Category: too much government

Deadly Dress Code

Iranian women are again out in the streets protesting the brutality of the regime.

We can only hope that their efforts will bear fruit — or, if we’re Elon Musk, we can also provide protesters with Internet service via Starlink satellite, now that the Iranian government has blocked the Internet in much of the country.

The immediate spark was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

On September 13, Mahsa was arrested by Iran’s morality police for incorrectly wearing the hijab, the traditional head covering mandatory for Iranian women since 1979. Some of her hair showed.

According to witnesses, the police beat Mahsa in the police van; the police deny it.

Within hours of being detained, Mahsa was hospitalized and in a coma. She soon died. The police not very plausibly claimed that she had a heart attack. All a terrible coincidence. The family says that Mahsa had no health problems before being detained.

The immoral morality police were obeying the country’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, who on August 15 decreed that the nation’s dress code be more strictly enforced.

The protests — in which women have been burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and shouting “Death to the oppressor!” — are ongoing and nationwide, and have spread to other countries.

At least thirty protesters have been killed.

In the words of the New Yorker’s Robin Wright, Mahsa’s death “lit the fuse of long-smoldering dissent in Iran,” and its people have taken to the streets before.

Godspeed this time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Hijab, Iran, morality police, revolt, revolution, woman

folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Energy Trap

madness of crowds, energy policy, electric cars, fuel, oil

After the spectacular failures of the COVID response, “the experts” appear to be on a roll. That is, they are once again not “following the science” but being led by politics, ideology, and the madness of crowds.

The big issues right now demonstrating mass folly on a societal level? Aside from agriculture policy, trade, subsidy, banking and high finance, and “climate change,” the big one — not unrelated to most of the rest — is the power grid.

About which our leaders seem to be nuts.

What we know is the supply of “renewable energy” is nowhere near enough to meet the general demand for energy. California’s a great example, announcing “the end of fossil fuel-powered car sales by 2035” but sporting a power grid that is already unable to handle demand, which became bitterly funny when the Golden State asked citizens not to charge their electric cars during high-demand hot days.

“US Power Grid Needs Trillions in Upgrades to Accommodate Renewable Energy Demands,” reads a recent Epoch Times feature.

Trillions.

It’s not as if America is rolling, like Uncle Scrooge, in trillion-dollar surpluses. As I type these words, the US Debt Clock shows the federal government quickly approaching $31 trillion in public debt.

So now we’ll need more trillions to keep the lights on?

Yes.

Our lives depend on electrical energy, our civilization runs on electricity, but our leaders have been painting us into a corner. Bad policies that hobble efficient fuel sources and pushing inefficient sources have set a trap.

And the only real way out of the trap is one politicians don’t like: admitting they were wrong and reversing their policies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags debt crisis, energy policy, oil, solar power

initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

SF Scheme Scuttled

The proposed tax was very popular. In San Francisco. It polled at nearly 75 percent in favor.

But it possessed a fatal flaw.

And worse.

The fatal flaw? The numbers didn’t add up.

Organizers spent nearly half a million bucks developing and promoting and getting the petition signatures to place Proposition K on this November’s ballot.

The notion? Tax Amazon sales within city limits to fund a guaranteed income scheme in the Golden City.

But then they learned — after it qualified for the ballot — that it was an incoherent tax-and-spend mess. Its chief pusher, John Elberling, admitted, reports The San Francisco Standard, that “he made mistakes in calculating how Amazon earns its revenue in the city.” And, The Standard continues, “the City Controller’s office found that the tax measure would actually harm hundreds of small businesses in San Francisco and cut revenue to the city’s general fund by about $10 million a year.”

So Elberling ate crow, admitting to error (and also, apparently, to misleading petition signers), and a judge removed Prop K from the ballot.

Whew. Disaster averted.

Alas, Elberling promises to “perfect” his scheme, and advance it again.

Which is ominous, for the core idea itself — adding on more taxes to fund a trendy-but-disastrous “guaranteed income” — is not the way out of California’s progressive-induced nightmare. It’s just a vastly bigger version of what’s gone on before.

If Californians don’t develop more common sense about the limitations of salvation-by-government, they are doomed to repeat such folly.

That goes double for San Franciscans.

Who this time have a reprieve, thankfully.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags guaranteed income, San Francisco, taxes, unintended consequences

government transparency too much government

Last of the Big Spenders

The state government of California spends a lot of money. But how much and on what?

That information has, apparently, been a state secret.

Until now.

For years, a watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com has been working to discover and disclose government spending in the United States. Its efforts were enabled by 2006 legislation sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to establish a website, USASpending.gov, that details federal expenditures. Until his death in 2020, Coburn was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.

The group reports that in 2021, it filed some 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on some $12 trillion of government spending. So they’ve been busy.

California is now the fiftieth state whose spending is being made public in detail.

The state had long resisted requests for info about its spending. State controller Betty Yee said that it was impossible to comply with such requests because California has no central database of government payments. Compiling the data would be too darn hard.

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com performed the chore instead, filing requests for public records with each of 469 state-government entities.

According to founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”

Various budgetary items will doubtless prove controversial — now that they are publicly known.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags California, FOIA, oversight, spending

First Amendment rights public opinion too much government

The Method to the Current Madness

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 30, 2022
14 Comments on The Method to the Current Madness

fact checking, fake news, social media, censorship, Covid, public health

The safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines has been disputed from the beginning.

What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-state as fact the original and now more-dubious propaganda.

Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.

How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-claims carry their own weight.

In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”

And as excess deaths and inexplicable demises increase around the world we are “not allowed” to state this in many public forums.

No way to run a health crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, covid, social media

government transparency too much government

Trudeauvian Tyranny

Discovery in a lawsuit brought against the Canadian Government has revealed that “Follow the Science” was a ruse.

When Trudeau’s administration announced, last year, a restrictive travel ban on all who refused to get “vaccinated” against COVID, the breathtaking nature of the political move (which was followed by a snap election) — and its sheer illiberality from a Liberal — may have overshadowed how little science was behind it.*

Of course, now that the vaccines have proven to be ineffective at stopping the disease, the medical rationale seems especially shaky. But, as Rupa Subramanya writes at Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” Substack news page, “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”

Among the juicy revelations uncovered?

“No one in the COVID Recovery unit” — which Ms. Subramanya identifies as “the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate” — possessed any medical credentials or had undergone any significant medical training.

The impetus for the travel ban came from above, in Trudeau’s cabinet.

And, juicier yet, “leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short.”

Oddly, the COVID Recovery unit has no website, and is rarely mentioned in official documents.

The plaintiffs in the case that has brought the information to light are Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard. Lawsuits are expensive, and some of the funds to bring the case forward were raised on GoFundMe. In February, following Trudeau’s crackdown on the Trucker protest, GoFundMe kicked Rickard off the site.

In mid-June, Canada lifted the travel bans. But threatened to re-introduce them as, er, needed.

What we have learned is that the “necessity” was always a political one.

The science was just not there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Emails released recently by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration show a similar lack-of-science basis for high-level political requirements for dramatic “medical” responses to COVID.

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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.

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h/t crAIyon

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Tags economics, inflation, regulations