Category: too much government

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free trade & free markets too much government

Wicked Trimmers of Cost

Robberies. Corruption. Furious government-enabled debt expansion in the name of curing the effects of prior furious government-enabled debt expansion. Murders. War.

And now, carpooling.

Yes, just when you think maybe it really is time to move to Canada to escape American insanity, you hear about how our neighbors to the north are harassing people for daring to save money on gas.

The alleged villain is an online startup called PickupPal.com. This is a website enabling people going places to hook up with other people going places. The site actively fosters collusive cooperation among travelers. My blood boils! Grr!

Two problems with this, if you live in Ontario.

First, Ontario strictly regulates ridesharing. Ontario riders can carpool only to and from work; must ride with the same person every day; may pay that person for their trouble only once a week; may not cross municipal boundaries during the ride; etcetera.

Second, Ontario bus companies are huge fans of these regulations. So the bus companies sued PickupPal. And the Ontario courts have just fined PickupPal over $11,000 Canadian dollars for making possible a $60 ride from Toronto to Montreal. PickupPal must also somehow enforce the Toronto regulations on their website.

Finally, the world is safe again for Ontario bus service.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Obaminableonomics

There’s a new school of economic thought: Obaminableonomics.

Come to think of it, though, maybe there’s nothing so very new about this Obaminable economic school — after all, it just combines typical big-government redistribution with a few nominal nods in the direction of fiscal self-discipline.

You can get a concise idea of the Obaminable approach to economics from a headline that floated into my In Box the other day. I quote: “Obama Promotes Fiscal Restraint, Big Spending.” According to the reporter, the president-elect “wants to project fiscal restraint even as his economic team assembles a massive recovery package that could cost several hundred billion dollars.”

Huh?

Well, President-Elect Barack Obama thinks he erases the contradiction by contrasting his short-term plans with his long-term plans. Short-term, government must spend like there’s no tomorrow, because this is what we allegedly need to see happening if we are to regain confidence in our future. Yes, we absolutely must see an endless parade of babbling bureaucrats going hog-wild with taxpayer dollars on a wide array of ludicrous, unworkable schemes. Absolutely.

After that, though, will come the line-by-line budget review, the ruthless cutting out of bloat.

Well, any alcoholic will tell you that he can stop whenever he likes. Just so, our rulers keep putting off the restraint of fiscal restraint.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

What About the Roads?

The classic political study Crisis and Leviathan, by Robert Higgs, argues that the state often exploits the sense of urgency that attends a crisis to enlarge itself as the way to “solve” the problem — even when government itself created the problem.

The federal government’s profligate credit policies, which fueled the now-busted housing bubble, come to mind. The government’s “solution” here is to lard some failed companies with subsidies and nationalize others. Why? Oh, no time to think, just hurry up and do it before investors get even more jittery.

Sometimes, though, officials scrambling for a solution consider solutions that might actually help. Crumbling infrastructure is on the minds of many city and state politicians. But the tough economy is also on their minds. Many are therefore more open these days to the idea of private financing of roads
and bridges. As Norman Mineta, former transportation secretary, puts it, ”Budget gaps are starting to increase the viability of public-private partnerships.”

I don’t know about the “partnership” part of it. Too often such ”partnerships” mean that a business is prevented from making good decisions, or is protected from the costs of bad decisions.

If we’re going to delegate a train or road to a private company, let them take full responsibility for it. Companies that succeed will get us from here to there just fine. And taxpayers won’t have to cough up money for the ones that fail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Al Gore Reinvents the Internet

Former Vice President Al Gore wants a “purpose-driven Web.”

See, cyberspace isn’t purpose-driven . . . yet. It only helps us access all the information in the world, communicate instantly at no cost with people on the other side of the globe, find true love, shop, download books and movies and lectures, elect presidents, refute environmentalist alarmism, save lives, and other such trivia.

A New York Times article reports that in Al Gore’s view, “we” haven’t done enough to spread his vision of the imminent doom of the earth.

Gore can’t be held accountable for anybody else’s understanding of his views, of course. So let’s find a direct quote from this article about how “we” must do more with the Web than just trade party photos on Facebook.

According to Gore, speaking at an Internet conference in San Francisco, “Web 2.0 has to have a purpose.”

What purpose?

Nothing less, he declares, than “bring[ing] about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth.”

Sounds quite grand, as long you don’t try to divine what the words actually mean.

In my online world, individual lives and individual purposes matter quite a lot, despite a lack of overarching purpose. Offline too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights too much government

Second Amendment Foundation Hits Target

Better late than never.

It was one of the most laborious and disgusting clean-up jobs that had to be done after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Finally the Second Amendment Foundation has achieved satisfaction in its “clean-up” lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for using the hurricane as an excuse to grab guns from law-abiding citizens.

In September of 2005, the Foundation teamed up with the National Rifle Association to sue the New Orleans government for violating the right of innocent residents to bear arms. In the wake of Katrina, guns were grabbed without warrants, without even any probable cause or reasonable suspicion of crimes.

Just when people and their homes were at their most vulnerable, the forces of alleged law enforcement made it even harder for them to protect themselves against looters and other criminals.

It has taken three long years for New Orleans to agree to return the stolen weapons to their rightful owners. Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, says he is glad the suit is finally settled. But he adds that it should never have been necessary.

Gottlieb hopes the permanent injunction will “[send] a signal to mayors and police chiefs everywhere that we live in a nation of laws, and those laws are not subject to their whims.”

Natural disasters are no excuse to crumple the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Unintended Consequences!!!

Here’s a revelation: A story headlined, “Bailout funds being spent in ways Congress never foresaw.”

