Author: Redactor

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

A Fearsome, Fiery Cliché

Senator Chuck Schumer insists that it would be the height of irresponsibility either to freeze the federal government’s debt ceiling or “shut down the government.” Either action would risk “the credit markets losing some confidence in the United States Treasury” — tantamount to “Playing with fire.”

The opposite of his point appears closer to the truth.  Michael Tanner explains that “If the debt ceiling is not increased, the Treasury can prioritize interest and debt payment to avoid a default and essentially put the government on a stringent pay-as-you-go basis.” Economist Robert Murphy adds that “even if the debt ceiling weren’t increased, the Treasury could still roll over its debt as existing bonds matured. The only thing the Treasury couldn’t do would be to issue more debt.”

The truth behind Schumer’s clichéd metaphor is this: He and his cronies have been “playing with fire” for a long time. And it’s worth noting that forcing the Treasury to switch to pay-as-you-go would likely have the opposite effect on credit markets than he contends: When prodigal spenders cut up their credit cards and continue to pay existing bills, creditors tend to breathe a little easier.

But expect no such acumen from Schumer, who, in that same exhortation, lists the “three branches of government”: The House, the Senate, and the president. Apparently, he hopes to gain authority for his contentions by piling factual error upon cliché.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies too much government

The Kill Switch for Freedom

The Egyptian government — or perhaps a mysterious inter-dimensional vortex, we’re not sure which — has shut down some 99 percent of the Internet within Egypt as protests mount demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down. Mubarak has ruled autocratically for three decades and the protesters are fed up. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other cyber-tools have played a part in their protest, helping them document Egyptians’ clashes with authorities in word and image.

Declan McCullough, a veteran reporter on privacy and the Internet, observes that the Egyptian government is “conducting a high-profile experiment in what happens when a country with a $500 billion GDP, one that’s home to the pyramids and the Suez Canal, decides that Internet access should be restricted to a trickle.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, U.S. pols like Senator Joseph Lieberman are again pushing a bill to give the president authority to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” in the event of a crisis and shut down major portions of the Internet. For our own good, of course. No judicial review would be necessary before the executive branch could snap the cyber-spine.

Perhaps American politicians who advocate letting the president throw a so-called kill switch for the Internet in case of emergency would deny any tyrannical intentions. And perhaps their motives are indeed pure . . . in some aesthetic sense. But once you give government new authority to exercise destructive control over us, there is, of course, the temptation to use it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
porkbarrel politics

Monuments to Megalomania

Some reform proposals are so modest they have scant hope of passing. Why? Because the people who pass the bills are so immodest.

Congressional egos would be severely bruised if Representative Michael McCaul’s proposal were enacted. His bill would prohibit lawmakers from erecting monuments to themselves glorifying the fact that they have dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to the erecting of monuments to themselves.

McCaul says that these “monuments to me” are emblems of arrogance and “contribute to both political corruption and excessive spending.” Such contributions are prolific.

Remember Senator Robert C. Byrd (1917-2010), “serving” in Washington for more than half a century? Well, the construction industry in West Virginia sure does. Wikipedia devotes an entire entry just to listing the buildings and transportation and other projects named after the self-aggrandizing Senator Byrd. He was always eager to lug as much pork to his state as he could, and most of it is stamped with his immortal cognomen. There’s even a Robert C. Byrd highway to nowhere. A Wall Street Journal article by William McGurn gives a laundry list of other sites named after congressmen alive and in office when their names got slapped on.

The ban should be enacted. Even if this reform is small and symbolic, the abuse it addresses is real. And McCaul wants to know: “If we can’t do the little, obvious things, how are the people going to trust us on the big ones?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Tyrants Are Not Our Friends

Last month, an upset apple cart led to political revolution.

On December 17, Tunisian government agents tried to confiscate Mohamed Bouazizi’s livelihood. When he refused to hand over his produce, he was slapped by a female inspector and then beaten by two of her colleagues, who took his scale. When he went to the municipal building to get his property back, he was beaten again.

Later that day in the public square, Bouazizi doused himself with lighter fluid and set himself on fire. He died weeks later, but not before demonstrations erupted in his home town and spread throughout Tunisia.

Tunisians had long labored under the repressive dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who repressed both political speech and commerce. No longer. He’s been ousted.

So do our leaders celebrate with the Tunisian people? No. The New York Times reports that Ben Ali was “an important ally of the United States.” He’s now in exile in Saudi Arabia, another dictatorship allied with the United States.

Protest has spread further, most notably to Egypt, yet another repressive government supported by America’s State Department . . . and taxpayers.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassures us that, “the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

That response? To imprison and torture bloggers and opposition political leaders.

Our most effective aid to Africa would be to stop subsidizing repressive regimes and pretending that slavery is freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

The Kid With the Illegal Magic Marker

Want to be marked for life? Be a student in DeLynn Woodside’s math class at Roosevelt Middle High in Oklahoma City, where last month a 13-year-old boy fell prey to another exercise of unenlightened zero-tolerance-for-common-sense policies.

The child’s high crime was using a magic marker in school, a no-no in light of the school’s graffiti problem. The police report documents his “possession of a permanent marker on private property,” which is illegal. According to Ms. Woodside, the boy was “writing on a piece of paper, which caused it to bleed over onto the desk.” When she asked for the marker, he tried to hide it.

A problem? Perhaps. But if so, a minor one. She could have dealt with it by explaining that markers are not allowed in school and by asking him to put the marker away and not bring it back to school. Instead, at the teacher’s behest the child was arrested and taken to a certain Community Intervention Center, a holding facility for juvenile offenders. A sergeant “booked the marker into the property room.”

