Category: too much government

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Common Sense First Amendment rights general freedom too much government

Happy Birthday, Mr. Jefferson?

Can you get arrested for celebrating Jefferson’s birthday?

I’ve just received an alert from Jason Talley, the former publisher of Bureaucrash.com. Jason remains active trying to get people to think about freedom. He’s made a lot of noise . . . by being silent.

His most recent effort seemed innocuous enough: A ten-minute “silent dance,” abetted by iPods, at the Jefferson Memorial on April 13. That’s Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. The 20 or so participants celebrated in a perhaps startling way. The group performed their dance late in the day, midnight actually, so as not to interfere with the experience of other visitors.

Well, after a few minutes, security at the memorial leapt into action to expel the dancers. One was even arrested. Her sin? Asking “Why?” In a local NBC news report Jason points out that the dancers were silent, which video confirms. So there isn’t much weight to claims that they were disturbing the peace. School kids visiting the monument are rowdier. Jason says he hopes police don’t start arresting school kids.

Videos of the incident at YouTube have already been viewed by tens of thousands. A “Free the Jefferson 1″ blog and Facebook and Flicker and Twitter accounts are helping spread the word. When the charges are dropped, it’ll all stop.

Tom Jefferson once said, “Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise.” And he didn’t even own an iPod.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense First Amendment rights too much government

Canada’s Kangaroo Court

Hurray for the new media.

Two years ago, Ezra Levant edited a magazine that reported on the bitter controversy over cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammed. The cartoons first appeared in a Danish newspaper. Levant reprinted them.

The reprint angered a Muslim living in Canada. So he complained to Alberta’s so-called “Human Rights Commission.” This dishonestly named commission can persecute people for saying anything that might offend somebody else.

Levant appeared before the commission. Closed-door proceedings. No reporters. No lawyer. No rule against bringing a video cam, either. So he did. Go to YouTube and see his defiance for yourself. Plug the words “Ezra Levant” into the search engine. Hundreds of thousands have seen the two-minute video.

Shirlene McGovern, the so-called “human rights office” who questioned him, quit because of the backlash. Levant says that McGovern had started to make small talk and shake his hand, but he “upset her by not being complicit” in what he calls his “own prosecution.”

On camera, Levant tells McGovern she’s a thug for assailing his freedom of speech. He says, “I don’t grant you the right to sit in judgment on whether or not I’m reasonable. . . .” in how he exercises his freedom of speech.

The complaint has now been withdrawn. But Levant is still challenging the abuse in court. A truly inspiring defense of First Amendment rights.

Of course, in Canada “freedom of speech” doesn’t fall under the heading of “First Amendment rights.” We’ll be happy to let them borrow it though.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense free trade & free markets insider corruption nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Welfare Kings

Bear Stearns. You gotta like an investment company with the word “bear” in it. If you are the kind of investor to go bullish over anything big, Bear, Stearns & Co., Inc., was BIG. For years its subprime mortgage biz made investors go all squirmy with bullishness.

They could pretend that the word “bear” was there for irony.

Call it prophecy, instead: The Bear Stearns bull lies on the ground, gored. Time to sell off the carcass.

The Federal Reserve has forced through a takeover deal, with J.P. Morgan buying out the dead bull. At a low, low price – though not nearly as low had the Federal Reserve stayed out. It’s another so-called capitalist bailout, an attempt to make a failure not seem so big.

This is not free-market capitalism, folks. This is big business welfare-statism.

In their normal run of operation, businesses negotiate the uncertainties of markets using tools like the profit-and-loss statement, aiming for profit. When they don’t manage this, they fail. Remember that term, loss?

Well, in today’s truly bipartisan political economy, the bigger you are the more scared our rulers get when you fail. So they prop up, as best they can, the biggest failures.

Forget welfare queens. The welfare kings are businessmen on the take from government. The losers are everybody else, as idiotic risks and bad business practices get propped up by government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Nifty Doesn’t Cut It

Just because something can be done doesn’t make it economical to do. There is a big difference between physics and economics.

Take ethanol. It might seem nifty to grow the fuel for our cars and trucks like we do our food, in fields. But niftiness alone is not enough. Nifty notions, like un-nifty ones, must prove out in terms of all the costs involved.

A growing amount of research shows that ethanol doesn’t cut costs at all.

The most recent ethanol debunker I’ve come across is Robert Bryce, author of a forthcoming book with a provocative title, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence.” Interviewed on ReasonOnline by Brian Doherty, Bryce offers some fascinating perspectives on energy economics and policies.

  • Did you know that for every gallon of ethanol, there’s at least 51 cents of subsidy?
  • Had you heard that corn-based ethanol produces more greenhouse gases than does our use of fossil fuels?
  • Have you stopped to think about all the water that raising more corn would require, and the increasing expense of getting gargantuan more amounts to farms in the midwest?

These and other considerations lead Robert Bryce to call current ethanol policy a “scam”and “the longest running robbery of taxpayers in American history.”

Some forms of bio-product may be more economically feasible than ethanol, like the biodiesel made from the unused parts of slaughtered animals. But we should wait to see how they cost out, too, without subsidy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Mississippi Burning . . . Fat?

Our discussions of government gone wild would be a lot more amusing if we didn’t have to actually live with the consequences. That we do tends to mitigate the uproarious hilarity of the politicians’ effervescent insanity.

Awhile back we might have offered a dismissive chuckle to the Big Brother-ish New York City policy of banning restaurants from using trans fat. Personally, I avoid trans fat, as more and more Americans are doing.

But what business is it of the government?

The state doesn’t pay my food bill or my medical bills. Though, some politicians sure would like to make taxpayers pick up the tab.

Now Mississippi Representatives W.T. Mayhall and John Read, Republicans, and Bobby Shows, a Democrat, have pushed nanny government to new heights. These nabobs have introduced legislation to tell restaurants who they may or may not serve. If passed, House Bill 282 would force restaurants to refuse to sell food to those deemed by the state health department to be obese.

I don’t have to explain that discrimination on the basis of race or gender or creed — or even percentage of body fat — is just plain wrong. Everybody knows this.

Everybody but politicians, it seems. So, here it is in terms even politicians might comprehend: Obesity is unhealthy. But in America we believe in individual freedom. In other words, it’s your life.

Moreover, forced discrimination is the opposite of freedom. And even more deadly than obesity.

And definitely not that funny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Stimulus, Response

Wall Street and the real estate markets have taken big hits, and so, to prevent a major recession, our president and representatives immediately began one-upping each other about a “stimulus package.”

And my thoughts go back to my classroom days. In biology.

There were these frogs, see. Dead frogs. On the table. Some of the kids would take a battery with some wires attached, and prod the dead frog, stimulating nerves to make the dead, half-dissected frogs jump.

Half the boys in the class thought it a hoot, half the girls thought it gross. Or maybe more than half.

Sometimes I think this is about as much as we ever were prepared for thinking about stimulus packages.

The economy is not a dead frog. it’s alive, and it’s received a shock. A better analogy might be to someone who’s received a blow to the head. You don’t necessarily immediately start applying shock therapy to get the person moving. Ask a nurse what to do. Most of the time, the body repairs itself. In due time. With care taken not to jar the person again.

But a blow to an ecosystem — like an economy — is more complicated than even some guy with a concussion. And, listening to the debate over the stimulus package, and then reading actual, astute economists consider the politicians’ proposals, and Iâ’m thinking . . .

Frog or no frog, the stimulus notions politicians prefer seem more directed towards influencing voters than getting the economy to jump back into action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.