What? Our omniscient congressmen failed to forecast the fate of their latest multifarious munificence?

You know, whenever I myself spend hundreds of billions on random questionable socialistic takeovers of the economy, I always demand an itemized account of exactly what I will get in return. Always.

It seems that the $700 billion just authorized by Congress is not only being spent on buying up troubled mortgages but is changing into a “broader bailout of all sorts of troubled businesses.” Some banks used the money to buy other banks instead of to “spur more lending.” And other recipients are paying dividends to stockholders.

Apparently, various central planners of our economy expected those receiving the money to use it in more publicly spirited fashion.

Such caviling ignores the real problem, which is more basic. You can’t cure the effects of gignormous debt creation and gignormous subsidizing of unwise enterprises with even more gignormous debt creation and gignormous subsidizing.

If massive intervention in markets caused the economy to curdle, roll back the massive intervention. Let investors take risks with their own money.

But don’t get drunk all over again, faster and harder, and expect that this time there won’t be any hangover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets insider corruption nannyism too much government

The Boomers’ Bust

Remember when Bill Clinton ascended to the presidency? There were hurrahs. At last the Baby Boom generation had its own president!

We’ve gone through another Baby Boom president, and now we — and I’m talkin’ ’bout my generation, here — have our very own economic bust. Call it the Boomers’ Bust.

John Kass, writing in the Chicago Tribune, notes how different things look for Boomers, now. “In the ’70s,” Kass writes, “the slogan was ‘Do your own thing.” But today’s slogan might be ‘Washington, please save us.’”

Kass attributes some of the difference merely to age. When we were young, we took risks. Now that we’re older, we simply want to keep our houses and our cars and our TV sets, and our retirement plans.

The ominous marker in all this is the transfer of power. In our desires, demands, for security, we’ve given up a lot. Kass says we are giving up “liberty for all” and exchanging it with “power in the hands of a few.”

We can see it is who gains most: people and corporations on the inside track. But, as Kass points out, look who loses: “The casualty will be the entrepreneurs, those on the outside. . . . Such men and women will be on the outside for decades now.”

Since it was entrepreneurs who accomplished the most enduring good during the last 40 years, this will be tragic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Unbefreakinlievable

Now what?

Well, now the governors are going to Washington to beg for bailouts. New York Governor Paterson and New Jersey Governor Corzine have schlepped their way up to the Hill to explain that they are “cutting all [they] can” from their bloated budgets, and to demand some “relief.”

I don’t believe that the notoriously corrupt governments of New York and New Jersey have pared their budgets to the bone. Or that the only way to cut another dollar is to throw some little old lady out onto the street.

I also don’t believe that the federal government has some magical way of getting money that state governments don’t have. It all comes from the same group of us taxpayers. Unless these governors are talking about taking cash from other states, where else would the money come from? Where but out of thin air — borrowing plus the trusty old printing press?

The feds are wearing the same blinkers as these gubernatorial guys. For example, the wizards at the Federal Reserve are struggling to bring interest rates to zero — as if cheap credit in the past had nothing to do with all the misbegotten easy mortgage loans spawning the present crisis.

Now, I put it to you: If fiscal irresponsibility can be increased from mammoth to infinity, will that, at last, solve the problem? If the Fed were to drop-ship crates of cash and credit cards onto every neighborhood in America, will that, at last, solve the problem?

Unbefreakinlievable.

We need some Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Socialism Fails . . . in Hawaii

We may have dismal years ahead of us. Democrats ruling Congress while Barack Obama, Mr. Redistributionist, will preside over an attempt to move in lurch step to massive new amounts of spending and taxes.

I write these words before the election, so maybe by the time you hear them, the electorate will have proved me wrong. But, hey: Under a McCain administration the federales would still not likely shy away from big government insanity.

There is, however, hope. When wishful thinking slams head-on into practical reality, sometimes we take stock. Sometimes we even say things like, “Know what? This is dumb and destructive. Let’s stop.”

We saw this in the 1980s and ’90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the turn toward freer markets in many former Soviet or other tyrannies (and near-tyrannies) around in the world.

And we’ve just seen an example here in the states, in Hawaii. There the state is ending its universal health care plan for children. Why? Because it was getting too expensive.

A government doctor in Hawaii named Kenny Fink reports, “People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free.” He adds that that this was not the purpose.

Of course not. Socialism is never supposed to kill economic incentives and self-responsibility. It just always does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights too much government

Light Rail, Too Heavy for Developers

American city planners tend to obsess over trains. Though not nearly as economical as buses, light rail trains are regarded as the gold standard in public transportation.

But ten years after Portland established its westside line, just how bad an investment light rail can be is becoming clear. So argues John A. Charles, Jr., president of the Cascade Policy Institute.

The area’s light rail system is called MAX. The westside line put up in 1998 maxed out at $963 million. Taxpayers nationwide footed nearly three-quarters of the bill, which went through over the protests of the Federal Transit Authority.

The FTA didn’t like the route, because it was run through a lot of empty area. Why? Because planners hoped that developers would build high-density housing along the line, thus justifying the route as time went on. It was a grand experiment in metropolitan planning.

Metro planners then cajoled and forced various city governments to redo their zoning laws to make the high-density developments more train-dependent. They specified an extremely scarce supply of parking.

And the developers? They stayed away in droves. As a landowner put it, “it’s never been developed” because of that very “mandated lack of parking.”

Government geniuses might think they can force people into the types of communities that people don’t want, like people were lab rats. Peculiar thing is, folks just naively thinking they are free, tend not to jump aboard that train . . . so to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.