Stories like these seem like real knee-slappers until you realize the outsized inanity displayed is probably not so funny for the kids being dragged downtown and booked.

Legislators, teachers, police — nobody who enables, sanctions or participates in such episodes — deserve any laurels. Treating kids as criminals for the most trivial violations of the rules, even rules that make sense, is itself criminal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government U.S. Constitution

Not His Job

President Obama will address the State of the Union, today, speaking before Congress. These annual efforts are almost uniformly unbearable, with too much applause and too much rah-rah-boy politicking. And far too little thought.

Scuttlebutt has it that the president will concentrate on the economy, on “jobs.”

After the sea change of the last election, one might hope that he’d stay on topic and address constitutionally-mandated issues of his office.

“Jobs” are none of his business. “Jobs” — by which I mean the number of people employed this way or that out there in the non-governmental sector, and by which he means the number of jobs total, including those paid for out of taxpayer expense — should not be his chief worry.

No president in recent memory has excelled by fiddling with policy to micromanage “the economy.” No one knows this stuff. Not even college professors specializing in macroeconomics.

What government operatives know is how to get elected, stay in office. How to preen for television cameras, read a prompter.

You know, the essentials.

But they cannot possibly know enough to “run the economy.”

And yet, Obama talks about making the country “more competitive.” Oh, come on. Just open up trade — which promotes widespread co-operation as well as competition — stop micromanaging the money supply through the Fed, make regulations fit a rule of law and not a vast bureaucratic command system, and let it go. Let individuals and businesses worry about “competiveness.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

Will Vote for Work – $5

Richard Milhous Nixon once famously proclaimed, “I am not a crook.” He later became the only president to resign from office.

The recall of Omaha, Nebraska, Mayor Jim Suttle brings that famous quip to mind. Many of the mayor’s defenders argue he shouldn’t be recalled because he hasn’t broken any laws. At a debate last week, restaurateur Nicole Jesse, co-chair of the recall committee, explained, “Omahans deserve and expect more than just, ‘He’s not a criminal.’”

She charged that the mayor had “promised to lower property taxes,” but “he’s increased them twice. He told the Omaha Bar and Restaurant Association he would not impose a new tax. He turned around and did just that.”

Dave Nabity, head of Citizens for Omaha’s Future, says that the mayor’s character — or lack thereof — is the critical issue. He has criticized the mayor and his campaign organization for making false allegations of fraud against the recall effort (as I discussed weeks ago), and can now point to a newly launched police investigation into the mayor’s anti-recall group, Forward Omaha, for fraudulent activity. The group allegedly drove busloads of homeless people to the polls after paying them $5 for “training” for a possible future job.

Mayor Suttle originally argued that the group’s actions were totally innocent and appropriate, but quickly changed his tune, issuing a statement that read, “The Mayor does not support this or any other type of voter manipulation.”

The recall election is tomorrow.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

What Gets Lost in Washington

The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates.

It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-course race . . . as I argued yesterday.

Meanwhile, how the anti-Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too.

Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Though “job-killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-through plan.

Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.

Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.

Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it.

That common-sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Ratchet Still Holds

Government grows by a ratchet effect.

When Democrats gained unified control over Congress and the Executive Branch in 2009 they understandably moved to increase the size and scope of government, rather than, say, swiftly follow through with President Obama’s various promises to withdraw from foreign interventions. Adding new stuff? More politic.

Thus the legislation called (by opponents) “Obamacare.”

Democrats hoped that the wide number of people who would bear the initial costs would soon forget about them (the reform is already causing substantial increases in private insurance rates) while the smaller group of people who make obvious gains in services would solidly rank behind the reforms.

A slight miscalculation. Americans reacted against Obamacare immediately, and gave control of the House back to the Republicans.

Who, yesterday, voted to repeal Obamacare.

But since Democrats control the Senate, the bill will die there. If by some miracle it passed, the president will veto.

In the ratchet they trust.

Hoping dispersed costs will eventually be lost sight of, and feeling certain that the concentrated effects will indeed nurture a voting bloc, progressive Democrats see a bright future for ever-expanding government incursion into medicine. As with most government encroachments, if it doesn’t work as advertised, more intrusiveness will be the next proposal for “reform.”

So far Democrats have plied their obvious advantage, reducing the repeal effort to symbolic action. Let’s hope Republicans can muster something more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
local leaders national politics & policies

Persistence, Thy Name Is Eyman

Eyman

We haven’t had enough Tim Eyman.

I try to rotate the subjects of these Common Sense efforts, moving from freedom to democracy and back again, covering local and state issues as well as national and international ones.

But certain topics make regular returns. Like Tim Eyman. In Washington State, he’s evergreen.

He’s the citizen initiative guy. He keeps plugging away, writing initiatives, working to put them on the ballot, defending them against all comers.

His recurring theme? Lower taxes.

He recently filed an initiative to require a two-thirds majority in the Evergreen State’s legislature to raise taxes.

He’s done it before. And Washington State citizens have voted this in, before. Four times.

Trouble is, the legislature can repeal any state initiative two years after enactment, by simple majority. Within the first two years, it takes a two thirds super-majority.

So Eyman is back on the horse, whip in hand, and says he’ll keep putting these initiatives before the voters. As many times as it takes.

He’s working on the current effort in case the legislature takes down the recently enacted I-1053, like they did the three previous citizen-enacted laws. If lawmakers don’t overturn this, he’ll wait until 2012 to reintroduce it. And he’ll keep this up until legislators at last understand: Citizens don’t have unlimited resources. Taxes come at a cost. Spending less is always an option.

You can’t keep a good man (or the voters) down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.