Author: Redactor

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Fidel Fesses Up

Cuba’s 1959 revolution happened before I was born. Fidel Castro won, and ruled the country with an iron fist and steel jaw until a few years ago, when he handed power over to his brother, Raul.

The country’s been Communist, governed on allegedly Marxist principles, with the Castros sticking by their faith in total government even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Their dogged dedication to state socialism is impressive, in its way.

It’s like, say, watching Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter character on the silver screen. You cannot approve of motive or act, but the sheer fortitude! The evil genius!

A journalist for The Atlantic recently asked the retired Fidel Castro whether he still thought Cuba’s communism was exportable. And the old man replied, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

The journalist’s companion, a Latin American scholar, interpreted this huge admission as recognition that Cuba has too much government.

Should we take a camera, a megaphone and a boat to Michael Moore’s moat and ask him how he feels about this?

The Cuban government provides its citizens with free education, medical care, and transportation. And not much else. Except state harassment and arrest for speaking out. And the rationing of food is pretty stingy. Nearly everybody works for the government nexus.

But hey, many well-​educated folks in America have admired the government. Why? For all those big state projects. Health! Education! Buses!

Big whoop, when you’re hungry and a slave to the state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Nothing Doing

When you don’t know what to do, the thing to do is nothing.

Well, maybe.

Economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, notes that we recovered from downturns in the economy more quickly before the federal government took it upon itself to fix things. The first major fix was with the Great Depression. Which dragged on and on.

Today, our leaders have spent trillions of borrowed money to fix the economy, with poor results.

Sowell’s column is great, right up until near the end, when his plea for politicians to “do nothing” ignores a lot of … something.

After the huge 1987 stock-​market crash, he explains, President Reagan did nothing. But then “the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.”

But were those 20 years really so benign? Activity by presidents, by Congress and most of all by the Federal Reserve set up the systemic problems that led to the Crash of 2008. Consumer price inflation was low during Sowell’s Reagan-​blessed period, but all the while the Fed was feeding first a dot-​com bubble and then a housing bubble. And it engaged in a series of bailouts of financial institutions.

Maybe Reagan and later politicians didn’t do enough in the “do nothing” department. They should have reined in (or abolished) the Fed. They should have abandoned “too big to fail.” They should have stopped subsidizing creditors in busts and home-​owners in booms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

The People Are Restless

Scott Rasmussen’s polling company, Rasmussen Reports, asks questions the establishment polling outfits don’t. For one, he breaks down his poll respondents into the “Political Class” and “Mainstream Americans.”

Last month, by Rasmussen’s criteria, 67 percent of people in the “Political Class” said the country is headed in the right direction, while 84 percent of “Mainstream Americans” said the exact opposite. 

On Friday, Rasmussen Reports released polling showing that 71 percent of Americans support requiring a national vote to approve any changes Congress might make in Social Security. When it comes to raising taxes, 61 percent of us want a tax hike approved by Congress to go to a national vote to be approved or rejected by the people, with 33 percent in opposition.

On the issue of a national vote there is again a stark difference of opinion between the Political Class, which opposes a public vote on changes to Social Security (60 percent) or on raising taxes (73 percent), and Mainstream Americans, who support a vote on entitlement changes (78 percent) and tax increases (72 percent).

Rasmussen Reports has also been tracking something even more fundamental: Does our government have the consent of the governed?

The answer in July was that less than a quarter of us feel the government has that consent. This is actually up from February, but I don’t think that changes the big picture: Public opinion is undergoing a revolution. Rasmussen Reports is trying to track it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

An Ideological Cure?

Sometimes doctors need a stiff belt of medicine too.

Scot Echols, a  reader of Glenn Reynolds’s “Instapundit” blog, wrote in to say that while he appreciated a recent piece by Reynolds hailing capitalism, he thought it had not sufficiently stressed how capitalism fosters the creation of value.

“Value is created when someone does something for [others] better, faster, or cheaper than they can do it themselves,” Echols wrote. Then he related an anecdote about his doctor, whom he had gone to see about a sore throat. His doctor ranted about how “we need communism or a benevolent dictator to solve all of society’s problems.”

Sore throat notwithstanding, Echols responded, saying that he could either treat a sore throat himself with a regimen of gargling and garlic or pay $80 for a consultation and quick-​acting antibiotics, reducing a two-​week treatment to twenty minutes. His doctor’s knowledge and ability thus create value for him, value worth paying for. Because of such value creation, physicians gain wealth that enables them to drive nicer cars and live in nicer places than many of their receptionists can.

His doctor had no reply, but perhaps did understand a little better just how the kind of value-​killing society he’d been dreaming about might not allow him to enjoy the nice things he had now; also, that the freedom to give value and be rewarded for it is a good thing. 

Let’s hope the cure sticks. Let’s hope it spreads.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Like Zimbabwe

Richard M. Lindstrom signed a petition, but his signature didn’t count.

The analytical chemist for the federal government left off his middle initial. He told the Washington Post, “I dropped my middle initial on my official signature, oh, I don’t know, probably 40 years ago. It’s my signature. It’s acceptable to my bank and everybody else. But not the Board of Elections.”

Welcome to Montgomery County, Maryland. The Old Line State may lack a statewide initiative, but it does have a robust initiative and referendum process at the county level of government. Unfortunately, as many as 80 percent of the signatures for two initiative petitions — one for term limits and another on ambulance fees — were recently invalidated by county officials. In 2008, the Maryland Court of Appeals declared that a person’s signature on a petition must be presented precisely as signed on his or her voter registration form or, alternatively, must include the surname from the registration and one full given name as well as the initials of all other names.

Longtime petition activist Robin Ficker led the term limits drive. But his signature didn’t count either. While he signed “Robin K. Ficker,” his full name is Robin Keith Annesley Ficker. He forgot the initial “A.”

“They are not even letting people have the chance to vote,” Ficker argued as he and others appeal the petition decision. “It’s the antithesis of a democracy. It’s what they would do in, like, Zimbabwe.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Devastating Regard for Gender

This just in: Cutting back on runaway government spending may be sexist.

In Britain, the government has an austerity plan. Yup, the very opposite approach from America’s Spend-​a-​lot Administration. But now the Tory spending reduction plan has been challenged in that nation’s high court by the Fawcett Society, a women’s rights group, which claims the plan would widen gender “inequality.”

Additionally, the country’s Independent Equality and Human Rights Commission recently ordered the treasury to show it had properly considered the impact on women and other “vulnerable groups” of the planned spending cuts.

Is the plan unfair? Well, it lays off government workers, 65 percent of whom are women. Is it discriminatory to women that they will now face more lay-​offs? Or has it all along been discriminatory against men who as nearly half the population can’t get more than 35 percent of government jobs?

Or perhaps it is discriminatory against both men and women. Let’s all sue each other for trillions!

To show the potential impact, the Washington Post article noted that “deficit-​cutting campaigns” are “underway from Greece to Spain,” adding, “and in the United States when it eventually moves to curb spending.”

Eventually? We’ll see … eventually. But, apparently, that budget tightening our federal government has so long refused to do, but could possibly do one day way off in the future, well, it’s probably sexist.

No worries, though: Economic collapse may be fairly gender neutral in its devastation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.