Author: Redactor

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom

Wonders Never Cease

James May is one of the stars of a BBC television show called Top Gear. He’s the long-​haired fellow who argues about cars with the show’s short chap and the host, a big, loud gentleman. May often serves as both the scholar and the avatar of common sense. And then, occasionally, his enthusiasm veers off into a pleasant madness.

Ah, television.

On TopGear​.com he offers a fine essay on the joys of how things just work. He needed a new brake caliper for his aging auto, ordered it, and put it right in. “Nothing remarkable about that.” And yet, he has the wit to see that “nothing remarkable” is not quite right. Actually, he goes on, “it’s a matter for extreme wonderment.”

Precision isn’t easy. And yet precision is what we have, to amazing degrees, in the cars we rely upon.

In the manner of Adam Smith — who, in 1776’s Wealth of Nations, celebrated the complexity of building something as simple as a pin — May opines, “That something as complex as a car can be owned by ordinary people is, I think, one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It can be attributed to improved standards of living,” he concludes, and is “bloody marvelous.”

Yes. We may take things like cars for granted, but they aren’t “a given.” Their very existence depends on worldwide markets and a great degree of freedom. 

Which we must also not take for granted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Forcing You to Pay for Bad News

Poor old-​media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition. 

What to do … aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work? 

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering.…”

It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!

For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-​compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.” 

It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-​worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-​established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”

Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-​bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths. 

How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies

Ponzi in California

Keeping loans and investments distinct is important not merely for business people, but for governments.

Case in point? Mahmoud “Mike” Karkehabadi’s 89 felony counts of securities fraud and grand theft. The Laguna Niguel, California, movie maker is accused of turning his business into a Ponzi scheme.

When his film Hotel California flopped, bringing in just over half a million dollars, Mr. Karkehabadi convinced his investors to roll over their loans to him into future movie projects. When he did this, it is alleged, he fuzzed up the distinctions between different deals, and entered dark territory. Fraud.

According to California Attorney General Jerry Brown, Karkehabadi “ran a cold and calculated scam, making promises he never intended to keep and using the funds of new victims to pay off the earlier ones.”

I don’t know which this sounds like more, something out of Get Shorty or the Social Security Act of 1935.

It’s interesting that, at the same time it prosecutes Karkehabadi, the state of California is hastily and drastically re-​arranging its finances. Politicians are forced to do so because they have promised the state’s retiring employees returns on investments never made in amounts state government could never, realistically, afford to come through on.

The whole story of the accused Mr. Karkehabadi looks bad. Criminal. But then, so does the whole story of how politicians in California (and elsewhere) behave. 

Fraud isn’t as uncommon as it should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Big Brother in the Trash Can

America, we’re catching up with the British.

For years we’ve trailed when it comes to stifling the medical industry with regulation, rationing and red tape. But thanks to recent legislation this side of the Atlantic, we can expect major gains. When it comes to liberticide, we’re catching up.

Locally, too, thrilling progress in freedom-​killing is being made. I’ve reported before about how the British government hounds citizens who fail to lid their garbage properly or who — shame — put out “too much” trash. Now, Cleveland trash monitors are following suit.

Starting in 2011, city residents can expect to be more than hounded for failing to recycle. Is your garbage bin more than 10 percent full of stuff the trash police say you must recycle? Then expect a $100 fine. A spychip embedded in the trash bin will supposedly figure the proportions accurately and send reports on delinquents back to Big Brother.

Cleveland gets $26 for every ton of recyclables it collects. Even ignoring sorting costs, its “loss” from a household that fails to recycle must be much less than a dollar per pickup. So why not, at worst, charge those households an extra $4 a month?

Apparently, the goal is not to nudge people into better behavior. It’s to punish and humiliate those who neglect the rituals of the jihadist wing of the environmentalist religion. Government-​mandated recycling isn’t about sensibly conserving our resources; it’s an excuse for obsessively overbearing government. 

And it stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies

With Precedents, Very Small

When you hear the word “unprecedented,” look for precedents. 

It used to mean “lacking record of similar events in the past.” Now “unprecedented” seems to mean “very, very bad.”

A few months ago the President of the United States said of the Gulf Coast oil spill that “we’re dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”

Apparently, the Exxon Valdez fiasco wasn’t precedent enough.

But hey: When looking for precedents, look to nature. Oil exists in the Earth’s crust. It occasionally seeps out. Naturally. 

How do we know this? I mean, besides the fact that oil seepages were historically recorded, and considered a bane until oil’s industrial utility was discovered, and then considered a boon?

Well, biologists have discovered microbes in the deep sea oil spills, vigilantly eating up oil. And it’s a new species. That is, new to us.

The AP reports how the microbe “thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 41 degrees Fahrenheit,” and goes on to say that one researcher speculates “that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.”

Happily, the bacteria does not appear to cause inordinate oxygen depletion (radically reduced oxygen in the seas could lead to massive death, including vast species extinctions). 

Yes, folks: Evidence of a natural order. And something to adapt for our own efforts to clean up from this summer’s biggest government/​business partnership mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Philly Bloggers Beware

Do you live in Philadelphia? Do you blog? Have you earned a penny or more from your blog page? Then don’t click away!

Stick around a minute even if you blog in some other town, because today’s installment is about the lengths to which tax mongers might go to mulct or muzzle you.

The Philadelphia government has begun sending letters demanding dough to bloggers who report even trivial revenue from their blogs. The city wants $300 for “business privilege” licenses. Marilyn Bess is one recipient. Her blog MsPhilly Organic earned about $50 over the last few years.

Sean Barry also got the city’s letter. His own blog, Circle of Fits, has been deluged with some $11 in revenue over the last couple of years. He, too, had dutifully reported the blog-​generated boodle on his tax returns.

What did these electron-​stained opinion-​purveyors do to deserve this special attention? Nothing but fail to read every last jot of the city’s tax code — and every last secret inter-​department city government memo about when to go after local bloggers — before setting fingers to keys.

Philadelphia’s pursuit of imaginary scofflaws may amount to just an obtuse lunge for hitherto unextracted funds. But the new protocol is also a weapon that could be selectively deployed, now or later, to harass bloggers who publish inconvenient words. Wouldn’t be the first time in our history that the power to tax has been turned to such ends.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.