Author: Redactor

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy

An Attack on Private Pensions

We all know that America’s socialized pension system is, barring major reforms, doomed to undergo major default. But Americans should be nervous about their private pension funds and accounts, too. 

Over at PensionTsunami​.com, the folks at California Public Policy Center have their ears to the ground, listening for rumblings of the next market collapses, a huge bubble bursting in multiple forms of pension systems. A link from that site led me to a Bloomberg article, about Ireland’s bizarro response to that country’s downturn.

And the ominous portent it presents.

You see, Ireland’s politicians are so convinced that they have to “do something,” something big, to jumpstart the economy out of its current depression, that they’ve decided to levy a tax against pensions — a special tax designed to raise 470 million euros a year for four years, to pay for a massive new jobs program.

Forget that government jobs programs rarely do much good. Forget that it’s not government investment which accounts for market progress, but private investment, and that people will invest when they feel secure enough about the future to do so.

Forget that robbing people of their savings for the future tends to make investors less secure, less likely to invest — and thus put the economy in a bigger, longer-​run fix.

Remember, instead, that to a politician nothing is sacred, nothing is out of bounds for a tax or control. 

And that this kind of dangerous public thievery could happen here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Prize Optimist

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has awarded its annual Friedrich Hayek Lecture and Book Prize to Matt Ridley, for his book The Rational Optimist.

I wrote about the book last July, focusing on the title theme. The course of the last few hundred years gives us plenty of reasons for an upbeat long-​term view, in part because a few revolutions have occurred over that time, giving us plenty of, well, plenty.

Ridley, a popular science writer, actually takes a longer view than that. He identifies the source of most progress in trade. He starts the book discussing human prehistory, noting the evidence that Cro-​Magnon people traded widely, while Neanderthals did not. This probably explains why we descend from the former, not the latter. The traders won out, out-​producing (out-surviving) the more “socialistic” folk with bigger brains.

The ability to trade gave our ancestors a huge comparative advantage — a key economic principle that Ridley ably explains.

Ridley and Hayek share a general outlook, so the award is fitting. It’s also fitting to learn of it during “Hayek Week” — what with the new, “definitive” edition of F.A. Hayek’s classic Constitution of Liberty out, receiving reviews in major papers.

Here’s hoping Ridley continues to echo Hayek’s success in the marketplace of ideas. His recent Wall Street Journal op-​ed cheering on “the cheapeners and cost-​cutters” (rather than the usual ballyhooed inventors) suggests that he will do just that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling Tenth Amendment federalism

Fighting the Centralizers

National politics tends to frame every debate.

Or, perhaps I should say “mis-frame” every debate. Trouble is, there’s this tendency to make a “federal case” out of everything.

Politicians seem driven to add on bureaucracies and taxes and programs, rather than root around government to repeal programs that aren’t working. More failed programs beget more failed programs.

We witness this, these days, in the debate over medicine. The drive to centralize is strong, seemingly irresistible. 

But centralization rarely accomplishes what people hope for it.

K‑12 public schooling has been systematically centralized first at state levels, and then, increasingly, at the federal level. 

“Closing the Door on Innovation” is a broad-​spectrum, trans-​partisan attack upon the very idea of (as well as recent calls for) a national curriculum. Its sponsors know that calls for increasing centralized control over what kids learn in our public schools only sounds good as sound bites. In practice, centralization strangles innovation and closes off diversity in schooling.

I encourage you to read the manifesto. Sign it. In my opinion, the further we place our kids’ educations out of the hands of parents and into the hands of bureaucrats and politics, the worse things will get.

It is decentralization that should be our watchword. Let’s add it to our political agenda.

And let’s teach it to our kids. They could use a good education, after all, one good concept at a time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
term limits

Why the Brutality?

A former Uganda Supreme Court justice has said that were the country’s top banana, President Yoweri Museveni, to meet his own self of a quarter century ago, “they would shoot each other.”

Will Ross, reporting for the BBC News, provides a fascinating account of what’s gone wrong in the country after the ousting of tyrant and cannibal Idi Amin. The upshot? Not so good.

Freedom of assembly and the right to petition — protest — one’s government are a thing of the past in Uganda. Protestors got around this by holding “walk-​to-​work” protests … and then found themselves arrested. For walking.

Brutal government is back in style. A law society official laments that his people are “mourning the death of law in Uganda.”

And Museveni himself has become brutal. As Ross tries to explain, he’s changed over time.

Power has done something to him.

But this is not shocking. Indeed, it was predicted. By Museveni himself. “The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular,” he wrote in 1986, “is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.”

And yet here he remains, still in power. Unwilling to give it up.

From this follows many of the country’s other problems, the suppression, the police state tactics, even the declining economic outlook. In America, we used to call the necessary principle “rotation in office.” Now we speak of “term limits.”

Fledgling democracies need term limits as much or more than we do. The concept is universal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
local leaders

Georgia’s Model City

Local governments suffer from a big problem: bigness. Too often they expand their scope of services, and, in so doing, progressively fail to cover even the old, core set of services. You know, like fire and police and roads and such.

The solution is obvious. Mimic Sandy Springs.

This suburban community north of Atlanta, Georgia, had been ill-​served by Fulton County. So a few years ago the area incorporated. And, to fend off all the problems associated with the “do-​it-​all-​ourselves” mentality, the city didn’t hire on a huge staff of civil servants. Instead, it contracted out the bulk of those services in chunks.

Now, the roads get paved and the streets are cleaned and the waste is removed better as well as cheaper than ever. The town’s mayor, economist Eva Galambos, noted that in five years the town saw 84 miles of roadway newly paved, up from the five miles they were lucky enough to squeeze from Fulton County’s operation during the decade before incorporation.

Reason Foundation, a think tank known for its privatization emphasis, has been on the story from the beginning. A 2005 appraisal predicted that the town would become a “model city.” That prophecy seems to have been on the money, and a Reason TV video emphasizes this with the shocking fact that the town “has no long-​term liabilities.”

As the rest of the nation’s cities, counties and states lurch into insolvency, Sandy Springs shows a way out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Property Owners Victorious

In late April, the Institute for Justice won a smashing judicial victory on behalf of the Community Youth Athletic Center, a boxing gym and haven for local kids, as well as for other property owners in the neighborhood. They hope it’s a knockout blow.

The California Superior Court ruled that National City had no warrant for declaring the area “blighted,” that the city government had violated due process, and that it had violated California’s Public Records Act by failing to provide a private consultant’s documentation of the alleged blight.

Such studies are often blighted themselves — jargon-​ridden fictions concocted to rationalize what the government wants to do solely for other reasons. After the Supreme Court’s egregious Kelo decision, which gave targeted property owners little hope of protecting their property on constitutional grounds from eminent-​domain attacks, property owners in California and other states fought for laws to protect themselves from such baseless designations of “blight.”

Of course, politicians continued to do their darnedest, grabbing stuff that doesn’t belong to them. So the status of the legal protections often must be adjudicated.

CYAC president Clemente Casillas says, “I hope National City does the right thing now and throws in the towel so we can get back to focusing all our attention on helping to grow the kids in our community. The city can have redevelopment, but that has to be done through private negotiation, not by government force.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.