Author: Redactor

Categories
Accountability

My Favorite Fix

California is going bankrupt. Behind its economic trouble lies serious political dysfunction.

What to do?

To hear some Golden State legislators and experts talk, the problem can be blamed squarely on the people and their lawmaking power through the state’s initiative process.

While initiatives like Prop 13 and term limits may bedevil the Sacramento insiders, they remain popular among voting Californians. Voters don’t see handing over all power to the politicians as a magic solution.

Others suggest California is so ungovernable that it should be split into two, a North and a South California. Why? To make the insolvent state start completely anew. And to reduce the massive scale of decision-making in what is by far our country’s most populous state.

I have a better solution, which more and more folks from across the political spectrum seem to be considering. I suggest doubling the size of California’s legislature. Or tripling. Or more.

California’s legislative districts are huge, dwarfing those in other states. The ratio of voters to Assembly reps is 455,000 to one. The ratio of state senators to constituents is 900,000 to one.

The balance of interests between citizens and their representatives is all out of whack. When constituencies grow too large, politicians feel answerable to no one.

Smaller districts give voters more relative power — and legislators relatively less. Now that sounds like the right track.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

A Doc Drops Out

Doctor Alan Dappen wasn’t going to take it any more. So he got out.

Eight years ago, he decided that his office would no longer accept Medicare payments. Why? As he tells his patients, “We can’t afford to.” Medicare won’t pay for consultations by phone or email, won’t cover the full cost of a house call, and “barely pays for an office visit.”

Then there’s the regulatory burden. Dappen can’t understand a lot of the regulations. Further, as far as he can tell the folks enforcing them don’t understand many of them either. Yet the bureaucrats can audit a doctor’s paperwork and impose huge fines based on these unclear regs.

Medicare-mired physicians would be more effective if only they didn’t have to worry about complying with arbitrary regulatory dictates all the time. These rules make it harder for doctors to do their jobs. So Dr. Dappen took the risky but more satisfying path of operating in an unhampered market. And, of course, he invited his patients to join him.

Today, in the name of mandatory universal health coverage, the Obama administration wants even more restrictions on medical freedom. Shouldn’t we consider the consequences on the decision-making ability of doctors and patients of current coercive micromanagement when assessing the viability of yet newer coercive schemes?

Dr. Dappen figures he is better off with freedom. You and I are too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

Keep Up the Pressure

David Schlegel of Auburn, New York, has a problem. The New York state legislature is filled with typical entrenched lawmakers. And for some strange reason, these glued-to-their-seats solons are sullenly hostile toward certain reasonable public-spirited requests from constituents who are not deep-pocketed lobbyists.

Three months ago, Mr. Schlegel urged fellow Empire State citizens to contact their state representatives and demand the right to initiative and referendum. Citizens in about half the states of the union can pass statewide initiatives to end-run the legislature when the legislature fails them. And if any state legislature could serve as poster boy for chronic legislative failure, it is the notoriously rapacious and dysfunctional New York state legislature.

Schlegel made his own appeal to his state senator and assemblyman on the subject of initiative rights. And in response — I hope you’re sitting down — he heard absolutely nothing! He got no reply at all, not even the standard boilerplate letter thanking constituents for writing.

So now what? Schlegel says he still urges “all concerned citizens of this state to write their representatives and voice their opinions regarding the ongoing dysfunctional government of New York.” Because doing something is better than doing nothing, better than meekly assenting to the madness.

The man’s got a point. Keep up the pressure. We’re supposed to be the government, even in New York.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights responsibility

Downwind in New London

It is at its worst at night, when the wind lets up and the fog is low.

“It” is the stench from the sewage treatment plant in New London, Connecticut.

Citizens have been complaining for some time. It’s not exactly a new problem.

And the whole issue suggests, to me, that the government of New London, which is ultimately responsible for the sewage treatment system, should have been paying closer attention to this basic — most basic, most very, very basic — service.

It is not as if the city of New London hasn’t spent millions on its sewage system. It’s just that the money has been ineffective. Especially on weekends, or nights, when the smell is worse.

There’s a pattern here. New London condemned Fort Trumbull neighborhood homes to give to the New London Development Corp. The city was sued by one of the owners, Suzette Kelo, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The city won. The homes — including Ms. Kelo’s — were paid for at government-determined rates, the area razed.

And yet Pfizer has not moved in. The whole area remains flat.

And stinky.

It turns out that Fort Trumbull neighborhood home-owners had been complaining about the stench before the whole Kelo cased blew up.

We’ve been saying there’s something rotten in New London for a long time. We just didn’t know how literally correct we were.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights initiative, referendum, and recall

Who Is John Lilburne?

Now that Citizens in Charge Foundation has given the John Lilburne Award to ten defenders of petition rights — most recently, to Oregon State Senator Vicki Walker — it seems time to talk to friends of Common Sense about the award and about Mr. Lilburne.

I founded Citizens in Charge Foundation to help put citizens in control of their own government. Voting for elected officials is one important means of doing that. But it’s not enough to prevent career politicians from ganging up on us and often ruthlessly stomping our liberties. We need ways to produce a better political result when politicians stonewall. That’s why Citizens in Charge Foundation promotes the right of initiative and referendum.

John Lilburne was a 17th-century political activist who pioneered the use of petitioning and referendums to redress governmental abuse of power. He was a leader of a radical democratic movement called the Levelers during the time of the English Civil War. He advocated religious liberty, wider suffrage, and equality before the law.

Critics saw Lilburne and his allies as trying to bring everybody down to the same level. Hence the label Levelers, intended to be pejorative. I view Lilburne as trying to bring everybody up to the same level — of democratic rights.

Each month, the Citizens in Charge Foundation gives the John Lilburne Award to a person who is particularly praiseworthy in pursuing the same goal.

