Author: Redactor

Categories
property rights U.S. Constitution

Not Robbed Until Proven Guilty

You are “innocent until proven guilty” in America, with one big exception: Under civil forfeiture laws, police don’t have to prove that a crime has actually been committed in order to seize your property. And once your boat or car is stolen by your government, the burden falls to you to prove your stuff is innocent.

Police departments are getting rich from the loot they seize from folks never convicted of a crime. As the Institute for Justice argues, civil forfeiture laws provide an ugly incentive for police “to enforce the laws in ways designed to maximize forfeiture income rather than to minimize crime.”

Now a challenge has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Alvarez v. Smith concerns six people whose property was seized by Chicago police, though three of them were never charged with a crime.

The Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute, the ACLU and the Reason Foundation have filed amicus briefs arguing that due process was denied.

In favor of more free-wheeling civil forfeiture are a number of state governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other groups representing government entities that spend the proceeds from the seized loot.

During oral arguments, Judge Sonia Sotomayor asked the pertinent question, “You take the car and then you investigate?”

Backwards justice is no justice at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Dysfunctional Judgment

The Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court recently declared the state’s government “dysfunctional.”

But Judge Ronald George didn’t bother to tell this to his employers, the people of California. Instead, the judge delivered his speech all the way across the continent, in Massachusetts, at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judge George specifically blames Golden State voters as chief culprits in California’s severe budget woes. While admitting that legislators lack the “political will” to make the tough spending cuts or tax hikes that he believes necessary, George nonetheless says there may have to be “some fundamental reform of the voter Initiative process.”

What the judge doesn’t tell his earnest East Coast audience is that less than 10 percent of amendments to the California constitution come through initiatives.

The voters, he claims, are over-influenced by special interests. But he neglects to mention that the much-loved, much-hated tax-cutting Proposition 13 — and Prop 140, the measure placing term limits on legislators — were both heavily outspent by the state’s most powerful lobbies. Both nevertheless prevailed at the ballot box.

Lastly, his Honor bellyaches that he and fellow jurists are “called upon to resolve legal challenges to voter Initiatives” and sometimes “incur the displeasure of the voting public.”

My heart bleeds for them, of course, but isn’t adjudicating disputes sort of expected of judges?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Enemies Lists

Courtesy of the Obama administration, we’re experiencing more and more Nixonian moments.

Take medical reform. The health insurers started out in Obama’s camp. But a shuffling of policies and a few insurance companies began making obvious points about how this or that feature would raise costs, not decrease them.

And the Obama administration struck back.

I’ve talked about the Humana gag order, how our bureaucrats in Washington decided to tell insurance companies to shut up about reform proposals. Congress gagged the gaggers.

Then a health insurance association released a study suggesting that the cost of insurance would likely go up under legislation being proposed in Congress. The president retaliated by threatening to take away the industries’ immunity from anti-trust laws.

What? An important policy change, and the president threatens it not to achieve a better outcome, or for constitutional reasons, but merely to punish and thereby silence opposition to his policies? How petty. How dangerous.

On the floor of the Senate, Lamar Alexander advised the Obama administration to play a little less hardball. Alexander warned that by creating an “enemies list,” including people in the media, the White House is heading into Nixon territory.

“An enemies list only denigrates the presidency, and the republic itself.” An old Nixon aide, Senator Alexander should know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Robbing Words of Meaning?

Words change over time, in meaning as well as sound. Since much of this comes from misuse, ignorance, laziness, and even wordplay, the more you know and the less fun-loving you are, the more a scold about words you will likely be.

Over the long run, though, for each loss in meaning we gain another. Might as well live with it.

In any case, the history of words can be fascinating. For example, did you know that “rob” and “robe” have the same ancestor?

Rob means to steal by force; robe means a loose flowing garment. Both hail from the same Old High German word, which I won’t try to pronounce. “Robe” comes close to the original meaning, of “clothes.” The original became synonymous with “stealing by force” because, in times long past, one of the most common items to grab from another was clothing. When one was robbed, one often had to disrobe. It was your robes you were being robbed of. Clothes were that valuable.

No wonder, then, when clothing was a robber’s favored booty, to become poor meant utter destitution. The destitute often wandered around with nary a scrap on them.

Not only have words changed, times have, too.

When next I catch a word in painful transition, I’ll remind myself that it’s more like a peaceful clothing change than a robbery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Money, Money, Money

Money. Politicians like to spend it. People — especially special interests — like to get it. And taxpayers really don’t much like having to pay for all that spending.

So our representatives try to procrastinate their balancing of spending and revenue. How? With debt. Hence our yearly unbalanced budgets.

At the federal level, deficits soar. Many states, however, have constitutional spending limitations and balanced budget requirements. What difference do such limits make?

Well, Professor Barry Poulson, of the Independence Institute, points out that a few years before Colorado passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR), limiting state spending growth to the increase in population plus inflation, California’s legislature was abandoning the GANN Amendment, a similar limit.

Says Poulson, “Over the period since TABOR was passed, Colorado has experienced one of the highest rates of economic growth in the nation, while California has experienced retardation in economic growth.”

Two states — Maine and Washington — have initiatives on their ballot this November that are very similar to Colorado’s TABOR. The special interest opponents to these measures, most notably government employee unions, have raised millions more than supporters. Soon voters will be pummeled with ads claiming that the sky will fall if there is any limit on state spending growth.

