Category: too much government

The $165,000 Question

How far will the enemies of liberty go?

Well, almost all the way to armed robbery, for the latest outrage by foes of individual rights looks an awful lot like just that, plain armed robbery.

The victims?

The owners and staff of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey.

On January 13, at the behest of Governor Phil Murphy, state officials seized the assets of the gym. These assets included $165,000 in the business’s bank account, all of which, says co-owner Ian Smith, had come from donations and online sales of T‑shirts and other apparel.

For months, the owners of Atilis have been involved in a pitched battle with the state of New Jersey over orders to shut down the gym, which they have kept open despite those orders (for which disobedience they were arrested in July). Atilis has been pursuing litigation to overturn the order, revocation of its license, and fines ($15,000+ per day) that the state has imposed to punish the defiance.

Smith is asking for our help as he and his business partner confront Leviathan.

“This was never about protection, it was always about control,” he says. “Please continue to support us in any way possible. Please share as much as you possibly can this story and help us continue our fight.”

Visit the Atilis Gym website to buy merchandise, and visit the gym’s GoFundMe page to “support the efforts to reopen and stay open” and to help staff and members cope with the financial hardships imposed by the shutdown order.

And subsequent armed robbery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Covid 19, free markets, freedom, too much government

too much government

Distill This

This story started out lousy and then swerved into neutral. But there are still problems under the hood.

At the very end of 2020 (good riddance, 2020!), U.S. distilleries were suddenly faced with a ludicrous FDA tax of $14,000 for using their facilities to make alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

These adaptive distilleries — about 835 of them — have long used alcohol to make booze, of course. But early last year, lockdowns began to massively reduce demand for alcoholic beverages in certain venues. It made sense to begin producing hand sanitizer in order to meet the massively new pandemic-induced demand for sanitizer.

Win-win, until, in the last days of 2020, FDA decided that such flexible pivoting deserved what amounts to a penalty. Bureaucrats decided that producing hand sanitizer changed how the 835 distilleries should be classified. Entities so classified — as “over-the-counter drug monograph facilities” — are supposed to pay the $14,000 fee.

Media coverage and the outcry by already-walloped distilleries has, however, led the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind the penalty. HHS has told FDA to stand down. The fee has been cancelled.

So everybody is happy now, the way you’re happy when the sledgehammer swinging down doesn’t bash you in the head after all.

Aaron Bergh of Calwise Spirits wonders whether distilleries will still get hit with such a fee in 2021. What the government giveth, it can taketh. For now, though, like everyone else, he’s just darn relieved.

Happy New Year, folks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags FDA, freedom, government, tax policy

general freedom too much government

A Tyrant’s License

Covid, virus, epidemic, US Flag, lockdown

The “lockdowns” are not how a free society would handle a contagion.

Free people might advisedly wear masks and physically distance themselves from others when they are especially vulnerable to an airborne disease, or they themselves show some symptoms.*

But free people take risks, too, and accept responsibility for risks taken. And they go about trying to improve their lives generally, in society.

In society, via commerce.

Furthermore, free people would also change their behavior based on good information freely discussed.

What they would not do is engage in bullying to suppress information, cheer on institutional debate suppression, or mandate abridgments to other’s liberties on the basis of personal or sectarian opinion.

That is, they would not do what we do now.

And, perhaps most importantly, free people would utterly condemn leaders who lied to them, or who took special privileges by flouting their own mandates, enforced on the rest of us.

We’ve sure seen a lot of this latter.

The latest case is that of Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, who has been caught in one of those grand hypocrisies that show the panic to be mostly political opportunism: he had recorded his early November message to “stay home if you can” after attending his daughter’s wedding with 20 guests and then taking a getaway trip with a party of eight.

“This is not the time to relax,” he warned, however. “We may have to close things down if we’re not careful.”

Recorded in Mexico, I guess that “social distance” allowed him the gumption to deliver a threat: if you don’t self-quarantine, I will quarantine everybody!

Except, of course, himself.

Freedom is not just something for our rulers. Liberty with an exception clause is spelled “L‑I-C-E-N-S‑E.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* By wearing masks and gloves these two groups would signal to others to give them some distance. Not virtue-signaling, but well-mannered responsibility signals. The healthy people, though, would take the risks of the disease because, after all, we face a million risks every day, from automobile injury to cancer.

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general freedom too much government

The Saddest Thanksgiving

We are social animals. We need human interaction, not just interaction with our “screens.”

So, no wonder suicide is a rising problem during the lockdowns.

