Category: too much government

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Happy Healthcare

The funniest show on TV? Health care reform. It’s a laugh a minute.

More awkward pauses than The Office. The melodramatic back-​stabbing that makes Desperate Housewives amusing. Plus, nearly as much deliberation as Wife Swap.

Boy, do we have great politicians. For Christmas they got us much better medical care and at lower cost. But wait, the federal deficit gets reduced in the process. They just vote it into being. Shazam!

How can they do it? By sticking it to the insurance companies!

Funny, the stock prices of health insurance companies have shot up … just as this legislation is passing. President Obama brought the House down, in his weekly television bit, proclaiming these bills are “the toughest measures we’ve ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.”

The more sophisticated humor is how polls show most Americans opposed to the plan Congress rushes to pass. So, who are the beneficiaries? Those who slipped special deals into this 2,000-plus page bill?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that’s what legislating is all about. But giving unfair deals to certain states to entice their senator’s vote looks, well, sorta blatantly crooked. Not to mention fiscally irresponsible. The sale of Senator Ben Nelson’s vote gained Nebraska a Medicare expansion on the federal taxpayers’ tab … forever.

The silver lining is that, at the rate they’re going, forever may not be so long.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Browsing for Trouble

Microsoft is in less trouble today than it was yesterday.

The software maker has been in hot water with the European Union because Microsoft integrates a browser with its operating system. To avoid costly litigation, the firm has “settled” with European regulators and agreed to “offer customers a choice” of browsers in addition to its own Internet Explorer.

In the annals of crime, coupling operating systems with web browsers ranks right up there with uxoricide, armed bank robbery, and using the wrong fork with your salad. But the prospect Microsoft faced if it didn’t cave to the EU was pretty serious. The firm has already shelled out more than two billion dollars in fines to the Europeans as a result of previous bogus antitrust litigation.

Neelie Kroes, who fills the post of “European competition commissioner,” says millions of European consumers “will benefit” now that they have a “free choice about which Web browser they use.” But every online computer user has always been free to compare browsers and pick a competing one. You surf. You click. You download. Not hard.

So what’s the deal here? Big target, deep pockets. Competitors without scruples willing to enlist government guns to force Microsoft to do their marketing for them. Nothing to do with justice or anyone’s legitimate rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Head Over Heals for Stimulus

Which thinker is more relevant right now, Lord Keynes or Naomi Klein?

We’ve hit hard times. The Keynesian advice is to spend a lot of taxpayer money to make up for the lack of private spending, thereby jump-​starting the injured market order.

Naomi Klein, on the other hand, is best known for her book “The Shock Doctrine,” in which she charged that free-​marketers were conspiring to use social and economic crises as excuses to “take over” and remake the world in their favor.

Let’s look at the evidence, shall we? We’ve hit a crisis. The government has done the Keynesian thing. Unemployment went up, but … who has made the biggest gains?

USA Today reports that federal workers are enjoying a boom in both employment and salaries. “Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months” — and that’s not counting overtime and bonuses!

It’s not markets being stimulated, here, but government.

Not only is this Keynesianism on its head, but Naomi-​Kleinism, too. Those who have taken advantage of the crisis are the ultimate insiders. As a Washington Examiner editorial puts it, “bad times for the rest of us are good times for the federal establishment.”

We could wish Naomi Klein were right.

But things aren’t getting better because she’s wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Virgin Galactic’s Latest

It seems like only yesterday that Burt Rutan flew SpaceShip One into near-​orbit and received the Ansari X‑Prize for piloting the first manned private craft into space.

But it’s been five years. 

Things have happened in the meantime. To be specific, SpaceShip Two, just unveiled.

It’s a much larger ship than the original, capable of carrying six passengers as well as two pilots. It has more windows. I like windows.

A year or so ago the company, Virgin Galactic, had shown off their White Knight Two, a twin-​fuselage aircraft designed to ferry SpaceShip Two high into the atmosphere.

There’s still a lot of work to be done before rich people can actually trek up into space. Yes, space tourism is a few years away. But it’s coming, and it’s important.

As long as space is a government-​subsidized and ‑organized industry, it will suffer from the usual problems associated with bureaucracies and politics. 

But let’s give NASA its due: Those scientists and engineers took the risks, squelching the screechings of many folks who, these days, don’t approve of burning any kind of fuel, really, or risking anyone’s life. Think of the lawsuits that would have happened — the OSHA violations, for instance — had private industry been allowed to start this!

Now, it’s high time for private enterprise to take over. To make space flight rational. And fun, again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

A Contorted Practice, Challenged

In his book Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Tastes of Millions, Christian Lander notes that “Yoga is essentially stretching with guidance.… . You might think that since yoga is such a minimalist activity, it can be done almost anywhere. But you would be wrong. Yoga must take place on hardwood floor at a studio. Exposed beams are generally believed to enhance yoga experiences by 40 percent.”

With this droll explanation in mind, you might think that much of the “specialness” of yoga depends on trivialities, like “$80 pairs of pants.”

But the state of Virginia harbors no such cynical thoughts. It understands the secret of yoga’s ancient allure: The great chain of instruction must be regulated by the state.

Virginians are free to do yoga, even in their own dingy homes, and to inappropriate music, say Bach or the Turtles.

Further, any Virginian may teach yoga. Hey, it’s a free state.

But under no circumstances may a Virginian teach another Virginian how to teach yoga — not without paying heavy administrative fees in the state’s vocational licensing system.

Silly, you say?

Yes.

Thankfully, the Institute for Justice teamed up with yoga-​teacher trainers Julia Kalish, Suzanne Leitner-​Wise, and Beverly Brown to challenge the law, on Constitutional grounds.

Now that’s soothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets responsibility too much government

Massive Failures

How many times, in the last year, have I heard praise for FDR’s banking reforms, even down to the specifics of federal deposit insurance?

The funny thing is, this factoid is false. Roosevelt opposed deposit insurance. Everyone did who at that time knew the history of the states that had experimented with this form of subsidy. Only logrolling pushed deposit insurance into law as a known special favor to small banks in rural areas — not to cure the nation’s ills.

The actual history and lessons of bank failures is explored by Charles Calomiris in a recent paper provocatively titled “Banking Crises Yesterday and Today.” According to this Columbia Business School professor, bank panics were not uncommon in the U.S., prior to the Federal Reserve in 1913. And the Fed pretty much stopped them. Massive bank failures, on the other hand, are different. Not unheard of elsewhere, massive failures had not been a problem in America leading up to that time. However, such failures became a problem a few decades later in the Great Depression.

Calomiris explains that such massive crises are brought on, chiefly, by institutional risk factors, like deposit insurance, government manipulation of the housing market to increase ownership through loosening of financial standards, and the “too big to fail” doctrine.

It turns out that honest standards, and not mammoth government subsidies and guarantees, prove the best way to prevent catastrophe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.