Category: too much government

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too much government

UNkindest Cut of All

One of the sad truths about trying to help folks in far, distant lands, is that so much of the aid gets soaked up in overhead.

But if you think it’s bad with charities, prepare to wince at the United Nation’s Haitian peacekeeping efforts. It turns out that only 4.6 percent of the $495.8 million the UN spends on salaries, hazard pay, and the like goes to “national staff” on the ground in Haiti. The rest goes to support staff at some remove from the island nation’s devastation.

So does $461.9 million out of $495.8 million seem like a good cut for overhead?

Seems steep to me.

The entire budget is well over $700 million. Nearly $200 million of that comes from U.S. taxpayers.

The Fox News story from which I harvested these figures goes on to discuss the boats used to house some personnel. $112,500 per day. One of the boats is nicknamed “The Love Boat.” I don’t think I want to know more.

This should be a big story, except that, in context of today’s typical government operations, it’s not out of the ordinary. These days, operations often get judged not by the good done but by the number of people and dollars associated with it.

People in Haiti suffer. So we naturally don’t want to complain about money spent helping them. But, like so much else in government, efficiency is out of the question.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Don’t Kill The Angels

President Obama is blasting what he calls “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists” to fend off tighter regulation of the financial industry.

Pretending that Fed credit expansion and governmental incentives to take on temporarily cheap mortgages had no part in the current crisis, officials carefully direct our attention elsewhere. Widespread moral hazard stemming from bailouts, both guaranteed and implied? Shhhh.

But the government, uninterested in regulating itself and its own excesses, is instead targeting you and me.

“Tighter regulation” means less freedom to make your own decisions about your own time and resources.

Venture Beat magazine reports on a provision of Senator Chris Dodd’s proposed reform that would make it much harder for so-called “angel” investors to fund new start-ups.

An angel investor is somebody willing to fund a new business with his own wealth, even when venture capitalists managing others people’s funds decline to invest. Dodd’s bill would force start-ups raising funds to register with the SEC and wait 120 days for the filing to be processed. It would also increase the minimum capital that “accredited investors” must have in the bank before the government will permit them to invest.

Based on nobody’s considered judgment about a particular venture but only on lawmakers’ nebulous fear of entrepreneurial risk, the proposed law would kill in the crib many pioneering and timely, must-act-now innovations.

Accidentally, I’m sure, current businesses would be spared competition from upstarts.

And this is supposed to help the economy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Quick! Stop the Rescue!

If there’s anything worse than running a state into the ground, it’s turning that state around.

Such seems to be the attitude behind yet another “bailout” program being mulled over by our congressional overlords in Washington, DC.

Over at National Review Online, Daniel Foster calls the Democrats’ proposed $23 billion fund for preventing teacher layoffs a “putting off hard decisions” fund. Pitched in the direction of Foster’s own state, New Jersey, the giveaways would sabotage efforts by the new governor, Chris Christie, to close a looming budget deficit for fiscal year 2011 of more than $10 billion.

The Garden State’s budget for fiscal year 2010 was about $30 billion. Christie is trying to cut funding to school districts. He has pledged to restore the funds in districts where teachers agree to a one-year pay freeze and to contribute a small bit of their salary (1.5 percent) to help pay for their own health insurance. Currently, most pay nothing.

But if the federal government flings borrowed largesse that makes the state’s budget cuts irrelevant, teachers will have much less incentive to cooperate with even marginally more responsible policies.

Perhaps that’s the goal for Washington’s big spenders. After all, if folks could get their fiscal houses in order without handouts from the spendaholics in DC, there’d be no need for such handouts.

And then just how “important” would those politicians be?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Commiserations on Tax Day

It’s April 15, my eldest daughter’s birthday. I used to tell her she wouldn’t have to pay taxes like everyone else, because IRS folks wouldn’t dare make her file on her birthday, would they?

Seriously, when it comes to family and taxes, I’m just glad that my wife does all the work.

My job is getting the birthday cake.

You can understand why I’d shirk the tax work. There are 40,000 sections to the tax code, and no one understands it all.

This complexity has costs. And not just to my sanity. A whole industry has risen to ease the burden of figuring out our taxes. One hates to begrudge anyone an honest living, but really, most of today’s tax accountants would better serve humanity in some other job.

Simplifying taxes should be as important as tax reduction. Instead, because our representatives and our president just cannot stop themselves from spending more and more of our money, they are raising taxes. It’ll be on the proverbial rich, in the immediate future, but they won’t stop there.

They can’t stop there.

Why? Because if you took all the wealth — not just the income, but all the wealth — from every millionaire in the country, you still couldn’t pay all the future obligations of the federal government.

My darling daughter aside, April 15 is no day to celebrate. It’s tax day, and it marks the degradation of our nation at the hands of our politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Carrying On About Carry-Ons

Poor Chuck Schumer. A vendor now charges for a service that it didn’t previously charge separately. So the senator wants to outlaw this.

“Airline passengers have always had the right to bring a carry-on bag” without separate fees, Schumer fumes. It’s a “slap in the face to travelers” that some airlines now consider charging for carry-on bags, a policy already in place at Spirit Airlines.

Horrors! The ugly spectacle of businessmen acting as if they . . . have the right to run their businesses freely, not merely as lackeys of congressional overseers.

Spirit, which is simultaneously reducing base ticket prices, says airplanes will empty faster if there’s less luggage looming overhead. I don’t like paying the fees, but airlines do have costs. And competition. An airline that kept heaping up fees until it was charging $1,800 per ticket wouldn’t get off the ground. Not if another airline was charging far less for the same journey.

