Author: Redactor

Categories
general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

World Policeman on the Take?

The United States of America is at war in Afghanistan and Libya and has nearly 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq. We have 702 military bases in 63 countries around the world.

We’ve become the world’s policeman. 

This mission comes with a hefty price tag — most importantly, in the lives of our soldiers. Secondarily, but not inconsequentially, in dollars. Last year, we spent $685 billion for our worldwide presence, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we’re adding Libya to the bill.

So, how do we pay for all this policing?

Over the weekend, in a visit to Iraq, U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher suggested, “We would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years.”

We can hope, but Sean Hannity went a misplaced step further: “We have every right to go in there [into Iraq and Kuwait] and, frankly, take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation.”

Heavens! Rescuing someone doesn’t give us the right to take others’ money or oil or anything else. 

Now, were a liberated nation to choose to repay us, that’d be nice. Kuwait did actually pay more of the financial cost of the Gulf War than we did. 

But face it: Policing the world is just not cost-​effective. Making it pay by turning a liberation crusade into an excuse for looting? That’s not police activity. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Explaining the Next Bust

Is the long-​cycle “higher education boom” now beginning to go bust?

Like financial bubbles fed by subsidy and the Federal Reserve’s limbo-​low interest rates, American colleges and universities are plagued with too much government attention —particularly by policy that says “everybody should go to college.”

But common sense tells us that not everybody profits by going to college, that sending ill-​prepared, unqualified and even uninterested young non-​scholars to college, largely so they can “earn higher incomes” is absurd. Pushing the vast majority of American humanity through the university mill cannot ineluctably yield increasing returns. With diminishing returns, increasing government attention can only feed a dangerously unsustainable bubble.

And once it bursts, Americans will demand explanations. 

Look to the theory of “signaling,” which posits that a (or the) chief use for schooling is not learning but a demonstration: Getting a college degree shows (“signals”) employers that the persevering student possesses virtues useful in “the real world.” 

We’ve come to rely on those crude signals, but as economist Bryan Caplan argues, businesses could adapt to a very different information market: “Ending government subsidies for education wouldn’t create a new working-​class generation; it would lead businesses to massively expand the employment of interns to take advantage of the large pool of talented, young people who can’t afford tuition.”

Gee, learning one’s trade for free sounds better than going into debt to “signal” employers that one would likely be able to produce for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom

Here to Raid You

Government agents: Here to help? Or to break in, drag you out of your house by the scruff of your neck, throw you to the ground, handcuff you, and stuff you into a patrol car before finally releasing you six hours later?

That’s what happened to “Stockton man” Kenneth Wright, as witnessed by the neighbors and his kids. According to News 10, “After the Department of Education raided the home of a Stockton man Tuesday morning, officials said the search was part of an ongoing investigation into financial aid fraud.” Wright wasn’t even the subject of their investigation — that would be his estranged wife.

So … an “investigation” into “financial aid fraud” warrants smashing in someone’s door and treating him like an escaped axe murderer? Not this side of the portal to Bizarro World.

The raid wasn’t even triggered by an unsubstantiated tip about a medicinal-​marijuana stash. No need any more to use the drug war as an excuse to assault peaceful citizens. Now any old “investigation” warrants outrageous assaults, and any government department can commission them. Not so long ago I spoke of raids on barber shops suspected of unlicensed scissor use.

Such abuse of power is becoming the norm. If America is not quite yet a full-​fledged police state, it’s sure starting to smell like one.

Wright says: “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.” That’s not enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism too much government

The Propaganda Diet

When the federal government gave up its goofy “food pyramid,” I thought it might be a sign that the USDA had given up. We’re not so lucky. The USDA just announced its new diet propaganda campaign, trading in the pyramid for a pie chart.

But, as noticed on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, there’s no pie.

Actually, the graphic’s in the shape of a plate, with four categories broken down in pie-​chart fashion: Fruits, grains, vegetables, and proteins. In a separate element to the side, a “cup” labeled “dairy” serves as a fifth food group.

The “eat your vegetables” mantra we’ve been hearing all our lives is now reinforced by the command to make half our “plate” (the graphic is available at ChooseMyPlate​.gov) fresh fruits and vegetables, take half our grains as whole grains, avoid salt, and switch our milk to skim or 1 percent. Oh, and avoid sugary drinks; drink water instead. And eat less overall.

Good advice, I suppose, but at this point if the government tells me that the unclouded sky is blue, I’d check to verify, first.

And regarding our diets, “check to verify” is probably a good idea. We can hardly trust even the so-​called experts without applying our own critical intelligence. Our eating habits are ours. And much of what the government’s said in the past has been nonsense.

As for me, I’d like to cut down on government itself. This campaign seems the place to start. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Save Herds, Save Hunting

Ideas of local control and popular government are perennially revived on both the right and the left. But we don’t often enough export those ideas, especially to areas of endeavor like wildlife preservation. 

Considering the sorry state of so much wildlife, especially in Africa, you’d think decentralization and citizen control might more often be trotted out.

Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan, writing for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, argue that devolving hunting rights down to the village level in Africa would almost certainly help preserve wildlife stocks. It’s worked pretty well in Zimbabwe, while Kenya, which prohibited hunting instead of managing it, saw “its population of wild animals [decline] between 60 and 70 percent.”

The usual wildlife policy advocated in the West might as well be called wildlife colonialism. It combines a heavy dose of moralism with a heavy-​handed, top-​down authoritarianism — the last thing we want to encourage in African governments for other matters. And it doesn’t work for preservation. With it, local communities have no stake in wildlife management, so wildlife degrades through poaching and habitat encroachment.

Far better to provide people in Africa — in villages and towns and in the stretches between them — incentives to keep stocks of elephants and lions and apes and monkeys and what-​have-​you healthy.

Hunters kill animals, yes — but, with the right incentives, can help save whole species. As Anderson and Regan put it, “if it pays, it stays.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The Ideology of Anti-Ideology

Politics is becoming politicized. Ideology ideologized. There is disagreement in the land. Rumbles! Portents! Where will it all end?

In the minds of those with infinite faith in their infinite wisdom to hammer out a better world by thwocking the rest of us into meek serfs of their edict-​spewing will, it’s supposed to end with their unchallenged ascendancy over us. Why not? After all, they’re enacting not any ideology but only Scientific Truth. Anyone who opposes this Scientific Truth on the grounds of (different) political principles is being unscientifically Ideological.

It’s obvious that we can dispute the exact meaning and proper role of ideology — political ideas and programs — in human affairs. But the ideologues of interventionism are being coy and obfuscatory when they decry criticisms for being “ideological.”

The latest manifestation of the syndrome comes to us courtesy of a nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, who says his nomination is being thwarted on — yes — ideological grounds. He won a Nobel! He’s studied labor markets! Analysis of unemployment is “crucial to conducting monetary policy”! And: “Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better”!

Hasn’t the Fed proved umpteen times already that its skilled analytical manipulation of economic life is perfect, infallible, and un-​blundering? Couldn’t it benefit from the services of yet another smug, credential-​wielding seer?

What? You doubt it! What are you, some kind of ideologue?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.