Author: Redactor

Categories
First Amendment rights

Arresting Developments

Gustavo Rendon was arrested in broad daylight — right in front of his two boys. One St. Louis policeman threatened that his boys would be sent into foster care.

Rendon’s crime? He passed out fliers in his neighborhood. He spoke out on public policy — in this case, opposing an eminent domain land grab and promoting a petition effort to put the city’s development plan to a vote. 

Dave Roland, an attorney for the Show-​Me Institute, says this outrageous behavior is part of “an unsettling pattern” … of squelching free speech.

Roland also points to St. Louis’s attempt to force Jim Roos to take down a sign protesting the city’s abuse of eminent domain — a case still in court. He mentions a recent instance where the Northeast Ambulance and Fire District actually sought to ban citizens from public meetings. 

Roland’s “most disturbing” example concerns the Missouri Municipal League. The League has filed a lawsuit challenging the ballot titles for two anti-​eminent domain abuse measures, effectively putting both petition drives on hold.

At a recent meeting of the Missouri Bar Association’s Eminent Domain Committee, Municipal League attorney Carrie Hermeling admitted that their “main objective” is “to delay the gathering of signatures.” Adding, “[H]opefully we’re accomplishing that.” 

Thwarting the people, denying their basic rights — quite an accomplishment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Property Grab, Bad

Good news and bad news. The good news is that a New York appellate court has ruled against the plundering of private property.

The court determined that New York State cannot use eminent domain to grab land for Columbia University’s expansion project. According to the ruling, assertions that the neighborhoods to be grabbed are “blighted” are mere sophistry, cooked up to justify a decision that had already been made — hardly a shocking revelation to longtime students of eminent domain abuse.

Property owners in the threatened area are jubilant about the ruling. Nicholas Sprayregen, an owner of self-​storage warehouses who has refused to sell to the university, says he was “always cautiously optimistic.” But he also knew that “we were going against 50 years of unfair cases against property owners.”

Unfortunately, an appeal of the decision will be heard in the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which just ruled six to one that the state was justified in grabbing land to turn over to a Brooklyn developer for the so-​called Atlantic Yards project.

Columbia already owns some 95 percent of the land they wanted for their multi-​billion-​dollar project. As Sprayregen notes, they could easily proceed without the 5 percent owned by the holdouts. But to avoid a little inconvenience, university officials seemed willing to violate the rights and destroy the livelihoods of others.

It’s sad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets responsibility too much government

Massive Failures

How many times, in the last year, have I heard praise for FDR’s banking reforms, even down to the specifics of federal deposit insurance?

The funny thing is, this factoid is false. Roosevelt opposed deposit insurance. Everyone did who at that time knew the history of the states that had experimented with this form of subsidy. Only logrolling pushed deposit insurance into law as a known special favor to small banks in rural areas — not to cure the nation’s ills.

The actual history and lessons of bank failures is explored by Charles Calomiris in a recent paper provocatively titled “Banking Crises Yesterday and Today.” According to this Columbia Business School professor, bank panics were not uncommon in the U.S., prior to the Federal Reserve in 1913. And the Fed pretty much stopped them. Massive bank failures, on the other hand, are different. Not unheard of elsewhere, massive failures had not been a problem in America leading up to that time. However, such failures became a problem a few decades later in the Great Depression.

Calomiris explains that such massive crises are brought on, chiefly, by institutional risk factors, like deposit insurance, government manipulation of the housing market to increase ownership through loosening of financial standards, and the “too big to fail” doctrine.

It turns out that honest standards, and not mammoth government subsidies and guarantees, prove the best way to prevent catastrophe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom

A Deadly Law

Suppose I donated bone marrow to help save someone’s life … and you, to encourage people like me to step forward, offered college scholarships for such donations.

Most folks would applaud us. But not the federal government. It would charge us with a felony and send us to prison for up to five years.

The fear that people might sell their non-​renewable organs — such as kidneys — for money, led Congress to pass The National Organ Transplant Act in 1984. The act also makes it illegal to compensate someone for donating bone marrow — which is renewable. 

Thousands of Americans have rare and potentially fatal blood diseases requiring bone marrow transplants, often from a stranger. Every year thousands die because they can’t find donors. 

The folks at MoreMarrowDonors​.org want to recruit more donors through scholarships and financial incentives. Makes sense. But by law they can’t.

Doreen Flynn has three daughters with a blood disease. To fight their deadly disease, she is stepping forward to fight this deadly law that blocks their treatment. 

Flynn and MoreMarrowDonors​.org, represented by the Institute for Justice, have sued the U.S. Attorney General to overturn the ban on compensating bone marrow donors. The case is Flynn v. Holder.

Attorney Jeff Rowes put it plainly: “The bottom line is that throwing people in prison for trying to save lives isn’t just wrong; it’s unconstitutional.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Unliberating Bondage

Two big lies have been making the rounds about the proposed return of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. This is the rule that forced broadcasters to air “both sides” of controversial issues until the agency scuttled it in 1987.

One big lie is that critics of the doctrine shouldn’t worry because nobody is really thinking about reviving it. The other big lie, which sort of cancels out the first, is that the Fairness Doctrine should be re-​imposed because it won’t restrict freedom of speech.

Writer Steve Almond argues the latter in a Boston Globe op-​ed. He calls Fairness Doctrine foes “desperate and deluded” liars for saying it would assail their First Amendment rights.

But compulsion really is compulsion. Almond himself admits as much when he notes that conservative radio hosts worry that the Doctrine would “spell the end” of what he calls “their ongoing cultural flim-​flam.” They would be forced half the time to turn their microphones over to the likes of Steve Almond. In this way, he says, Americans would be compelled to confront their biases.

Not that Almond is exactly an exemplar himself when it comes to pondering or tolerating alternative views. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto recalls that in 2006, Almond noisily resigned a teaching position at Boston College … because he disliked one of the speakers the college had invited to campus.

So much for hearing all sides.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Give Liberty a Chance

Give a golf club to Tiger Woods, and you know what to expect: Great golf.

Give the same club to Mr. Woods’s wife, and, well, you get something else again.

Give our politicians both a huge allowance and unlimited credit, and you get a batch of people unable to control their spending.

Expected, or unexpected?

Expected. Of course. We’ve come to expect this for a very long time. That’s why both the Federalists who wrote the Constitution, and the anti-​Federalists who amended it, were obsessively concerned with checks and balances, with limitations on government. 

Unfortunately, too often we speak of BIG government these days. But it’s not the size, as such, that is the problem. It’s the unlimited nature of it.

So when you have a chance to check government at the ballot box — say, in a state or local initiative or referendum — ask whether the measure limits government or unlimits it.

And, when considering a candidate, look for his or her promises about limits. If the candidate won’t limit spending in some very sure way, or the candidate’s own terms in office, then reject the candidate. Vote against. Go to the polls and write someone else’s name in, if that’s the only pro-​limit, pro-​liberty thing you can do.

We’ve got to put “limits” back into the conversation. Think constitutions. Think rule of law. Think liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.