Of course, the fiscal sky has already fallen. Voters should support these measures as the best way to pick up the pieces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Visible Taxes, Invisible Support

There’s a lot of talk about the Value Added Tax and its various sister excises, like the Retail Sales Tax and the GST, or Goods and Services Tax. A lot of countries have one or more of these. They raise a lot of revenue, but require mounds of record-keeping and can quickly become oppressive.

Economist David Henderson recently noted the strange fortunes of Canada’s GST. When it was imposed, it cost the party that sponsored it — the so-called “Progressive Conservative” party — nearly everything. Canadians so loathed the tax that they punished the PCs by throwing them out of office — way out: Their representation in Parliament went from 295 seats to two.

Some repudiation, eh?

Henderson wryly notes that the Liberal Party, which picked up majority support, did not abolish the tax as promised. Are you shocked?

Nearly everyone feels the GST, nearly everyone pays it. One reason to support such a visible tax, Henderson says, “rather than less-visible taxes is so that voters have a feel for the magnitude of the tax. But precisely because that’s true, they’ll punish the party that imposes it.”

Hey politicians — I have a better idea. Get rid of some less-than-visible spending. It would hurt the parties a lot less. And it really would solve the tight budget problem, making the need for a visible tax vanish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

A Friend in Pennsylvania

“Slow, corrupt and expensive is no way to run a state government.” That’s what Pittsburgh Post Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill wrote recently about the Pennsylvania Legislature.

The state budget remains unset three months past deadline. O’Neill bemoaned that for the seventh consecutive year “America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature has been unable to perform its principal task on time.”

What a mess! What to do?

O’Neill suggests cutting the 253-member legislature down to 201. He points out that this 20 percent cut would translate to savings of $60 million dollars or more a year.

Sounds good: Fewer politicians, less cost. But reducing the number of legislators won’t solve the problem. It may make it worse.

A Pennsylvania senator represents 250,000 citizens, a representative only 61,000. Compare that to California, where a state senator represents more than 900,000 people and a representative 460,000. And California’s budget is a bigger mess.

The math is simple: A single citizen’s voice is more pronounced to a Pennsylvania state legislator. The cost to challenge an incumbent is far less, there, as well.

So don’t cut the size of the legislature. But by all means cut the cost.

The problem Pennsylvanians have in reforming their state is that — shockingly — self-interested politicians are resistant to reform, and the voters lack an initiative process to do the job themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement responsibility

That Ol’ Double Standard

On Townhall.com I discussed the ominous parallels between giving an award to a statesman who’s accomplished almost nothing and Hollywood insiders’ weirdo defense of international, jet-setting rapist Roman Polanski. My point was that people tend to relax their standards for the people they like, remaining harsh to the people they oppose.

Though I picked on the liberalish mindset, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: This is not a problem limited to the Left.

I remember Republicans of my younger days thinking that Richard Nixon got a raw deal. True enough. Nixon’s two predecessors did nearly everything he did. But let’s remember: Nixon got justice. Or nearly so.

What he’s getting right now is none of my business.

There’s also the delay that I saw in conservative reactions against Tom DeLay’s obvious corruptions. And I’m not talking about his recent stint on Dancing With the Stars. I’m talking about his fancy footwork — and that of his supporters — in Congress.

The tendency to support a double standard — leniency for friends and cohorts, hanging judgments for enemies and opponents — is not new. It will never go away. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t surprise ourselves by sticking up for principle especially for those on our side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

Steal This Free Document

Is it possible to steal a free good? Ask a lawyer. She’ll look it up, probably in federal court records.

Now, our federal courts use a not-very-user-friendly database system, known as PACER, for distributing public records. These records are the work product of democracy. Federal law prohibits copyrighting the information, making it public property. But the PACER system nevertheless requires lawyers and others who want to access court decisions to plunk out eight cents per page to get them.

Worse than this, the database isn’t keyword searchable.

Enter the geeks.

In a free market, a potential demand meets supply by the entrepreneurial minded. In this case, it’s just the freedom-minded, the transparency-minded. Some Harvard and Princeton affiliated computer whizzes developed a new tool or two to retrieve these documents little pieces at a time, planning to place them in a truly searchable system.

And then the courts opened the records to law libraries without charge, and one hacker wrote a PERL script and started downloading the whole database, in huge, streaming chunks.

Half a month later someone noticed. Egads, someone was stealing free information!

The FBI investigated, started following the infiltrator.

So, what do you do when someone steals public information? Exactly what the FBI determined, in the end.

Yes, sometimes “nothing” is the proper response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Way More than Enough

“Enough is enough.” We say that when we’ve had too much.

When do we reach enough government spending?

One way to figure this out would be to determine what is the real public interest and spend enough to cover that, and no more.

Take defense. A good diplomatic policy, backed by adequate military might, serves us all. We can argue what that good policy is, but we certainly don’t want more spending than required to serve said policy.

And yet, a much-ballyhooed current defense spending measure is laden with line-item spending projects that the Pentagon didn’t ask for.

President Obama, when he was a candidate, promised to crack down on such spending. It’s usually called “pork.” Unfortunately, politicians like pork.

A fascinating post on the USA Today website explains how our prez signed “a pork-laden spending bill left over from the previous year but vowed to be more vigilant going forward. Now, his administration is lauding a $636 billion defense spending bill, for the fiscal year that began Thursday, that includes $2.7 billion in earmarks” — including funding for destroyers and cargo planes the Pentagon didn’t ask for.

Such spending doesn’t serve us all. It serves a few, back home in some districts. And it helps re-elect their representatives.

All at our expense.

By definition, it’s more than enough. It’s too much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.