Author: Redactor

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Tree of Liberty

For years, Egyptians have called for greater democracy and constitutional limits — like term limits. Now newly appointed Egyptian Vice President Omar Suhleiman dangles the concession of term limits for the president, freedom for the press and an end to the three decades of emergency powers, the better to retain the keys to the nation’s executive washroom and the army. Or so he hopes.

Wisely, both pro-democratic and not-so-democratic opponents aren’t buying it. Opponents fear that such concessions will (if Mubarak or his chosen cronies remain in power) be pulled back later.

At a time more opportune for thuggery.

Still, how to get from a brutally repressive state to a free, constitutional democratic republic? Revolution is a clumsy, dangerous mode of political change.

Jefferson may have written something about “refreshing” the tree of liberty every generation with the blood of patriots, but most of us prefer more peaceful methods.

Lo and behold, they exist: Free elections. Here in America, voters have had the power to change party control of the U.S. Congress several times this decade. Hasn’t gotten us the reforms we want yet, but it’s better than in Egypt.

Plus, in half the states and most cities, citizens can check government and inject reform into the political system through the initiative, referendum and recall.

Egyptians are struggling to get democracy; Americans should use what we’ve got.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Brew Stronger Tea

The Tea Party’s House Republicans have begun work, outlining a “plan to attack the federal deficit. The result: A proposal to cut $100 billion,” which amounts, in the words of Tom Mullen, on LewRockwell.com, to a mere “[s]even percent of the deficit.”

Disappointing. But wait, Mullen goes on, “if history has taught us anything, it is that this isn’t ‘just the beginning,’ with more substantial cuts to follow. This will be the high water mark as far as reduction in government spending is concerned.”

Mullen then offers an alternative venue: The states should unite in defiance of Washington, authorizing and defending citizens who withhold income tax payments until Congress balances the budget. He calls this “interposition.”

Radical, yes. But it will prove even less effective than our first House’s first foray.

Why? Many of the states are in just as bad a financial shape — or worse — than the federal union, and are presumably right now primping for federal bailouts.

What to do?

Brew stronger tea.

And throw it at Congress.

No state bailouts. The only thing the House can do, alone, is prevent more debt. Don’t raise the debt ceiling, and force President Obama and Democrats in the Senate to take budget cuts seriously — big budget cuts — now.

As I wrote a few days ago, let’s put the federal government onto a cash, pay-as-you go finance plan immediately. This would require, certainly, no small amount of courage from House Republicans.

Brew stronger tea.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

Not Guilty as Charged

If software developer Phil Mocek is guilty of anything, it’s the conviction that he has a right to move about the country as if he were a free man. He’s guilty of defending his dignity. Guilty of believing he’s innocent.

That’s his crime, not “failing to obey an officer,” “concealing his identity,” “criminal trespass” or “disorderly conduct.” Fortunately, an Albuquerque jury has now found him innocent of these bogus charges.

During his trial, a TSA official and an Albuquerque police officer both testified, in Mocek’s words, that “you do not have to show ID in order to fly and that you can use cameras in public areas of the airport.” Yes, recording the unwarranted and outrageous harassment of him was proposed as proof of the man’s criminality.

The normals among us, on the other hand, can only applaud Mocek’s nerve and presence of mind in standing up for himself.

Defense co-counsel Molly Schmidt-Nowara observes that TSA officials and police at the airport “became annoyed because he was filming.” But annoying the police or TSA officers is not in itself a crime.

Mocek says: “I wasn’t testing the system. I went in with a boarding pass. I had what I’m required to have to fly and by way of being a human I observed what happened.”

Has the tide started to turn against the noxious surveillance state and in favor of everyday freedom for human beings?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Help Us Help Ourselves

Hopeful about the innovations transpiring in various small sectors of fields like medicine or education?

Atlantic Monthly blogger Megan McArdle isn’t.

According to McArdle, the history of “social science” — society? — is “littered with exciting programs that promised to both significantly improve the lives of the targeted populations, and to save money.” Yet average costs of education and health care keep going up.

Gee willikers, why?

Scalability. McArdle suggests that successful but small-scale experiments have expertise and enthusiasm going for them that can’t be readily replicated on very large scales. The positive effects of the small programs tend to disappear when people who don’t want to change their ways have to sign off.

She says that this isn’t a medical or educational problem but a social one.

What kind of social problem? McArdle doesn’t say.

But compare and contrast. Do small-scale innovations in electronics and computers, for example, tend to dissolve into puddles of social lethargy and recalcitrance even if they achieve substantial improvements at lower cost? Apparently not. So what’s the difference? Well, hardware and software firms may be taxed and regulated by government, but they’re burdened with nowhere near the level of bureaucracy that swaddles schooling and medicine.

In free markets, bad solutions don’t get entrenched. Good ones don’t either, unless they prove economically viable over time.

So how about removing the shackles and just letting us function as free people — in every realm of human endeavor?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

A Fearsome, Fiery Cliché

Senator Chuck Schumer insists that it would be the height of irresponsibility either to freeze the federal government’s debt ceiling or “shut down the government.” Either action would risk “the credit markets losing some confidence in the United States Treasury” — tantamount to “Playing with fire.”

The opposite of his point appears closer to the truth.  Michael Tanner explains that “If the debt ceiling is not increased, the Treasury can prioritize interest and debt payment to avoid a default and essentially put the government on a stringent pay-as-you-go basis.” Economist Robert Murphy adds that “even if the debt ceiling weren’t increased, the Treasury could still roll over its debt as existing bonds matured. The only thing the Treasury couldn’t do would be to issue more debt.”

The truth behind Schumer’s clichéd metaphor is this: He and his cronies have been “playing with fire” for a long time. And it’s worth noting that forcing the Treasury to switch to pay-as-you-go would likely have the opposite effect on credit markets than he contends: When prodigal spenders cut up their credit cards and continue to pay existing bills, creditors tend to breathe a little easier.

But expect no such acumen from Schumer, who, in that same exhortation, lists the “three branches of government”: The House, the Senate, and the president. Apparently, he hopes to gain authority for his contentions by piling factual error upon cliché.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies too much government

The Kill Switch for Freedom

The Egyptian government — or perhaps a mysterious inter-dimensional vortex, we’re not sure which — has shut down some 99 percent of the Internet within Egypt as protests mount demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down. Mubarak has ruled autocratically for three decades and the protesters are fed up. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other cyber-tools have played a part in their protest, helping them document Egyptians’ clashes with authorities in word and image.

Declan McCullough, a veteran reporter on privacy and the Internet, observes that the Egyptian government is “conducting a high-profile experiment in what happens when a country with a $500 billion GDP, one that’s home to the pyramids and the Suez Canal, decides that Internet access should be restricted to a trickle.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, U.S. pols like Senator Joseph Lieberman are again pushing a bill to give the president authority to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” in the event of a crisis and shut down major portions of the Internet. For our own good, of course. No judicial review would be necessary before the executive branch could snap the cyber-spine.

Perhaps American politicians who advocate letting the president throw a so-called kill switch for the Internet in case of emergency would deny any tyrannical intentions. And perhaps their motives are indeed pure . . . in some aesthetic sense. But once you give government new authority to exercise destructive control over us, there is, of course, the temptation to use it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
porkbarrel politics

Monuments to Megalomania

Some reform proposals are so modest they have scant hope of passing. Why? Because the people who pass the bills are so immodest.

Congressional egos would be severely bruised if Representative Michael McCaul’s proposal were enacted. His bill would prohibit lawmakers from erecting monuments to themselves glorifying the fact that they have dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to the erecting of monuments to themselves.

McCaul says that these “monuments to me” are emblems of arrogance and “contribute to both political corruption and excessive spending.” Such contributions are prolific.

