Category: too much government

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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.

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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.

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

How Not to Help Haiti

Haiti has suffered horrific devastation. It didn’t have to.

There was no way to prevent the 7.0 earthquake itself. But estimates of as many as 200,000 dead? That didn’t have to happen.

Economist Donald Boudreaux recalls that in 1989, an equally powerful quake hit the San Francisco Bay area. It caused lots of trouble but killed fewer than 70 people. But Haiti is a much poorer country than the U.S., with weaker buildings and roads, for starters.

Why so poor?

Haiti is not a free society. It’s had one corrupt tyrant after another, recently emerged from the terrorizing rule of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was sent packing in 2004.

Many pundits are saying that the way to strengthen Haitian society over the long haul is torrents of foreign aid. Economist Jeffrey Sachs wants Washington to spend billions on a five-year development plan, which he says it should fund by taxing Wall Street bonuses.

Charity and rescue efforts are wonderful. Government-to-government foreign aid, not so much. Haiti has remained desperately poor despite the massive flow of foreign aid, which, over the years, has mainly subsidized corruption. What Haiti needs is stability. The ability to attract investment. Less propping up of corrupt politicians. Less foreign aid, more freedom.

But a free society is something Haitians will have to build themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Impossible Dream, Real Nightmare

Over at Amazon.com there’s a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”

Some visitors decry the horrors of socialism enabled by such wishful thinking. Others say, “Hey, be fair! The calamitous ‘socialist’ regimes of the 20th century aren’t what Wilde was talking about!”

But not many volunteer for Wilde’s “voluntary” socialism. To impose such utopian dreams society-wide can only be done by force.

If an unrepentant socialist admits the track record, he must insist that his own ideas of perfect, magically blissful equality have been ignored or misappropriated. What he proposes is the socialism in which the incentives and demands of human life in society have disappeared, in which men and women are disembodied spirits, in which wishes are all-powerful fairy dust.

In the real world, socialism quickly devolves into the looting of the better-off and transferring a portion of said loot to the lesser-off — at the point of a gun. The more consistently socialists work to equalize everyone’s economic condition, the more rampantly and brutally they must deploy coercion. And so, under socialism, comes death to individual hopes, dreams, options . . . and souls.

The unbridgeable gulf between socialist fantasies and inconvenient facts explains much about recent health care reform. ObamaCare won’t be the socialist medical nirvana anybody was proposing. But it never could have been.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government U.S. Constitution

Know Your Rights

For years, politicians and activists have declared that we have a right to medical care. Not a right to freely contract for medical services, mind you, but a fundamental right to medical care.

This assertion serves as the moral force behind those pushing for nationalized, universal health care legislation. But can medical care really be a basic right?

Well, it’s nowhere to be found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Should it be?

Again, no.

Rights cannot involve requiring others to provide a product or service to us. We can’t simply demand, with talk of rights, the expertise and labor of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. Why? Because they possess the same rights we possess, in particular, the right not to be enslaved.

Watching the 2,000-page health care bill plod through the congressional sausage factory, the fraudulent nature of this “right to medical care” claim becomes painfully obvious. We’re not getting a new right from the deal. Instead, politicians are slapping us with a new mandate, forcing us to fork over our hard-earned money to health insurance companies.

If our right to freedom of speech worked this way, the First Amendment would mandate that we buy a local newspaper and sign up for cable TV or XM Radio. The Second Amendment would force us to own a gun and pay dues to the NRA.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom too much government

Googling and Snuggling No More?

After years of abetting Chinese censorship, Google may finally take a stand. The world leader in Internet search may no longer be willing to help impose the Red regime’s repressive measures. The last straw? A cyber attack on Google that originated in China and targeted email accounts of Chinese dissidents. Other companies were also attacked.

In recent decades, China has loosened controls on its economy. But it is loath to permit any significant scraps of civil liberty as well, like the right to speak out freely in criticism of the government.

