Author: Redactor

Categories
porkbarrel politics

Fitting Tribute

Senator Robert Byrd has passed from this world, ending a 58-year perch in power, the longest stint in the entire history of Congress.

Politics isn’t a sport, though sometimes it’s blood-sport . . . thus there’s no jersey to retire.

So what do you offer to the memory of a man who in life already appropriated nearly everything possible? What’s the proper homage to the King of Pork?

Retire the earmark, once and for all.

Congress had a good run with earmarked pork barrel spending, and Byrd was that run’s poster boy. He had bridges named after him, highways and freeways and a stadium or two. Airports. Special rooms in the legislative wing. All paid for by taxpayers, most often funded by Congress through sneaking said projects into legislation without requiring a separate, conscious and above-board vote.

You might think it nicer, if not wiser, to commemorate the man for his habit of keeping a pocket Constitution on his person at all times. Or for his knowledge of history. Or arcane Senate rules. Certainly, it wouldn’t be polite to mention his “youthful” organizing of his state’s KKK.

But West Virginia’s senior senator was so closely associated with self-aggrandizing earmarked spending that no other honor comes close — we should push for a true monument to outshine all others. And that’s why I suggest cutting out the earmark.

Make the porkers squeal.

And let the tumult stand as a salute to Sen. Byrd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights incumbents national politics & policies

The Kill-Political-Discourse Act

Sometimes politicians name their legislation the better to hide what they are trying to do. The name fails to disclose, you might say.

Consider the so-called DISCLOSE Act, which just passed the House of Representatives by a mostly party-line vote of 219-206 and is now awaiting action in the Senate. The full name of the monstrosity is the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act. It should be called the Democracy Is Undermined by Rigging the Game to Favor Incumbents and Especially Democrats Act.

The goal is to hamper political advertising by independent groups and corporations by requiring disclosure of the names of contributors who give above $600 a year. The new rules would harm corporations more than unions, and would foist anew some of the same burdens on First Amendment rights just overturned by the Supreme Court. The same court that threw out chunks of McCain-Feingold on free speech grounds would also likely find DISCLOSE unconstitutional.

But could the court do so before the 2010 elections? Democrats like Hank Johnson ― who told fellow partisans that the Act, if passed, would stop Republicans from being elected ― are betting that it can’t. Their hope is that with the speech-shackling new law skewing things in their favor until the high court acts, they’ll be more likely to escape political annihilation in November.

No, we can’t wait for the Supremes on this one. Call your senator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

E-Power to the People

Disagreement is simply an inescapable part of living with one another. But we should all agree on one thing: The people are sovereign.

The practical question is, how is that sovereignty best instituted? Our experience with those organization and rules we’ve come to rely upon is that, too often, they work against our interests, even working mightily to limit our sovereignty.

Earlier this week, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that electronic signatures should be counted in a case involving an independent candidate for governor who was required by law to gather 1,000 official voter affirmations on a petition.

Of immediate concern is whether the same standard on e-signatures should apply to initiative petitions, which in Utah are required to number over 100,000. Utahns for Ethical Government is asking the AG to count electronic signatures on their measure.

There are certainly issues as to how best to authenticate e-signatures. But can there be any doubt as to the desirability of making it easier for voters to sign petitions and place issues they deem important before their fellow sovereign citizens?

There’s entrenched political opposition to that, though. Utah Governor Gary Herbert says “electronic signatures are part of the future” — but he hopes that’s the far distant future. He wants the legislature to weigh in. Which it may do, working around the judgment of the State Supreme Court.

Will popular sovereignty make it to the Internet, today’s dominant interactivity realm?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

The Maywood Solution

What do you do when your town’s politics has been bitter and internecine for years, when your police force is best known for hiring disgraced cops from other departments, and when your town budget is nearly half a million bucks in the red?

Give up.

Well, not quite. The town of Maywood, not far south of downtown Los Angeles, was in just such a pickle, and resorted to a rather extreme solution: The elected officials, town manager, and city attorney kept their positions, but everybody else was let go.

