Category: too much government

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general freedom too much government

1984 in 2010

Students in a Pennsylvania school district are learning more about George Orwell’s novel 1984 than they had expected.

No, they’re not being subjected to “a boot stamping on a human face, forever” — the bottom line of Orwell’s bleak techno-totalitarian dystopia — but they sure have gotten an unexpected taste of the telescreen in every room.

The Lower Merion School District says it intended no such thing when it handed out webcam-equipped laptops to 1,800 students. It says that the only purpose of its ability to switch on the cams remotely was to help track lost or stolen laptops.

But Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High, found out different. According to a class action lawsuit against the district, assistant principal Lindy Matsko confronted him about a bad deed he had allegedly done at home. As proof, Matsko pointed to an image on the laptop taken by the webcam. Matsko thought it showed Blake taking drugs. Blake says he had simply been eating Mike & Ike candies. Nor had he reported a lost laptop.

What exactly happened with these webcams will be thrashed out in court. It’s also being investigated by the FBI. But the district admits it never told anybody that it could operate the webcams remotely.

The kicker is this: Kids at the school had just read Orwell’s novel. I guess they’ll remember it better now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

Idealism or Brute Power Play?

Senator John McCain and other politicians advocate violating your right to contribute as much as you want to the political candidates you support. They also advocate violating your right to speak as much as you want, either positively or negatively, about a candidate.

Do they support these repressive doctrines out of misguided idealism, or misguided pragmatic politics? Doubtless the answer depends on the individual. But McCain certainly acts as if today’s confusing welter of campaign finance regulation best serves as a very convenient club to beat an upstart challenger over the head and shoulders.

McCain faces a tough primary. His conservative challenger, J.D. Hayworth, a former congressman, is also a radio talk show host. Or at least he was until buddies of the senator began yelping to the Federal Election Commission. See, Hayworth attacked McCain on his show, which supposedly makes his show a form of “political advertising.” As a result of this pressure, Hayworth and the station agreed to take the show off the air.

Jason Rose, who works with Hayworth, calls what happened a “political mugging.” Sounds right to me.

McCain is on record endorsing what his friends did here. So . . . Hayworth can say anything he wants to — à la the First Amendment — unless it’s a criticism of McCain.

Funny how the framers failed to stipulate this when they were putting together the Constitution and that First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Hope and Change in NJ

Spending sprees are fun. The responsible cut-backs after such sprees? Not so much fun.

Seems the recent gubernatorial election made a difference in New Jersey. There’s change there. Also hope.

Last November, running on a platform of fiscal sanity, Republican challenger Chris Christie defeated the Democratic Governor Jon Corzine. And it seems that, unlike a certain U.S. president, Christie has every intention of following through.

In early February, Christie told lawmakers that the state’s finances remain a mess and that the budget passed eight months ago is full of “all of the same worn out tricks of the trade” that have driven New Jersey to the edge of bankruptcy.

He said that the legacy of “irresponsible budgeting of the past, coupled with failed tax policies which lie like a heavy, wet blanket suffocating tax revenues and job growth” require extraordinary steps to bring the budget back into balance.

So on his own initiative, Christie is freezing spending across an array of programs. For example, he is cutting the subsidy to New Jersey Transit and urging managers of public transportation to “improve efficiency . . . revisit its rich union contracts,” be more fiscally responsible and efficient. He’s also targeting bloated government pensions and education funding.

Can Governor Christie complete the pivot to fiscal common sense despite the hurricane of opposition he faces? Time will tell. But it would be hard to imagine a better start.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets too much government

Take That Money

I didn’t notice it right away, but President Obama included some strange stuff about student loans in his State of the Union address. He called the current system an “unwarranted” taxpayer subsidy to banks.

Well, yeah. His solution? Another unwarranted taxpayer subsidy.

The president seeks to give families a $10,000 tax credit for sending kids to college. He also insists that no student spend more than 10 percent of his income to pay back loans, and that the unpaid portion of loans be forgiven after 20 years.

Further, if the former student happens to work for the government, the loan would be forgiven in half that time — just ten years!

This amounts to a huge special favor to government workers, of course. It may sound nice and patriotic when the president calls it “public service,” but it seems less so when you realize that government workers now earn, on average, more than private sector workers. Perhaps the fact that public employee unions are a big spending political powerhouse for Obama and Democrats matters in some small way.

Alas, more vote buying.

The president used an interesting phrase, explaining what he’s up to. He instructs us to “take that money” now loaned by banks and “give to families.” This is pseudo-specific. It’s not the same money.

But a politician obscuring the real source of wealth is nothing new.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government U.S. Constitution

The Man Who Would Be Missed

A billboard went up in Wyoming, Minnesota. It features a photo of ex-prez George W. Bush, with a goofy smile and one of his off-kilter, clumsy poses, with the large caption “Miss Me Yet?”

Some dispute the intent of the message. The anonymous businessmen who paid for it aren’t talking. But it seems pretty clear to me. To ask the question is to challenge the current man in the hot seat.

For my part, I never hated George W. Bush the way some did — but I never admired him as did many others. In my mind, Bush didn’t do much for limited government and the rule of law. He mostly moved things in the other direction.

Sadly, that “other direction” is not exactly a new direction. It’s old hat. More government. More regulation. More spending. More debt.

And, even sadder, the current president likes George W. Bush’s direction. He’s taken Bush’s Keynesian stimulus ideas, and upped the ante. He took the bailouts, and bailed out more businesses. And he took Bush’s two wars, and he’s put more money and men and women into them.