So here’s to John Lilburne — a champion of the rights of everyday citizens.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Carson City Cakewalk?

It’s a heady time in Nevada. Next year’s election will be the first in which sitting legislators will be ousted under the state’s legislative term limits.

Politicians have begun to think hard about this. Quite a few lower-house reps have set their sights on the state Senate. Well, by “quite a few” I mean “nearly a dozen,” which is how David McGrath Schwartz of the Las Vegas Sun puts it. He also reports that “at least one senator forced out by term limits is seriously considering running for a seat in the Assembly.”

Is this news? Well, it was printed in a newspaper. But it’s hardly earth-shattering.

Yet, in that paper, it was made to seem earth-shattering. Schwartz led with this: “Nevada voters who passed term limits in the 1990s might have imagined it would bring a clean sweep of veteran politicians from office. What they’re likely to get will instead look more like musical chairs.”

Really? Musical chairs?

As analogies for elections in term-limited legislatures go, this falls a bit short. It implies that nearly all legislators will scramble for nearby seats. So far we have less than 13 out of 63.

And it forgets the voters. Who decide. When politicians “hear the music,” the music is played by voters.

Oh, and by the way: Switching chairs — competing for a new position — is one of the reasons for term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets U.S. Constitution

Fighting for a Fair Shake

Ben Vargas wasn’t trying to be the odd man out when he chose to fight for what was right. That’s just how it happened. And he got clobbered for it.

Several years ago, Lieutenant Vargas was the only Hispanic among eighteen mostly white plaintiffs in a reverse discrimination case, Ricci v. DeStefano, just decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2003, 56 members of a New Haven, Connecticut, fire department passed a test for promotion. Fifteen of them were black or Hispanic. When city officials learned that only two of the 15 would be immediately eligible for promotion based on those scores, they threw out the results.

New Haven officials didn’t initially claim the test was unfair. They admitted fearing a lawsuit. But one should think twice — thrice, a thousand times — about acting unjustly in hopes of heading off injustice by others.

After Vargas — one of the two minority test-takers who scored very well — joined a lawsuit against the city, he was shunned by many colleagues. Once even got punched in the face. But he tells the New York Times he has no regrets, considering the kind of world he wants his children to grow up in.

Ben Vargas says, “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota.”

Funny, isn’t that what good parents, of all races and ethnicities, want for their children?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Thou Shalt Not Mess Up Health Care

Last year, in Arizona, a narrow defeat for Proposition 101, the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Initiative, didn’t leave its core ideas dead, or even zombie-like.

The measure’s defeat by a mere 8,111 votes didn’t seem insurmountable. After all, opponents of the measure had made hysterical claims against it, and the thinking among supporters quickly became: A little more education.

A few weeks ago, the Arizona legislature repackaged the measure’s basic ideas as the Arizona Health Insurance Reform Amendment and set it for a vote of the people next November.

The new measure accommodates some worries and criticism of the previous measure. But the core message remains. The first plank states that “a law or rule shall not compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer or health care provider to participate in any health care system.”

The second plank says that no one shall be fined for paying — or accepting payments — for otherwise lawful health care services.

There are a lot of politicians out there, right now, who insist that “fixing health care” means “increasing government,” including pushing and shoving people into plans, or regulating the manner of payments so to encourage the use of government plans.

If this Arizona measure passes, or similar measures in other states do, a new idea will enter the national health care debate: Freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption local leaders

As Corrupt as the Feds

We are so shocked by the skyrocketing spending and taxes at the federal level — and by mammoth expansion of government control of our lives being attempted at the federal level — and by the nonstop huffing hubris of federally fumbling politicians eager to solve problems caused by past policy errors by repeating and multiplying and magnifying those errors.

So flummoxed by the insanity in DC, that, well, I fear we give short shrift to state- and local-level insanity.

Yet there is more than enough lunacy to go around. And not just in the Northeast or California. For example, also in Wisconsin.

Just like the national players, Wisconsin lawmakers doubtless wish that their maleficent missteps could be perpetrated under cover of fog. Too bad for them that the MacIver Institute for Public Policy is on the case, providing detailed and often instant updates on every sordid twist and turn of the state’s budget process.

Bad-faith secret dealing, back-room scheming. Hectic hikes in income, capital gains, property, cigarette and phone taxes — just to make sure bad economic times grow worse. Huge new government debt, despite Wisconsin’s balanced budget requirement. And on and on.

Thanks to the diligent efforts of the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, though, Wisconsin politicians are getting the credit they deserve. Their conduct is just as crummy as that of the big boys in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Banana Republic of New York

On June 8, New York state senate Republicans and two renegade Democrats acted to regain GOP control of the chamber.

Democrats tried various maneuvers to undo the coup. One was to lock the doors of the senate building.

Governor David Paterson bravely called the GOP’s re-ascendancy an “unnecessary distraction to government dressed up in the cloak, falsely, of reform.” One supposedly bogus reform would have imposed an eight-year term limit on committee chairman, a six-year term limit on leadership.

Anyway, then one of the Democrats who had jumped ship to the elephant caucus decided to canter back to the donkey side of the aisle. So now there’s a 31-to-31 split in the senate, with no lieutenant governor in place to break any deadlocks. Paterson used to be the lieutenant governor but became governor when the previous governor resigned in disgrace after scandalizing the republic across state lines.

So, now, whenever the lawmakers bother to show up for work, the Democrats hold their own legislative session independently of the independent legislative sessions of the Republicans. No quorums there. Believe it or not, all this is an improvement over how things are normally run in Albany.

Meanwhile, recent polls say two thirds of New York voters think the state is headed in the wrong direction. And 80 percent want term limits. Huh? How can this be?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.