Category: too much government

national politics & policies too much government

Biden’s Peculiar Odor

William F. Buckley used to say that there is always a presumptive case for order.

Philosopher Joel Feinberg argued that there’s always a presumptive case for freedom.*

This notion of a strong case for or against something prior to specific data can keep philosophers and economists and folks like you and me awake at night.

Here, I’m just going to bring it down to the politics.

Of inflation.

Why are prices — especially fuel prices — rising so?

The Biden Administration has been trying to argue that it’s caused by the war in Ukraine, and Americans’ need to sacrifice to defend that beleaguered country.

But, as with his talk of “food shortages,” the war is almost certainly an exacerbating, not the prime, factor. Both fuel price spikes and bare shelves demonstrated an alarming trend before Putin invaded Ukraine.

The cause seems obvious. Do we really need careful studies to show that both were caused by (a) COVID lockdowns and (b) a blizzard of lockdown bailout checks during Trump’s term in office and eagerly pushed also by the current president?

And Biden’s current kick, of demanding that gas stations (!) freeze or reduce prices to “match the cost of production,” has all the odor of cranky, old-fashioned soapbox socialism.

There is a presumptive case that inflation is caused by monetary policy, just as shortages are usually caused by regulations. Trump and Biden and Congress all contributed to over-spending, financialization, and regulatory hits.** But the stink of the growing mess must also affix especially to Biden. After all, one of his campaign promises was to cut production of oil on all government lands and offshore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (1972), pp. 20 – 22. Where Buckley discussed his presumptive case is your guess or mine. Probably a column back in the 1970s or ’80s.

** A few weeks ago an interesting exchange occurred in this website’s comments section, between two friends of this program.

PDF for printing

h/t crAIyon

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags covid, food, inflation, Joe Biden, lockdown, monetary policy, Ukraine

general freedom too much government

Les Climate Lockdowns

It’s hot outside. In southern France, very hot. Obviously (?), then, regional governments there are justified in prohibiting various outdoor activities.

Following the pandemic-lockdown model, it is apparently now acceptable to annul the rights of French citizens if some persons may be hurt by the heat. Once again, adults are being treated as if not responsible for making their own judgments about personal risks.

In the Bordeaux area of France — the Gironde department, a “department” being a sort of county — officials recently banned various outdoor events, including concerts and commemorations of resistance to Germany during World War Two.

The department also prohibited indoor events in places that lack air conditioning.

“Everyone now faces a health risk,” one official explained, as if summer were a new thing.

We care about weather when deciding whether to proceed with events we have planned. We think nothing of calling off a parade on account of rain. By “we” I mean the organizers, who may or may not be a government entity.

But there’s a big difference between deciding oneself to cancel an event one is responsible for and a government’s decision to outlaw events produced by others.

Summer is just starting. Next comes winter. Cold.

Governments seem to be regarding the COVID-19 lockdowns as evidence of just how much pushing around we’ll accept in the name of eliminating all risk but the risk to freedom.

A lot, seems to be the conclusion.

We must show them otherwise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags ban, France, freedom

tax policy too much government

For a Thousand Years

Time for a gas-tax holiday.

When the people lie prostrate, when the people groan under heavy burdens, when the people just can’t take it anymore — and when an election is coming up — that is the time for politicians to relieve everyone’s burden.

A bit.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen favors considering a temporary gas-tax holiday to emulate some of the states. Reviving the Keystone oil pipeline — no, not something to consider, she says. But she’s okay with a brief gas-tax break.

Let’s do better.

I propose a millennium-long gas-tax holiday, government-barriers-to-drilling holiday, regulation-of-all-industries holiday. Under my plan, government gets all the way out of the way of all markets so we can all be as prosperous as possible, whether or not a big economic crisis is underway.

But would there be any such crises — long-term and intractable economy-wide crises, I mean — if my plan were enacted?

When government does everything possible to injure the economy and prevent recovery, it takes a long time for markets to bounce back from shocks. If ever.

Un-fetter the markets, though, and economic actors would be able more rapidly to adjust to major jolts. If gas imported from overseas plummets, producers could then quickly adapt by expanding production. They cannot readily do so now because government imposes so many barriers.