Remember Senator Robert C. Byrd (1917-2010), “serving” in Washington for more than half a century? Well, the construction industry in West Virginia sure does. Wikipedia devotes an entire entry just to listing the buildings and transportation and other projects named after the self-aggrandizing Senator Byrd. He was always eager to lug as much pork to his state as he could, and most of it is stamped with his immortal cognomen. There’s even a Robert C. Byrd highway to nowhere. A Wall Street Journal article by William McGurn gives a laundry list of other sites named after congressmen alive and in office when their names got slapped on.

The ban should be enacted. Even if this reform is small and symbolic, the abuse it addresses is real. And McCaul wants to know: “If we can’t do the little, obvious things, how are the people going to trust us on the big ones?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Tyrants Are Not Our Friends

Last month, an upset apple cart led to political revolution.

On December 17, Tunisian government agents tried to confiscate Mohamed Bouazizi’s livelihood. When he refused to hand over his produce, he was slapped by a female inspector and then beaten by two of her colleagues, who took his scale. When he went to the municipal building to get his property back, he was beaten again.

Later that day in the public square, Bouazizi doused himself with lighter fluid and set himself on fire. He died weeks later, but not before demonstrations erupted in his home town and spread throughout Tunisia.

Tunisians had long labored under the repressive dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who repressed both political speech and commerce. No longer. He’s been ousted.

So do our leaders celebrate with the Tunisian people? No. The New York Times reports that Ben Ali was “an important ally of the United States.” He’s now in exile in Saudi Arabia, another dictatorship allied with the United States.

Protest has spread further, most notably to Egypt, yet another repressive government supported by America’s State Department . . . and taxpayers.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassures us that, “the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

That response? To imprison and torture bloggers and opposition political leaders.

Our most effective aid to Africa would be to stop subsidizing repressive regimes and pretending that slavery is freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

The Kid With the Illegal Magic Marker

Want to be marked for life? Be a student in DeLynn Woodside’s math class at Roosevelt Middle High in Oklahoma City, where last month a 13-year-old boy fell prey to another exercise of unenlightened zero-tolerance-for-common-sense policies.

The child’s high crime was using a magic marker in school, a no-no in light of the school’s graffiti problem. The police report documents his “possession of a permanent marker on private property,” which is illegal. According to Ms. Woodside, the boy was “writing on a piece of paper, which caused it to bleed over onto the desk.” When she asked for the marker, he tried to hide it.

A problem? Perhaps. But if so, a minor one. She could have dealt with it by explaining that markers are not allowed in school and by asking him to put the marker away and not bring it back to school. Instead, at the teacher’s behest the child was arrested and taken to a certain Community Intervention Center, a holding facility for juvenile offenders. A sergeant “booked the marker into the property room.”

Stories like these seem like real knee-slappers until you realize the outsized inanity displayed is probably not so funny for the kids being dragged downtown and booked.

Legislators, teachers, police — nobody who enables, sanctions or participates in such episodes — deserve any laurels. Treating kids as criminals for the most trivial violations of the rules, even rules that make sense, is itself criminal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government U.S. Constitution

Not His Job

President Obama will address the State of the Union, today, speaking before Congress. These annual efforts are almost uniformly unbearable, with too much applause and too much rah-rah-boy politicking. And far too little thought.

Scuttlebutt has it that the president will concentrate on the economy, on “jobs.”

After the sea change of the last election, one might hope that he’d stay on topic and address constitutionally-mandated issues of his office.

“Jobs” are none of his business. “Jobs” — by which I mean the number of people employed this way or that out there in the non-governmental sector, and by which he means the number of jobs total, including those paid for out of taxpayer expense — should not be his chief worry.

No president in recent memory has excelled by fiddling with policy to micromanage “the economy.” No one knows this stuff. Not even college professors specializing in macroeconomics.

What government operatives know is how to get elected, stay in office. How to preen for television cameras, read a prompter.

You know, the essentials.

But they cannot possibly know enough to “run the economy.”

And yet, Obama talks about making the country “more competitive.” Oh, come on. Just open up trade — which promotes widespread co-operation as well as competition — stop micromanaging the money supply through the Fed, make regulations fit a rule of law and not a vast bureaucratic command system, and let it go. Let individuals and businesses worry about “competiveness.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.