China lets the Internet function within its borders. But it also erects firewalls, filters and other restrictions to block or limit access to various corners of cyberspace. For years, Google has cravenly played along, preventing phrases like “Tiananmen Square massacre” from being searched on the Chinese version of its search engine.

Google officers have long squirmed over their hypocritical willingness to “do evil.” Now a Google lawyer says the company is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results. . . .” They’re taking a few weeks to mull their next move. But they say they’ll leave China altogether if its government won’t agree to let Google’s search engine function freely.

China’s rulers won’t agree; so I hope Google does what it says it will do. Some things one should just not collaborate with. Tyranny is at the top of the list.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Where to Cut, and How

State and local governments have been hard hit by the current depression. What to do?

Cut.

But where?

Well, legislatures could simply repeal all increases and programs starting with the most recent, going back month by month, year by year to nix spending until total spending dips below current revenue. Legislatures around the country should go into sessions of repeal.

Or they could target endemic over-spending. According to a January Cato Institute Tax & Budget Bulletin, one area of over-spending in need of tackling is “Employee Compensation in State and Local Governments.”

According to the bulletin’s author, Chris Edwards, there are several distinct indicators that demonstrate that government workers are generally overpaid.

Comparisons of compensation between state and local workers and private sector workers show a 1.45 ratio, with government workers garnering nearly half again as much as private sector workers.

The percentage of government employees to receive benefit packages over salary is also significantly higher than private sector laborers.

Further, Edwards notes, “data show that the average quit rate in the state and local workforce is just one-third the rate in the private sector. This suggests that state and local pay is higher than needed to attract qualified workers.”

So, rational employers — that is, the citizenry — would start there, first by freezing wages and new hires, then by decreasing benefits and reining in profligate promises in retirement packages.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights too much government

Bitterroot Water Ruling

“Frankly, I’m an Obama guy . . . You hear these sort-of horror stories about the government is gonna take your property, or they’re gonna confiscate your ground, and I always thought it was some sort of libertarian gobbledy-gook. But in this case this is exactly what’s happening.”

That was Huey Lewis; this is the news: The Mitchell Slough, in the Bitterroots of Montana, is a century-old irrigation ditch. Newcomers to the area, including rocker Huey Lewis, worked on the slough to make it better for fish. Though farmers were at first skeptical, the redigging and unsilting made the slough better for agriculture as well as for fish.

But those fish are valuable. Other folks covet them.

In Montana, natural water bodies must be accessible to the public. So the recreation lobby took the slough’s owners to court.

At first, the historical facts of this man-made water system held sway. But the Montana State Supreme Court overturned all this, caving in to the intense political pressure to open up the slough to public access.

People with fishing rods may rejoice now, but their victory will be Pyrrhic. The fish and wildlife will degrade. Basically, Montana’s highest court unleashed what is called the “tragedy of the commons.” Public access of a common resource often leads to overuse, in this case, over-fishing. It’s sad news for Huey Lewis, farmers, fishermen . . . and fish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
responsibility too much government

Global Gall

Human cells have 46 chromosomes. So all the relevant evidence tells us.

But suppose persuasive evidence emerged that human cells have, say, 48 chromosomes? And suppose hackers discovered emails by prominent biologists talking about the need to “hide the extra chromosomes”? Or to prevent other biologists from discussing the evidence for these extras?

And suppose after the scandal broke, a government agency asked biologists to sign a petition “defending the integrity of genetic science” against “skeptics”?

Hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Unit confirm that there is more deception and less unity in climate science than many have claimed. Debate about the extent of global warming and of mankind’s contribution to it intensifies. But some scientists have struggled to suppress this debate and even to hide basic climate data.

In response to the scandal, the United Kingdom’s national weather service recently asked climatologists to sign a petition saying everything is hunky-dory in climate research and the official global-warming paradigm.

Hey, I like petitions, but . . . are we doing science here? Or politics?

One anonymous scientist, quoted in The Times of London, explained that UK’s weather service “is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming.”

I think my question has been answered.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.