Author: Redactor

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies

The Next War to End

I don’t know if David Schubert is guilty. You don’t either. But it wouldn’t shock me if a jury convicted him, or if he pled out. You probably wouldn’t be surprised, either.

The fact that we aren’t shocked is what is shocking about the story.

You see, Schubert is the Nevada prosecutor who has handled many celebrity drug prosecutions — Paris Hilton, most famously. He has now been arrested for possession of cocaine.

Common story: The people in charge of prosecuting America’s ongoing War on Drugs are often drug users themselves. Many are “on the take” to drug gangs and warlords and kingpins. Or themselves embroiled in the drug trade. 

The evidence for mass corruption, up and down the criminal justice system’s chain of command, is massive itself. It reminds me of the stories of Inquisitors themselves accused of heresy, in the Middle Ages. It’s a very old story.

And now it’s become a way of life in America. Corruption is endemic, and that says something about the drug war itself. About our drug laws.

Which could be repealed.

Did you know that Portugal has had great success decriminalizing pretty much all recreational drugs?

Last week, Rep. Ron Paul castigated House Republicans for overlooking America’s foreign wars as targets for cutting America’s overblown budget. I agree with him, but really: We should look close to home, too. 

It is high time for a complete cease-​fire in the costly War on Drugs. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Voters Boot Mayoral Marauder

On March 15, Miami-​Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez got the boot, with almost nine out of ten county voters (88 percent) agreeing to get rid of him. The Miami Herald calls the event “the largest recall of a local politician in U.S. history.” Brandon Holmes of Citizens in Charge calls it “the most significant recall election since California ousted former governor Gray Davis in 2003.”

Alvarez was shown the door for larding aides with hefty pay raises (from $185,484 to $206,783, for his chief of staff) and increasing the salaries of other county employees while hiking property taxes 18 percent in the name of preventing layoffs. Meanwhile, the mayor tooled around town in a taxpayer-​subsidized BMW Gran Turismo.

It all seemed like a racket, hardly consistent with the clean-​up-​government platform on which Alvarez had campaigned. The mayor showed further contempt for voters when he tried to stop the recall vote, twice going to court to block it. It also didn’t help when reports surfaced that the mayor had granted paid leaves to a dozen transit workers, at least one of whom used the time to campaign against the recall effort.

Pundits often describe elections as a referendum on the incumbent. They are, but only partly. Voters everywhere need the power to hold an instant referendum on incumbents who have disastrously demonstrated their incompetence or rapacity. Sometimes these guys need to be stopped in their tracks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Derailing Washington’s Train Fixation

The great age of trains — the 19th century — spawned a few amazing political careers, not excluding the railway lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. Many major railroads depended on moving politicians first, earth and iron second. 

More than ever, today’s passenger rail lines are creatures of the state. Amtrak loses money, and could only be successful as a private operation were politicians able to let its unprofitable lines go.

Congress insists, instead, on putting up more money-​losing railways in as many places as possible. President Obama even tried to get a bullet train put through between Tampa and Orlando, despite the fact that the two Florida cities were too close to each other for a super-​fast train to make any sense. 

Worse for the bullet was the politics.

In 2000, Floridians had voted in high-​speed monorail; in 2004, they voted in greater numbers to kill their own project. Voters realized that, with politicians in charge, railroad projects tended to go runaway.

Perhaps that helped convince Rick Scott, the new governor, to reject the federal government’s offer to pay $2.4 billion of a $2.6 billion bullet train. The billions of “free money” that the Obama Administration promised began to seem, well, costly.

So, of course, the federal government sued. In early March, a Florida court ruled that the governor did indeed have the power to tell the feds to play with trains elsewhere.

A minor victory for railway sanity. A major victory for federalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

National Public Railroadeo

The controversy about all the elitist condescension galloping through the halls and programming policies of National Public Radio are both on point and beside the point. Even if NPR’s appeal were universal, it is not the proper function of government to be funding and controlling media.

Just the same, NPR’s appeal is far from universal. It serves not “the public,” but a slice of it — about 11 percent, according to Sue Schardt, member of an NPR distribution committee. She concedes that those who built NPR “unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominantly white, liberal, highly educated, elite” but stipulates that it was “never anyone’s intention to exclude anyone.”

True, but not meaningful. Coca Cola would love to get all the Pepsi people, Mother Jones would love to get all the National Review people, plus Esquire and New Yorker people, plus CBS and NBC and ABC people. But every successful enterprise must target its product.

Schardt believes that the way to answer political challenges to NPR’s funding is to expand the base with a broader appeal. The 30-​year incubation period is over, now let’s be all we can be! Prove the nay-​sayers wrong!

Fine with me if NPR tries this — or any other audience-​building strategy. Just not on my dime. NPR would probably do best preaching to the liberal choir as they’ve always done. But, again, in the marketplace. Don’t make the rest of us pay for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

Categories
national politics & policies

Spain Slows Down

Spain has reduced its speed limit, from 120 kmh to 110 (about 68 mph). So of course some are asking whether the U.S. should similarly put on the brakes.

It’s ’70s déjà vu: OPEC was throwing its cartel weight around, Nixon responded with wage and price controls, which led to long lines at gas stations. And, for the first time, the federal government cajoled states to reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph.

We still argue about the results. Freeway deaths went down, to hurrahs. 

But, forced to travel 55 or thereabouts, more and more drivers opted to drive the secondary roads, roads less capable of handling increases in speed and congestion. Traffic fatalities there went up.

Most obviously, we saved gas but wasted time. 

If you are narrowly focused on one thing — gasoline used, in toto — you are unlikely to care. But wasting people’s time comes with many social costs, from fewer hours spent with kids to more hours driven drowsily. So a number of deaths by speed were swapped for a number of deaths by fatigue. 

Right now each of us can save gas — by driving less, or slower, or trading in the commuter car for a motorcycle. But each of these comes at a cost, with trade-​offs ranging from lost productivity to what for some would be a net loss in safety.

Any attempt to force such trade-​offs as policy warrants careful thought, a reasonable understanding of all the costs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

An App for That

We’ve had debit cards for most of my adult life. Regularly, people sign their names on electronic pads to obtain medication, credit, what-​have-​you. You can order books and music and nearly anything online, from your computer, your smartphone, or your new iPad.

It’s high time to take democracy into this new era.

At least, Michael Ni thinks so. And I agree.

Last year, Mr. Ni brought a signed ballot initiative to the clerk’s office in San Mateo County. He did not use anything so archaic as ink. Or a pencil. He signed the document using the screen of his iPhone, and he delivered it to the designated agent via flash drive.

It was rejected.

And so began a lawsuit, Ni v. Slocum, to upgrade the State of California’s initiative process. Mr. Ni runs Verafirma, a company that has produced technology that, you might say, puts another “i” (or is that the “e”?) in “initiative.” The technology works on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the Verizon Droid, and is slated for other smartphones and similar post-​PC devices.

Mr. Warren Slocum, named defendant/​respondent, admits that the technology “is transformative.”

Recently, Twitter and Facebook have helped foment and organize revolutions. But the statewide citizens initiative, a bulwark of democracy in half the states, is lagging behind, technologically. 

It’s time for government to accommodate the habits and desires and sheer convenience of the masses.

It’s time to say, “Democracy: There’s an app for that.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.