Author: Redactor

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Quick! Stop the Rescue!

If there’s anything worse than running a state into the ground, it’s turning that state around.

Such seems to be the attitude behind yet another “bailout” program being mulled over by our congressional overlords in Washington, DC.

Over at National Review Online, Daniel Foster calls the Democrats’ proposed $23 billion fund for preventing teacher layoffs a “putting off hard decisions” fund. Pitched in the direction of Foster’s own state, New Jersey, the giveaways would sabotage efforts by the new governor, Chris Christie, to close a looming budget deficit for fiscal year 2011 of more than $10 billion.

The Garden State’s budget for fiscal year 2010 was about $30 billion. Christie is trying to cut funding to school districts. He has pledged to restore the funds in districts where teachers agree to a one-year pay freeze and to contribute a small bit of their salary (1.5 percent) to help pay for their own health insurance. Currently, most pay nothing.

But if the federal government flings borrowed largesse that makes the state’s budget cuts irrelevant, teachers will have much less incentive to cooperate with even marginally more responsible policies.

Perhaps that’s the goal for Washington’s big spenders. After all, if folks could get their fiscal houses in order without handouts from the spendaholics in DC, there’d be no need for such handouts.

And then just how “important” would those politicians be?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Merging or Diverging?

We live in interesting times. Strapped for cash, local and state governments are cutting spending and raising taxes. The federal government, with its chummy relationship with the Federal Reserve and our money supply, along with a shopaholic’s addiction to debt, continues to spend at record rates.

In this context, perhaps it is not so shocking that Congressman Ron Paul, known for being tight-fisted on spending, and for his push to audit the Fed, is basically even in a head-to-head match-up with President Obama. A Rasmussen Poll ticked Obama at 42 percent against Paul at 41 percent.

Interestingly, only 66 percent of Republicans chose Paul. It’s independent voters who are nearly 2-to-1 for Paul over the President.

Why do Republicans hesitate? Paul is a severe critic of the Republican Establishment, especially the GOP’s recent fondness for undeclared wars.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement is being courted by Alaska’s Sarah Palin and Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann. Representative Bachmann went so far to say that the GOP and the Tea Parties are merging.

I hope not. The main unifying feature of Tea Party protests remains out-of-control federal spending and borrowing. The GOP did nothing to curb this problem when it was in charge.

Both parties created the problem, as Rep. Paul points out. That’s why the Tea Party will be more effective as an independent political force, rallying Americans to hold both parties and all public officials accountable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Commiserations on Tax Day

It’s April 15, my eldest daughter’s birthday. I used to tell her she wouldn’t have to pay taxes like everyone else, because IRS folks wouldn’t dare make her file on her birthday, would they?

Seriously, when it comes to family and taxes, I’m just glad that my wife does all the work.

My job is getting the birthday cake.

You can understand why I’d shirk the tax work. There are 40,000 sections to the tax code, and no one understands it all.

This complexity has costs. And not just to my sanity. A whole industry has risen to ease the burden of figuring out our taxes. One hates to begrudge anyone an honest living, but really, most of today’s tax accountants would better serve humanity in some other job.

Simplifying taxes should be as important as tax reduction. Instead, because our representatives and our president just cannot stop themselves from spending more and more of our money, they are raising taxes. It’ll be on the proverbial rich, in the immediate future, but they won’t stop there.

They can’t stop there.

Why? Because if you took all the wealth — not just the income, but all the wealth — from every millionaire in the country, you still couldn’t pay all the future obligations of the federal government.

My darling daughter aside, April 15 is no day to celebrate. It’s tax day, and it marks the degradation of our nation at the hands of our politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Carrying On About Carry-Ons

Poor Chuck Schumer. A vendor now charges for a service that it didn’t previously charge separately. So the senator wants to outlaw this.

“Airline passengers have always had the right to bring a carry-on bag” without separate fees, Schumer fumes. It’s a “slap in the face to travelers” that some airlines now consider charging for carry-on bags, a policy already in place at Spirit Airlines.

Horrors! The ugly spectacle of businessmen acting as if they . . . have the right to run their businesses freely, not merely as lackeys of congressional overseers.

Spirit, which is simultaneously reducing base ticket prices, says airplanes will empty faster if there’s less luggage looming overhead. I don’t like paying the fees, but airlines do have costs. And competition. An airline that kept heaping up fees until it was charging $1,800 per ticket wouldn’t get off the ground. Not if another airline was charging far less for the same journey.

The proper response to terms of trade that one dislikes is to complain to the vendor, take one’s business elsewhere, or both — not to decry any scrap of autonomy as a “loophole” in a regulatory regime not yet exhaustively draconian.

Yes, let airlines charge for carry-ons. And let Schumer take the bus to and from DC. This will give him less time to pursue phony-baloney crusades.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall Tenth Amendment federalism

Wayward States?

While Washington, DC, steps in to take over responsibility for determining just how much and what kind of medical insurance we should buy, the states march, instead, towards personal responsibility, defending a right to self-medication.

More than a dozen states have enacted medical marijuana laws, in defiance of Congress and Executive Branch nannies.

Now, California’s initiative to legalize recreational use of marijuana, or cannabis, has garnered enough signatures to qualify for November’s ballot. Oregon has a measure in the works, too, as do other, less bellwether-worthy states. You can follow the story as it develops on Ballotpedia.org.

California, the state most addicted to politicians (having the highest citizen-to-representative ratio in the union) also has one of the union’s most severely messed-up budgets. Barring cuts, the state needs money. Legalizing and taxing Americans’ favorite weed might help out, some advocates think. No wonder the initiative is popularly known as the “Tax Cannabis Act.”