The move was forced by the fact that no insurance company would guarantee the burg. The town had grown so iffy on all counts that it would have been crazy to bet on it. Thus placed in legal jeopardy, the town’s leaders decided that the only way to keep their jobs was to get rid of all others.

No. Wait. That’s too cynical. With a civic culture so corrupt something had to be done to move forward.

That makes Maywood’s next step almost sheer genius: Contract police, fire, everything else to neighboring, better-run jurisdictions. The county Sheriff takes over police patrols. Bell, a neighbor city, takes over the bulk of municipal services.

The new arrangement begins July 1. This makes Maywood one city to watch. Could it be a bellwether? In collapsing California, very likely.

And what about other cities in other states? It might mean a revolution: Economic competition for public services.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy too much government

Cinema Without Subsidy

Yesterday I insisted that states stop subsidizing filmmaking. Implied, I hope, was the notion that states needn’t provide tax credits to lure movie shoots to their state, either.

No sooner did I wrap up that argument (with the premature proclamation “end of story”) than I read a fine article on Show Me Daily about how “States Can Entice Businesses and Industries Without Credits.” The article begins talking about making films in Wisconsin, where the tax credits were just cut by two thirds. And yet the state has nabbed some major film efforts.

According to Show Me, “Wisconsin sets a great example. . . .” Every state has something going for it, unique locations, geography, architecture, people, climate, what-have-you. “Firms will locate” where they do for relevant reasons; “they don’t need to be bribed with generous incentive packages.”

But, but, but, but! some will sputter. Film companies are special firms. They start up, inhabit a location for a while, and then vamoose. State regulations and business taxation often makes it very difficult to shoot in a particular place. Filmmakers need special help around encumbering bureaucratic obstacles.

I’m sympathetic. For example, the business-and-occupation taxes that increasing numbers of states are instituting are horrendously burdensome: They take from gross revenues, of all things!

But the proper way around such counter-productive laws is outright repeal, setting up better state revenue programs . . . ones that are not so generally destructive of industry, including the film industry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Knot Cannibalism!

Midas, in honor of his peasant-turned-king father, King Gordias, dedicated an ox-cart to the gods, tying it with a knot so complex no one could undo it. It was there years later when Alexander of Macedon stopped by, and turned his hand to untying it. He couldn’t. So he took his sword and cut it open.

Some seemingly insoluble problems are best solved by stepping back and “cutting the Gordian knot.”

Take a current knot, fictional cannibalism. The auteur responsible for the gore-fest The Offspring recently sought funding for another cannibalism horror film, to be entitled The Woman.

The funder turned him down. “This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” said the head honcho of the funding institution, the state’s film commission.

Two years ago, that tax-funded organization produced 26 separate efforts. “Isn’t that just amazing?” Commissioner Janet Lockwood gurgled.

But her turning down funding for a horror film, for reasons of content, have let loose a storm of criticism. Some say that when government says “no” to an artistic product on content grounds, that’s censorship.

They are right.

Others say they don’t want their tax dollars going to vile, disgusting depictions of cannibalism and other vices and crimes.

And they are right, too.

The solution? Cut the knot of this problem in one swipe: Governments shouldn’t fund films. End of story. [Roll credits.]

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency national politics & policies

Absolute Safety Never Assured

There’s this old joke. “How do you know when a politician is lying? He’s moving his lips.”

Regarding President Obama’s recent speech about the ongoing oil spill disaster, Byron York of the Washington Examiner noted “one particularly striking moment . . .

midway through his talk, Obama acknowledged that he had approved new offshore drilling a few weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20. But Obama said he had done so only “under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe.”

York then quoted industry experts swearing on a stack of scientific reports that, regarding oil drilling, there is no such thing as “absolutely safe.” So, the intrepid reporter wanted to know, who told Obama that new deep sea oil drilling would be safe?

Long story short: He got a lot of administrative runaround from the Administration.

But who in their right mind believes anything is “absolutely safe”? Water isn’t. Chewing gum isn’t. As Thomas Sowell has explained in books like Applied Economics, we never choose between the risky and the absolutely safe. There’s risk all around. And trade-offs.

