reforms, including the securing of the rights to initiative, referendum and recall. I’ve also contemplated a few less simple ideas, like Instant Runoff Voting and proportional representation, both designed to break (or at least ease up on) the stranglehold that the two-party system has over American democracy.

But additional reforms are worth thinking about. One, for instance, would prohibit any mention of a party name on a ballot.

Since the parties are private groups, they ought not have special access to the public ballot. All the more because the two parties are a problem in and of themselves — their perennial clamor for power perverts political discourse, unnecessarily restricting and channeling the direction of debate.

Such rules already hold sway in many county and municipal governments throughout the country. It could be instructive to study the differences in politicking and policy.

For todays’ growing ranks of independent and unaffiliated voters, perhaps the motivations in favor wouldn’t wholly be rational, but partly vengeful.

And perhaps partisans might wish to consider the reasons for that kind of anti-partisan sentiment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Hammerin’ Hank becomes highest-paid, Tutu arrested in Cape Town

On Feb. 29, 1972, Hank Aaron signed a three-year deal with the Atlanta Braves that paid him $200,000 per year, making him the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball at the time. Two years later, Aaron became baseball’s career home run king when he broke Babe Ruth’s long-standing record.

On Feb. 29, 1988, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu was arrested along with 100 clergymen during a five-day anti-apartheid demonstration in Cape Town.

Categories
Thought

Mae West

“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

Categories
free trade & free markets

A Kickstarter in the Pants

Wikipedia surprised a lot of people, changed a lot of minds: Online collaboration can accomplish great things. Following Wikipedia, other interactive, collaborative, not-quite-commercial Web-based projects have offered more evidence that the Internet can transform everyday life.

Take Kickstarter.com. It’s really ramped up to something impressive, as Carl Franzen points out at Talking Points Memo:

One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.

Lots of folks around the world — including shirttail acquaintances of mine — have successfully used the Internet service to fund outré projects. Basically, they drew up proposals and placed them on Kickstarter, and people the world over chipped in to get the projects off the ground. As Franzen explains, all sorts of projects find funding that way, “everything from iPod Nano watches to children’s books on reproduction.”

While I look at this as a great development, another way in which free peoples can get good things done without government, not everyone is so positive — the above-quoted Strickler, for instance: “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”

Or maybe not. Maybe Kickstarter is pointing towards the right way to fund projects that, before the Internet, were hard to invest in or otherwise sponsor.

Maybe it’s about time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Paul Harvey, famed radio broadcaster, who died Feb. 28, 2009

“When your outgo exceeds your income, the upshot may be your downfall.”

Categories
Today

ATF’s Waco raid, GOP organized

On Feb. 28, 1993, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, with media in tow, raided the Waco, Texas, compound of the Branch Davidian religious group, prompting a gun battle in which four agents and six Davidians were killed. The federal agents were attempting to arrest the leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, on information that the religious sect was stockpiling weapons. A nearly two-month standoff after the unsuccessful raid ended with an assault on the compound on April 19, 1993, and a fire that burned the compound to the ground killing 76 Davidians, including Koresh and 20 children.

On Feb. 27, 1854, the Republican Party of the United States was organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.

Categories
ballot access national politics & policies political challengers

Seven Million for Show

Complaining about the cost of holding an election is usually done by those who fear the election’s likely outcome, not the price.

I’m not very sympathetic.

Yet, I’m in total agreement with Andrew Wilson, a resident fellow at the Show-Me Institute, whose article “Money Down a Drain: The Millions Spent on Missouri’s No-Show Feb. 7 Election,” states flatly that legislators ought to be “embarrassed” for calling “a statewide election” in which “nobody came.”

Missouri taxpayers forked out $7 million to hold the state’s February 7 presidential primary, which produced only a meager eight percent voter turnout, netting a whopping $25 cost for every vote cast.

The legislature had moved the primary date up to gain a greater edge for the state in determining delegates for deciding the presidential nominee. When that timetable didn’t work with the National Republican Party’s nominating rules, legislation was drafted to cancel the primary.

But the legislature and the governor couldn’t bring the bill beyond the draft stage. Instead, they stuck Show-Me State citizens with spending seven million for, well, show . . .  the primary having been rendered absolutely meaningless in terms of winning delegates.

Hence the low voter turnout.

There is a very simple solution. Let political parties have the freedom to run their own affairs, their own primaries. And let them do it without taxpayer subsidy.

Governments (taxpayers) pay for the general election; parties pay for their primaries.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Ralph Nader

Initiative and referendum is the citizen activist’s ‘ace in the hole.’

Ralph Nader was born on February 27, 1934 .
Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Townhall: Be Like China?

It’s getting to become more and more popular to bash initiative rights — even when those rights are not very relevant. I hear rumblings in California that the hopeless Republicans, there, are gearing up for more of such nonsense. But beware, folks: This puts you in very dangerous company, amongst defenders of outright tyranny. See my column at Townhall.com this weekend.

For references associated with that column, click the links below:

For last week’s column, view it on This Is Common Sense.