The proper response to terms of trade that one dislikes is to complain to the vendor, take one’s business elsewhere, or both — not to decry any scrap of autonomy as a “loophole” in a regulatory regime not yet exhaustively draconian.

Yes, let airlines charge for carry-ons. And let Schumer take the bus to and from DC. This will give him less time to pursue phony-baloney crusades.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Prisoners of Conscience

The crusade against political dissent under Venezuelan socialism rages on. The latest victim of President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is former presidential candidate Oswaldo Ålvarez Paz. In March, Paz contended that Venezuelan officials had ties with drug traffickers and terrorists. For articulating this conclusion he is charged with “conspiracy” and “spreading false information.”

The president of the Human Rights Foundation, Thor Halvorssen, notes: “Ålvarez Paz said Venezuela was ruled by a ‘totalitarian regime.’ The Chávez government disagreed so strongly with this that they proved him right by arresting him and keeping him imprisoned.”

Guillermo Zuloaga, who owns the independent television network Globovisión, on which Paz uttered his opinion, was also arrested recently for saying things “offensive” to Chávez.

Touchy, touchy, El Presidente.

“If the Venezuelan government can imprison a former presidential candidate and the head of the country’s only independent TV network because their opinions ‘offended’ the president,” asks Javier El-Hage, HRF’s general counsel, “then what options are left for a college student who wants to protest against the government, or an independent journalist wanting to write a critical investigation?”

The Human Rights Foundation is one of many organizations rebuking Chávez’s conduct and calling for the release of persons arrested for what has been called the “crime of opinion.” They will have earned a large share of the credit if Chávez is ever forced to change course — or Venezuela manages to change course by getting rid of Chávez.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Freedom First Aid Kit

After a year-long battle, congressional Democrats have rammed through Obamacare, a massive expansion of government control over the health care industry and a massive assault on the liberties of every doctor, patient, insurance agent, and taxpayer in the country.

But the issue is far from settled. So, let’s use this lull in the news cycle shelling to pass a little ammunition. Herewith, a first-aid kit for medical freedom-lovers in the form of an overview of resources to help us understand and join the coming battle to repeal Obamacare. And to prevent even worse.

We lost a major battle for medical freedom. But the war is only beginning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

No More Woolworths

The New York Times offers summer internships at $900 per week. From what I’ve gathered, most other editorial and journalistic internships don’t pay nearly that much.

Many pay nothing.

So why would anyone work for nothing? Well, for experience.

Thomas Sowell, in his recent book Applied Economics, tells the story of a young man named Frank, who applied for a position in a retail store and got it. When he asked about his wages, his employer said, “Pay you! You don’t expect me to pay you, do you? Why, you should pay me, for teaching you the business!” This, as Sowell notes, seems harsh, exploitative: Three months of hard work without pay.

But Sowell asks “Who benefited most?”

The answer is the young Mr. Frank Winfield Woolworth, who went on to found a retail empire, eventually hiring his old boss, the same man who wouldn’t pay him. But the old man sure did teach Woolworth the business.

Unfortunately, such relationships are illegal. “Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws,” the New York Times relates, “officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers.” The regulators’ campaign against internship programs is now going nationwide.

Bottom line: No more Woolworths.

Sure, the Woolworth chain died long ago. What’s left of the company is called Foot Locker. But I’m talking about future innovators, future Frank Woolworths.

Which makes this crackdown a prime example of a counter-productive policy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

How to Simulate Stimulation

Historians have noticed something interesting about the Great Depression: The bulk of Roosevelt’s New Deal money and effort wasn’t directed at the hardest-hit states. It was directed at swing states.

FDR’s New Deal could thus be seen as a vast re-election drive.

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Mercatus Center, recently testified before Congress about her studies of recent stimulus spending. She noticed that Democratic districts received bigger bucks than did Republican ones. Coincidence?

Nick Gillespie wrote about this on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit and Run. And, nestled in the comments section, is testimony from someone in the federal government about how stimulus money is actually spent. The government does not look for especially hard-hit areas. It looks for prospect projects that have been designed and engineered and ready to be funded to reach completion quickly.

This is useful to know. If believed, I’ll leave to you the explanation why Democratic Districts might be further along this pork-project train than Republican Districts. But it’s worth noting that this method does not really show any targeted expertise on the part of the federal government. It’s just a spend-and-spend-quickly program. Throw out enough dollars and hope something “sticks” . . . to produce real growth.

You see, this is nothing like how markets for capital projects work in the private sphere. And it’s nothing like a good way of jump-starting a wounded market economy.

It’s just government-mismanagement-as-usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

You Go, Google

A few weeks back I asked what was going on with Google’s pledge to stop helping the Chinese government censor search results for sensitive topics like Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square. Google was presumably using its threat of withdrawal from the Chinese market as a negotiating chip to wrest privileged status from the Chinese authorities.

But the hope was naive. It was unlikely in the extreme that China would give up its program of censoring mainland culture and especially politics. It wants to control the dialogue and thwart political dissent. So I told Google, “Google, ya gotta go. Stop enabling Chinese censorship. Do as you promised and provide a desperately needed and inspiring example of refusing any longer to cooperate with tyranny.”

I feared Google would retreat from its public commitment. But now Google agrees that for the Chinese government, “self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.” So Google is redirecting Chinese users of its search engine (Google.cn) to its Hong Kong search engine (Google.com.hk), where results are not currently censored because of the “one country, two systems” policy that has been at least roughly followed since China took over Hong Kong in 1997.

Whether citizens on the mainland will be able to get uncensored search results from the Hong Kong Google search engine is an open question at best. But any censorship of those results will now be perpetrated by China without Google’s active cooperation. Good for Google.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.