Assuming that Obama is not a nitwit (a pretty safe assumption), when he spoke the “absolutely safe” line, he simply wasn’t being honest.

Why? Because he looks bad. But this could have been an opportunity for America (and its president) to confront reality.

Of course, for a sitting politician, that’s the furthest thing from safe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people political challengers too much government

The Story of Our Time

The election season is heating up and challengers are making headway. So, here comes the name-calling by media hot-heads. The boiling point was quickly reached when Keith Olbermann called a Tea Party candidate a liar and a traitor, declaring that the challenger should be arrested and jailed.

This is, sadly, not unexpected.

In the 20th century, what was once considered radical and extremist became mainstream. The common sense wisdom of America’s founders was thrown out for imported philosophies like socialism and “dirigisme.” The leading intellectuals at the start of the century, many educated in Germany, took home doctrines of limitless government and added a can-do American spirit, creating Progressivism and then the New Deal.

Big Government went from the thing most feared to Our Friend.

Then, in England, a socialist noted that this alleged Big Brother could be awfully cruel, the opposite of fraternal. An Austrian economist explained how even well-intentioned government, if unlimited by a rule of law, could send us all down the road to serfdom. A backlash began.

Though increasing numbers of intelligent, concerned citizens began to doubt and then decry the growth of government, government continued to grow. And establishment opinion called supporters of limited government “extremists” and “radicals.”

Now, as government spending lurches beyond all sanity, it’s the establishment that appears extremist.

Expect a few skirling kettles to boil over this season. And then boil dry — and empty. Like the establishment’s big government philosophy itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly national politics & policies

Save the Unions’ Ponzi Schemes?

Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania is legislating something big, the “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act.”

Innocuous? Everyone wants more jobs. Government may have a lousy track record creating jobs that actually produce things demanded by people, but still — the bill is hardly unexpected in times like these.

It’s the second half of the title that indicates the powder keg within. The bill would bail out horrendously mismanaged union pension plans.

Unions, in the current legal context, are legal creatures of the state, with special privileges. And, surprise surprise, their own pensions — the ones that they manage — appear to be in as bad shape as the public-employee pensions I’ve talked about before, the ones that are building into a tsunami of insolvency.

A public bailout would transfer money from people without any special pension plan to people with pensions that are going bust. This is horribly unjust. That’s why Americans for Limited Government — a past sponsor of this program — is calling out Republican politicians who’ve signed onto Casey’s audacious scheme.

“At issue are multi-employer pension plans, in which companies across an industry pay into a single pension pool,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “[E]ven before 2006 only about 6% of multi-employer plans were fully funded, compared to about 31% of single-employer plans. The real problem is that multi-employer plans have become a sort of pension Ponzi scheme.”

Hmmm. Where have we heard that before?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Dank der Direct Democracy

For the last week, I’ve had the arduous duty of traveling across beautiful Switzerland, studying their very robust system of voter initiative and referendum. An important issue came up: is so-called “direct democracy” good or bad for business, for economic growth?

Years ago, a Swiss professor suggested that allowing voters a direct say “will ruin the Swiss economy.” (Sound familiar?) But a 2002 analysis by a Swiss business group, Economiesuisse, found that the facts showed otherwise.

Swiss cantons (states) with greater initiative and referendum rights had on average 15 percent greater GDP than those with lesser processes. Municipalities that required budgets to be approved by voter referendum spent 10 percent less per head. Also, public services cost noticeably less in cities and towns with voter initiative rights.

St. Gallen economist Gebhard Kirchgässer put it plainly, “In economic terms, everything is in favor of direct democracy — nothing against.”

But what about in America, where we hear so much about ballot initiatives “ruining” California?

Well, the recent American Legislative Exchange Council report “Rich States, Poor States” found a similar pattern. ALEC ranked all 50 states on a combined measure of their last ten years of economic performance and various factors of “economic outlook.” The top seven spots (and 12 of the top 15) were all held by states that enjoy voter initiative rights.

Ranked 46th, California was the only initiative state in the bottom five states. But even the Golden State’s low rank belongs to the legislature, not voters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.