Miss Mr. Bush? There are days when it looks like we’re experiencing his third term. And enough was enough already, long ago.

How long ago?

Picture good ol’ Grover Cleveland, and picture that picture with the caption, “Miss Me Yet?”

Well, yes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Smart Reaction?

If you balk at having more and more of your life run from the nation’s capital, you’re stupid.

Or, so blares Joe Klein in a Time magazine online article, “Too dumb to thrive.”

See, “smart” Americans understand that a trillion in federal “stimulus” spending can only do “good.” Apparently dumb Americans are the ones telling pollsters that the “stimulus” money is being wasted.

Klein says the biggest part of the stimulus is a tax cut for most, meaning more money in their paychecks. But ignorant Americans focus on the huge debts we’ll have to pay back . . . in higher taxes.

Klein says that the second biggest portion of stimulus money went to state governments to keep our kids’ teachers from being laid off and state taxes from being raised. The notion that without the stimulus all the public school teachers would have been pink-slipped is a bit much.

As for higher state taxes, couldn’t state spending actually be cut? And not just on police, teachers and firemen?

Klein’s blithering blathering reminds me of Chris Matthews, and other MSNBC geniuses, who contend that politicians are in deep doo-doo because “people are angry and scared” and want to take their frustrations out on someone.

People are angry and scared, sure. But taking out our anger out on those responsible for destroying our wealth and freedom seems . . . well .  .  . smart.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Do As I Don’t

Many American politicians decry any attempt to liberalize the market for grade school education. They insist that the public school system must be protected from competition. They hate charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, anything like that.

Yet many of these same politicians send their own kids to private schools.

But simultaneously promoting government-run industry, while choosing private alternatives, isn’t just an education pathology. Consider medicine.

Canadian politicians eager for medical care that really works have made it a habit to travel to the United States to get it. The latest is Danny Williams, premier of the Canadian providence of Newfoundland and Labradour. Williams recently trekked stateside for heart surgery. His office wasn’t releasing many details, but indicated that the surgery isn’t routine.

That explains it. If there’s any chance a life-saving procedure will be tricky, quality is really important.

Williams’s deputy premier, Kathy Dunderdale, told reporters that surgery in the province was never an option. She said: “He is doing what’s best for him.” I’m sure that’s true.

Folks, we can’t, just cannot, further put the American medical industry under government bureaucratic control — that is, make our health care as bad as Canada’s. There’s got to be somewhere for our Canadian friends to go when they really need the good stuff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Do the Right Thing – Later

Late in life, St. Augustine characterized his youthful, wayward ways in a droll prayer: “Lord, make me chaste and celibate — but not yet!”

Today, politicians of both parties understand the sentiment.

On Monday of last week, President Barack Obama unveiled his budget to Congress with this nicely worded maxim: “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”

Obama proposed a record budget of $3.8 trillion — including a deficit of well over $1 trillion. We can’t keep deficit spending like this, but we keep deficit spending like this.

Talking to reporters, Obama admitted that he and his friends in Congress “won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight.” He cited the need for more job creation as reason to continue to spend so much money.

Money we don’t have. So it will be borrowed. Against future taxes. Or future default.

Sure, the president is proposing a freeze. To start next fiscal year. And he’s proposing a bipartisan committee to cook up some way to balance the budget. The committee hasn’t been formed yet.

That seems like too much procrastination for the state of our nation. I think St. Augustine would agree with me: Virtue is not something you put off until next year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Disaster Economics 101

Could House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have spilled the beans, laid bare her party’s vision of economic growth in one offhand utterance?

A terrible tragedy in impoverished Haiti. An earthquake. The scope of the damage staggers the imagination . . . and spurs outpourings of charitable aid from America, and across the globe.

And this is where Mrs. Pelosi chimes in. As if she had never heard of the Broken Window Fallacy, she just blurted it out, hazarding that Haiti “can leap-frog over its past challenges, economically, politically, and demographically in terms of the rich and the poor and the rest there, and have a new — just a new, fresh start.”

Over 70,000 dead, Haiti in ruins, and she’s talking about hope for a “real boom economy.”

Now, I know, politicians like to spend money. They think it does a lot of good — though in Haiti’s case, the billions spent, previously, have sure fizzled. But Pelosi isn’t just arguing that the aid is going to remake an impoverished country. She thinks that scurrying about rebuilding is a net positive.

If you wonder why politicians so like economic booms, even the most artificial ones, look no further. They cannot distinguish between real progress and the frenzy of making up for disaster.

Perhaps that’s why they are so nonchalant about the disasters their own taxes and regulations so often cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Who Killed Disco?

The age of the glittery mirror ball and loud, simple dance music is over.

According to Ian Schrager, as recorded in Vanity Fair’s recent oral history of disco, it “wasn’t AIDS that made the nightclub business difficult. Government regulations did it in.”

Schrager and his partner set up their first nightclub, in Queens, for $27,000. The more famous Studio 54 — or is that “infamous”? — went up for $400,000.

“Now,” says Schrager, a major real estate developer, “with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards . . . before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.”

And it’s not just disco that’s suffered. It’s worth remembering one sad side effect of all the red tape cities and states put up to new enterprises. It leaves the private sector desperate to focus on the surest forms of wealth generation, less able to serve niche markets. Like discos.

Nowadays, to establish and run non-school,  non-work activities for young people, volunteers organize community events, write grant applications and hold out their hats. This crowds out funding for needier, worthier charities, and litters our towns with poorly run government-funded efforts.

Personally, I don’t like disco — but could it be that things were better when entrepreneurs like Schrager set the stage?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.