Author: Redactor

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.

Categories
term limits

Scientist Discovers Fire

A puzzled professor at Rice University, who also sits on a commission investigating whether term limits should be scuttled, offers evidence that people like term limits. Moreover, it seems people are especially prone to like them during times when the career politicians have gone out of their way to destroy the economy and all things wonderful and beautiful.

The popularity of term limits is old news. Term limit measures pass every time voters get a chance to vote for them. Many people who blog and write letters to the editor and attend Tea Party rallies regularly demand term limits — even as pols and pundits regularly announce, in tones of increasing desperation, that the term limits movement has expired already, and anyway we-already-have-term-limits-they’re-called-elections.

Bob Stein’s research pertains to Houston. His 1998 survey of registered voters showed 22 percent of respondents supporting city term limits “very strongly.” By 2009, 41 percent supported term limits “very strongly.” The number who opposed term limits “very strongly” rose from only 7 percent to 12.

The Houston Chronicle also reports that in a 2002 article, the professor observed that Americans support term limits “for elected officials at all levels of government.” But he professed not to understand the reason for this enthusiasm.

Somehow it doesn’t occur to the professor that Americans don’t want to be ruled by an entrenched, unmoving, heedless oligarchy that represents only itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture

“Representatives” Who Avoid Voters

Here’s a surprise. Congressional Democrats who faced angry voters in town halls last summer have scrupulously skipped the pleasure during more recent visits home.

The New York Times suggests that although the open town-hall style political meeting may not be quite dead yet, it’s “teetering closer to extinction,” inasmuch as only a few of 255 House Democrats held such meetings during a recent week-long recess. Instead they arranged invitation-only, scripted meetings with that portion of the electorate who believe that super-sizing the nanny state and burying the country in an Everest of debt are the best things that could ever have happened to us.

These congressmen evade communicating with unhappy constituents to “avoid rage.” And to prevent video clips of their fatuous non-answers to highly pertinent questions about mega-billion-dollar bailouts and pork barrel projects and socialized health care, etc., from showing up on YouTube.

One politician explains that town hall attendees last summer didn’t want to “get answers” so much as pursue a political agenda. I can’t help but remember the YouTube video in which a congresswoman “leading” a town hall forum seemed more interested in her cell phone than in a constituent’s explanation of why she didn’t want a government solution to medicine’s current institutional problems. Anyway, who really expects to escape “political agendas” at political forums convened to discuss politics?

Hopefully, the brilliant campaign strategy of ignoring voters and their legitimate concerns won’t pay off on election day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture

Facebook’s Secret Shame

Facebook has had some bad press lately.

The popular social networking site got in trouble in recent months for the ever-more-cavalier way it treats users’ privacy. People complain that their data has been unilaterally exposed in ways they never expected when they first signed up for the service, and that privacy settings have devolved into a confusing, hard-to-tweak labyrinth.

Facebook seems to be adjusting its privacy practices in response to the bad publicity. But there’s another lamentable Facebook practice that has, unfortunately, received less sustained attention: Its willingness to shut down a user’s Facebook page solely because somebody else is offended by the viewpoint expressed on that page.

The “somebody else,” in the case I’m referring to, is the government of Pakistan, which banned Facebook because of a page encouraging people to display images of the prophet Muhammad in protest of threats of violence against the show South Park, which had made fun of making threats against people who display images of Muhammad.

“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” gloated Najibullah Malik, who represents Pakistan’s Orwellian “information technology ministry.”

It’s dangerous to cave in to demands for censorship. The folks at Facebook were faced with the loss of a large market, but they should have let the anti-censorship page remain published and let Facebook users in Pakistan pressure their government to lift the ban.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights media and media people too much government

Liberty and Licenses

Oh, no. We’re being drowned — in alternatives.

Remember the good old days, with three choices for national broadcast news, Walter Cronkite and whoever the other guys were? Plus the local paper and the New York Times? Sure, there were other avenues. But if the big boys happened to have a unitary government-approved perspective on something, you could battle uphill for years with hardly anyone noticing your particular flag.

Then cable arrived. The Internet. Zillions of webzines and blogs. If you want an alternative to whatever the Official View is, you don’t have to look very far or for very long. It’s harder for the powers that be to burble baloney unchallenged.

Big, big problem, all this competition, right?

It is according to Michigan State Senator Bruce Patterson. He wants to license journalists the way Michigan licenses plumbers and hair dressers.

From what I can tell, the state can’t be trusted with protecting us from bad hair cuts, let alone tell us who’s best suited to toot out the news. But Patterson says we’re being overwhelmed by all the media outlets. Poor us! So we need guvmint — which always puts the truth first, of course — to tell us good reporting from bad.

Think about this: The traditional job of journalism is to provide a check on lying politicians. Now politicians will vet those who get the privilege to criticize them?

Puh-leeze.

Patterson, we’ll take a pass.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The New Hollywood Blacklist

Hollywood folks often boast about their tolerance and liberality. Maybe they should look up those words.

Our national myth-makers especially like to go over the horrors of the McCarthy “Blacklist” period, when the power of government nudged studio owners to blacklist writers and actors and directors who were (or were associated with) Communists.

Almost no one likes blacklists. Indeed, the McCarthy period censorship did much to harm the anti-communist movement.

But don’t look for such subtleties of judgment from Hollywood today. After all, there is a working blacklist right now.

This time, though, there’s no pressure from Congress or regular Americans for this form of censorship. Hollywood players serve as their own censors, maintaining their blacklist by shunning those they don’t agree with politically.

Take the case of J. Neil Schulman. He was an up-and-coming writer in the ’80s. The people at L.A. Law really liked his proposals. But he had the gall to write an op-ed they didn’t approve of, favoring the right to gun ownership, so the L.A. Law folks dropped him like a hot potato, and spread the word. “Too right-wing,” they said.

Dan Gifford tells the tale on Big Hollywood. It’s an interesting story. You can see why the new blacklist is more effective than the old: It’s tacit, hush-hush. There are no hearings, interviews, what-have-you. But the effect is pretty much the same as the McCarthy Era blacklist: Chilling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.