Author: Redactor

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.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

You Go, Google

A few weeks back I asked what was going on with Google’s pledge to stop helping the Chinese government censor search results for sensitive topics like Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square. Google was presumably using its threat of withdrawal from the Chinese market as a negotiating chip to wrest privileged status from the Chinese authorities.

But the hope was naive. It was unlikely in the extreme that China would give up its program of censoring mainland culture and especially politics. It wants to control the dialogue and thwart political dissent. So I told Google, “Google, ya gotta go. Stop enabling Chinese censorship. Do as you promised and provide a desperately needed and inspiring example of refusing any longer to cooperate with tyranny.”

I feared Google would retreat from its public commitment. But now Google agrees that for the Chinese government, “self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.” So Google is redirecting Chinese users of its search engine (Google.cn) to its Hong Kong search engine (Google.com.hk), where results are not currently censored because of the “one country, two systems” policy that has been at least roughly followed since China took over Hong Kong in 1997.

Whether citizens on the mainland will be able to get uncensored search results from the Hong Kong Google search engine is an open question at best. But any censorship of those results will now be perpetrated by China without Google’s active cooperation. Good for Google.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights local leaders

Intimidation in Southborough

We have free speech in America. Guaranteed by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. But a First Amendment guarantee doesn’t make freedom a certainty. It’s not as if we don’t have to stand up for our rights.

But stand up to whom?

Usually, threats to free speech come from government . . . most recently, the government of the town of Southborough, Massachusetts.

The blog MySouthborough.com, run by Susan Fitzgerald, is devoted to her town, providing a platform for residents to speak out and get heard.

And there’s the rub. Sometimes people in government don’t like criticism.

Fitzgerald’s website irked local head honchos last autumn. Someone calling himself (or herself) “Marty” had commented, online, about how the town’s Police Chief Selection Committee was meeting behind closed doors. Marty suggested that committee members were breaking the state’s open meeting requirements, and insinuated that the whole process was prejudiced in favor of one particular applicant.

Sounds fairly innocuous? Not to the town’s counsel, who demanded to know “Marty’s” actual name.

Fitzgerald wouldn’t give it to him, free speech and all. The lawyer blustered about how Marty was intimidating the selection panel. A laughable claim. A blog comment is intimidation?

And then the counsel warned her — intimidating her — to watch more carefully what’s posted on her blog.

Fitzgerald remains firm. And she defends anonymous contributors. “Choosing anonymity doesn’t make their opinion any less valid,” she states.

Or any less protected.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Sometimes a Great Prediction

Five years ago, I compared Social Security to the Titanic. Insolvency played the part of fatal iceberg. On Monday I noted that the first stage of insolvency —  projected back then to take place in 2017 — has been refigured to arrive early. This year.

So much for our leaders’ plan of “not putting off till tomorrow what can be put off a decade.” Decades sure aren’t what they used to be.

Neither are the budget numbers politicians throw around. Take the Democrats’ just-passed medical reform package. Do you really believe it will save us money?

Who’s right depends on the reliability of the reform package’s cost projections. And, from what I can tell, those projections are filled with trickery.

A typical sleight of hand is to project ten years in advance, and extoll how that decade’s first years don’t add much burden to the taxpayer. But that’s only because chunks of the programs stagger into effect over the first half of the decade.

But before you go poring over the bill’s two thousand and more pages, checking the  numbers, ask yourself: When have government economists correctly predicted costs of a major new entitlement?

Never.

Take Medicare. Initial projections for catastrophic coverage were half of the real amount; Medicare as a whole grew nine times over its promised size; and the costs of Medicare’s Disproportionate Share Hospital Adjustment program proved 17 times higher than originally predicted.

Congress is in the business of making bad law, not good prophecy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.