Category: too much government

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

Nothing Doing

When you don’t know what to do, the thing to do is nothing.

Well, maybe.

Economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, notes that we recovered from downturns in the economy more quickly before the federal government took it upon itself to fix things. The first major fix was with the Great Depression. Which dragged on and on.

Today, our leaders have spent trillions of borrowed money to fix the economy, with poor results.

Sowell’s column is great, right up until near the end, when his plea for politicians to “do nothing” ignores a lot of … something.

After the huge 1987 stock-​market crash, he explains, President Reagan did nothing. But then “the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.”

But were those 20 years really so benign? Activity by presidents, by Congress and most of all by the Federal Reserve set up the systemic problems that led to the Crash of 2008. Consumer price inflation was low during Sowell’s Reagan-​blessed period, but all the while the Fed was feeding first a dot-​com bubble and then a housing bubble. And it engaged in a series of bailouts of financial institutions.

Maybe Reagan and later politicians didn’t do enough in the “do nothing” department. They should have reined in (or abolished) the Fed. They should have abandoned “too big to fail.” They should have stopped subsidizing creditors in busts and home-​owners in booms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

An Ideological Cure?

Sometimes doctors need a stiff belt of medicine too.

Scot Echols, a  reader of Glenn Reynolds’s “Instapundit” blog, wrote in to say that while he appreciated a recent piece by Reynolds hailing capitalism, he thought it had not sufficiently stressed how capitalism fosters the creation of value.

“Value is created when someone does something for [others] better, faster, or cheaper than they can do it themselves,” Echols wrote. Then he related an anecdote about his doctor, whom he had gone to see about a sore throat. His doctor ranted about how “we need communism or a benevolent dictator to solve all of society’s problems.”

Sore throat notwithstanding, Echols responded, saying that he could either treat a sore throat himself with a regimen of gargling and garlic or pay $80 for a consultation and quick-​acting antibiotics, reducing a two-​week treatment to twenty minutes. His doctor’s knowledge and ability thus create value for him, value worth paying for. Because of such value creation, physicians gain wealth that enables them to drive nicer cars and live in nicer places than many of their receptionists can.

His doctor had no reply, but perhaps did understand a little better just how the kind of value-​killing society he’d been dreaming about might not allow him to enjoy the nice things he had now; also, that the freedom to give value and be rewarded for it is a good thing. 

Let’s hope the cure sticks. Let’s hope it spreads.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Devastating Regard for Gender

This just in: Cutting back on runaway government spending may be sexist.

In Britain, the government has an austerity plan. Yup, the very opposite approach from America’s Spend-​a-​lot Administration. But now the Tory spending reduction plan has been challenged in that nation’s high court by the Fawcett Society, a women’s rights group, which claims the plan would widen gender “inequality.”

Additionally, the country’s Independent Equality and Human Rights Commission recently ordered the treasury to show it had properly considered the impact on women and other “vulnerable groups” of the planned spending cuts.

Is the plan unfair? Well, it lays off government workers, 65 percent of whom are women. Is it discriminatory to women that they will now face more lay-​offs? Or has it all along been discriminatory against men who as nearly half the population can’t get more than 35 percent of government jobs?

Or perhaps it is discriminatory against both men and women. Let’s all sue each other for trillions!

To show the potential impact, the Washington Post article noted that “deficit-​cutting campaigns” are “underway from Greece to Spain,” adding, “and in the United States when it eventually moves to curb spending.”

Eventually? We’ll see … eventually. But, apparently, that budget tightening our federal government has so long refused to do, but could possibly do one day way off in the future, well, it’s probably sexist.

No worries, though: Economic collapse may be fairly gender neutral in its devastation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Forcing You to Pay for Bad News

Poor old-​media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition. 

What to do … aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work? 

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering.…”

It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!

For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-​compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.” 

It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-​worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-​established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”

Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-​bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths. 

How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture too much government

Big Brother in the Trash Can

America, we’re catching up with the British.

For years we’ve trailed when it comes to stifling the medical industry with regulation, rationing and red tape. But thanks to recent legislation this side of the Atlantic, we can expect major gains. When it comes to liberticide, we’re catching up.

Locally, too, thrilling progress in freedom-​killing is being made. I’ve reported before about how the British government hounds citizens who fail to lid their garbage properly or who — shame — put out “too much” trash. Now, Cleveland trash monitors are following suit.

Starting in 2011, city residents can expect to be more than hounded for failing to recycle. Is your garbage bin more than 10 percent full of stuff the trash police say you must recycle? Then expect a $100 fine. A spychip embedded in the trash bin will supposedly figure the proportions accurately and send reports on delinquents back to Big Brother.

Cleveland gets $26 for every ton of recyclables it collects. Even ignoring sorting costs, its “loss” from a household that fails to recycle must be much less than a dollar per pickup. So why not, at worst, charge those households an extra $4 a month?

Apparently, the goal is not to nudge people into better behavior. It’s to punish and humiliate those who neglect the rituals of the jihadist wing of the environmentalist religion. Government-​mandated recycling isn’t about sensibly conserving our resources; it’s an excuse for obsessively overbearing government. 

And it stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Social Security Beyond Retirement Age

Social Security turned 75 last week, and yet I saw few demands to retire the program.

Instead, pundits like Paul Krugman took the occasion to praise the septuagenarian boondoggle. 

Krugman started boldly, saying that the program “brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.” Huh? Social Security has indeed brought a steady income to retired Americans, many of whom would have had to rely on their children’s help to live out their last years. But Krugman doesn’t say that. Instead he implies that, before Social Security, old folks led indecent and base lives. 

But think about this: Saving for yourself and living on a limited means is indecent? It lacks dignity?

Krugman also talks about the economics of the program, defending, for instance, its dual accounting method in a bizarre way. But mostly he steps carefully around Social Security’s biggest failings, which include the intergenerational swindle, providing bigger rewards-​over-​contributions to earlier retirees than to current recipients, and, by its nature, will take more from, and give less to, future retirees.

Most shockingly, though, he says this: “Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-​century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-​called trust fund.”

Krugman does all but state that the special account has money in it.

It doesn’t. The “trust fund” consists of IOUs from Congress. That’s it.

I guess Social Security is a program too important to Krugman to tell the truth about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.