We’ve heard this story before. The Great Depression allowed the repeal of the 18th Amendment. The Progressive Era’s crowning achievement in social control, the prohibition of alcohol, was seen by the world as weird, and by those who admired the original Constitution of the United States as rubbing against the grain of American liberty.

But it wasn’t freedom advocates who ended Prohibition. It was the separate states seeking revenue from selling booze.

Ah, politics. Nasty when going wrong. Messy when going right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Prisoners of Conscience

The crusade against political dissent under Venezuelan socialism rages on. The latest victim of President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is former presidential candidate Oswaldo Ålvarez Paz. In March, Paz contended that Venezuelan officials had ties with drug traffickers and terrorists. For articulating this conclusion he is charged with “conspiracy” and “spreading false information.”

The president of the Human Rights Foundation, Thor Halvorssen, notes: “Ålvarez Paz said Venezuela was ruled by a ‘totalitarian regime.’ The Chávez government disagreed so strongly with this that they proved him right by arresting him and keeping him imprisoned.”

Guillermo Zuloaga, who owns the independent television network Globovisión, on which Paz uttered his opinion, was also arrested recently for saying things “offensive” to Chávez.

Touchy, touchy, El Presidente.

“If the Venezuelan government can imprison a former presidential candidate and the head of the country’s only independent TV network because their opinions ‘offended’ the president,” asks Javier El-Hage, HRF’s general counsel, “then what options are left for a college student who wants to protest against the government, or an independent journalist wanting to write a critical investigation?”

The Human Rights Foundation is one of many organizations rebuking Chávez’s conduct and calling for the release of persons arrested for what has been called the “crime of opinion.” They will have earned a large share of the credit if Chávez is ever forced to change course — or Venezuela manages to change course by getting rid of Chávez.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Freedom First Aid Kit

After a year-long battle, congressional Democrats have rammed through Obamacare, a massive expansion of government control over the health care industry and a massive assault on the liberties of every doctor, patient, insurance agent, and taxpayer in the country.

But the issue is far from settled. So, let’s use this lull in the news cycle shelling to pass a little ammunition. Herewith, a first-aid kit for medical freedom-lovers in the form of an overview of resources to help us understand and join the coming battle to repeal Obamacare. And to prevent even worse.

We lost a major battle for medical freedom. But the war is only beginning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

No More Woolworths

The New York Times offers summer internships at $900 per week. From what I’ve gathered, most other editorial and journalistic internships don’t pay nearly that much.

Many pay nothing.

So why would anyone work for nothing? Well, for experience.

Thomas Sowell, in his recent book Applied Economics, tells the story of a young man named Frank, who applied for a position in a retail store and got it. When he asked about his wages, his employer said, “Pay you! You don’t expect me to pay you, do you? Why, you should pay me, for teaching you the business!” This, as Sowell notes, seems harsh, exploitative: Three months of hard work without pay.

But Sowell asks “Who benefited most?”

The answer is the young Mr. Frank Winfield Woolworth, who went on to found a retail empire, eventually hiring his old boss, the same man who wouldn’t pay him. But the old man sure did teach Woolworth the business.

Unfortunately, such relationships are illegal. “Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws,” the New York Times relates, “officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers.” The regulators’ campaign against internship programs is now going nationwide.

Bottom line: No more Woolworths.

Sure, the Woolworth chain died long ago. What’s left of the company is called Foot Locker. But I’m talking about future innovators, future Frank Woolworths.

Which makes this crackdown a prime example of a counter-productive policy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

How to Simulate Stimulation

Historians have noticed something interesting about the Great Depression: The bulk of Roosevelt’s New Deal money and effort wasn’t directed at the hardest-hit states. It was directed at swing states.

FDR’s New Deal could thus be seen as a vast re-election drive.

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Mercatus Center, recently testified before Congress about her studies of recent stimulus spending. She noticed that Democratic districts received bigger bucks than did Republican ones. Coincidence?

Nick Gillespie wrote about this on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit and Run. And, nestled in the comments section, is testimony from someone in the federal government about how stimulus money is actually spent. The government does not look for especially hard-hit areas. It looks for prospect projects that have been designed and engineered and ready to be funded to reach completion quickly.

This is useful to know. If believed, I’ll leave to you the explanation why Democratic Districts might be further along this pork-project train than Republican Districts. But it’s worth noting that this method does not really show any targeted expertise on the part of the federal government. It’s just a spend-and-spend-quickly program. Throw out enough dollars and hope something “sticks” . . . to produce real growth.

You see, this is nothing like how markets for capital projects work in the private sphere. And it’s nothing like a good way of jump-starting a wounded market economy.

It’s just government-mismanagement-as-usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Sign of Dissent

Jim Roos has lost — for now. A federal judge says St. Louis may force him to whitewash a sign he painted on a south-side apartment building. The sign says END EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE.

Roos is president of the housing organization that manages the apartment building. He is also president of the Missouri Eminent Domain Abuse Coalition. He painted the mural after he and other property owners began receiving letters advising them that the city was thinking of using eminent domain to grab their property and turn it over to commercial developers.

The city refused to grant a permit for the sign, claiming it clashes with zoning requirements. Perhaps the City of St. Louis just doesn’t appreciate fine art. John Randall, an attorney representing Roos, observed that if the sign had “said something like ‘Go Cardinals’ or ‘We support our troops,’ I doubt that we would be in federal court with this.”

The case is about free speech, but it’s also about property rights. The mural is not vandalism, after all. Why shouldn’t Roos be able not only to keep but also to paint his very own property? Governments would often have you believe that your property belongs to you only contingently and provisionally, not as a matter of right.

Roos says he will appeal, and keep fighting. “If we eventually lose and there are no more appeals we’ll remove the sign. Until that time, however, I think the sign is going to remain.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.