Jon Miltimore, writing at FEE, focuses on one country known for its suicide-tolerant culture: Japan. “Suicide Claimed More Lives in October Than 10 Months of COVID-19 in Japan, Report Shows.” Though the island nation had seen lowering levels of suicides for years, the lockdowns to prevent the spread of the Wuhan contagion have apparently reversed the trend.

“The 2,153 suicides reported last month are about 600 more than the previous year, CBS reports, with the largest gains coming in women, who saw an 80 percent surge in suicide,” Miltimore informs.

Though these United States do not publish timely stats, reports from specific locales suggest that suicide is rising in America, too.

And this is not surprising.

If one were to “follow the science” — or sciences, in this case sociology, social psychology, etc. — one would have predicted such an effect. The “social distancing” model for pandemic mitigation is the perfect recipe for inducing suicidal ideations in social animals like ourselves.

Most at-risk are those with depression problems already, orother social trauma — or “merely” have trouble making friends. Government-mandated distancing just makes it harder for those who really need to make connections, but have trouble doing so.

Add on the holidays — a traditional time for familial bonding and social conviviality, but really tough for those alienated from same — and we are in for a bumpy sociality crisis.

Lockdowns are anti-social. This holiday season, reasonable, usually-healthy people might want to reach out, repeatedly (if only “virtually”), to those who need what many states now prohibit: human contact.

For humanity’s sake. For our friends’ sake.

This is Common Sense. Paul Jacob.

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general freedom Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Feds Not Wanted

For those arguing for drug reform for decades, Oregon’s successful ballot measures 109 and 110 are hugely hopeful signs in sensible drug policy.

They may, however, prove better signs of a general trend beyond just drug policy.*

The best reason to oppose drug prohibitions is not to maximize our freedom but to inculcate a culture of responsibility while getting government out of the business of interfering in our lives.

And while Measure 109 is about psilocybin mushrooms, what it actually does is establish a government board to set up a regulatory system to distribute and license possession of consumable psilocybins.

May work out great. It may also turn out very badly.

As one would expect from this sort of government program.

Measure 110, which also passed on Tuesday, made “personal non-commercial possession of a controlled substance no more than a Class E violation (max fine of $100 fine) and establishing a drug addiction treatment and recovery program funded in part by the state’s marijuana tax revenue and state prison savings.”

Both are very “liberal” programs, based on notions of state aid and government program-building rather than traditional, more “conservative” prohibit-and-punish models. Both the old and the new approaches skirt around personal responsibility.

What the measures show, though, is that Oregonians are effectively defying federal laws on “controlled substances.” The new approach is very old: federalist, more about local rather than national control.

As such, it shows the current tide turning away from making a federal case out of everything.

The next President of These United States, and both houses of Congress, should take notice.

On drugs, they are not only not needed. They are not wanted.

Apply that to health care in general, I say.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* These Oregon measures were the only two “hard drug” ballot measures this year. There were quite a few marijuana ballot measures around the country. All passed.

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Tags drug prohibition, psilocybin mushrooms

too much government

For a New Normalcy

Covid, virus, epidemic, test, government

Science writer Ronald Bailey argues that the best path to “a New Normal” can be found by rolling out home COVID-19 tests. But notes they are illegal.

Bailey’s November piece in Reason magazine informs us that “biotech startup E25Bio, diagnostics maker OraSure, and the 3M Co., are working on and could quickly deploy rapid at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests.”

These tests work, he says, “by detecting, within minutes, the presence of coronavirus proteins using specific antibodies embedded on a paper test strip coated with nasal swab samples or saliva. Somewhat like at-home pregnancy tests, the antigen tests change color or reveal lines if COVID-19 proteins are recognized.”

So why not go ahead with these antigen tests? Well, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t allow it. Bailey quotes a Harvard epidemiologist: “Until the regulatory landscape changes, those companies have no reason to bring a product to market.”

Regulatory blocking and kludge are just one reason this is not possible.

But if you — or for that matter, Mr. Bailey — think that this problem can just be solved with a Trumpian executive order or a quick legislative fix, there are reasons for doubt.

Our whole system is government-rigged. And, as Ludwig von Mises made clear in Bureaucracy, clunky slowness is not just a bug of such systems. It’s the feature.

And it’s a bad feature.

It’s why many of us oppose regulation by bureaucracy and prefer a rule of law and competition within markets to supply the regulation that businesses need.

Which suggests to me that the best way back to normalcy is not through a quick government fix but by nixing government fixes more broadly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Marco Verch

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