The politicians’ preference for modest, namby-pamby reprieves are not only substantially weak, they send the wrong signals. They get doled out as if government were doing us a special favor … by not beating us up so badly for a very little while.

We need freedom. On an ongoing basis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags free markets, Janet Yellen, laissez faire, regulations, tax policy, taxes

free trade & free markets too much government

Do More Than Baby Steps

Major disruptions such as pandemic policy in China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine obviously crimp trade and supply chains. But given such impacts, should governments here in the United States be making things better or making things worse?

Oil is one example of a good that would be more abundant and cheaper had the government left it alone — stopped blocking domestic production and the flow of oil from Canada.

Now parents are having trouble getting baby food.

A proximate cause of the shortage is the closure of a single major factory producing baby formula. But Kevin Ketels, a professor who studies the global supply chain, argues that restrictions on production had set things up so that a blow like this would be crippling.

For one thing, only a few companies, Abbott, Reckitt, and Nestlé, are allowed to participate in a government program to provide baby formula to low-income families. This is not a minor program. The federal government provides substantial grants to the states to fund it.

More importantly, only a few manufacturing facilities are allowed to produce baby formula, and “startups don’t have the volume required to produce in these facilities.”

High tariffs on baby-food imports have also reduced supply.

You would think, then, that the first thing to do would be to remove governmental barriers to production and imports.

And all, not just some.

So why isn’t that what we are hearing about now?

Well, politicians do not gain their power, prestige, and insider trading advantages by leaving well enough alone. Admitting that their stock in trade — regulation and tariffs and the like — is the cause of this problem might suggest to distracted minds that it is the cause of most, if not all, our problems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags economics, inflation, regulations

international affairs too much government

Rebellion in Shanghai

For months now, Ratta, a Shanghai-based firm that makes an e‑ink writing tablet called the Supernote, has been blocked from shipping its products as usual. Ratta’s shipping warehouse has been locked down to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, when the lockdown proved endless, the company was able to move much of its shipping operations in-house and begin fulfilling long-delayed orders.

In Shanghai, life has become almost impossibly difficult. The city’s 26 million residents must resort to sometimes desperate measures to even eat.

Employees permitted to work at a company office are often prohibited from leaving that office. The government fences off apartment buildings when any residents test positive for COVID-19. Similar tyrannical measures are imposed in other Chinese cities.

It’s a classic non-cure-worse-than-disease scenario. The mild but super-infectious omicron version of COVID-19 has eluded all totalitarian expedients. Nevertheless, people are being killed to save them.

Shanghai residents have started to rebel, banging pots and pans from their balconies, pulling down the makeshift barbed-wire fences designed to confine them, taking to the streets to protest, producing songs and videos that go viral despite what National Review calls “the CCP’s watertight censorship.”

Singing China’s national anthem, now being censored, has also become an act of rebellion. It has a line about refusing to be slaves.

Can the protests succeed?

No government, no matter how powerful, is omnipotent. Ultimately, its ability to impose its will depends on the resistance of the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags covid, lockdown, Shanghai

general freedom international affairs too much government

The Population Implosion

At the risk of turning Common Sense with Paul Jacob into Common Sense About Elon Musk, consider the second best thing about Musk’s Twitter preoccupation: his own tweets.

“At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist,” Musk posted on Saturday. “This would be a great loss for the world.”

A very significant observation, at odds with so much of the Official Narrative of Approved Subjects and Opinions.

Recognizing that depopulation is the big problem for the developed nations of the world, not over-population rubs up against most of what we’ve been told for years.

But it’s true.

Japan is not alone, here, in showing a demographic collapse. It’s merely the most advanced in population decline. Russia is in a bad way, and many European countries’ native populations are in zero population growth. The United States, too, is growing only because of immigration, legal and illegal.

Behind the numbers, though, is a disturbing reality: the instability of our welfare state policies. In America, and in most advanced nations, government-run social pension programs require a growing population to properly service. Yet, Social Security, by removing the need to have children as a natural safety net (where we beget offspring to help take care of us in old age), actually disincentivizes the population growth that might make the system sustainable.

Elon Musk did not offer a fix. But by pointing to a very real problem, he’s done us a great service, speaking simple truth instead of propaganda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts