Category: too much government

free trade & free markets too much government

The Anti-Worker Ism

California, socialism, labor, progressivism, Democrats

Progressives who lean socialist used to hide their worst intentions. Now they are letting it all hang out.

There have always been overt socialists in the U.S., of course. They would sometimes protest the reluctance of fellow travelers to fully embrace socialism’s moniker. But the sentiment “Ah, screw it, let’s just admit we want to destroy everything currently in existence” seems on the ascendance. Even a few major Democratic candidates for president are on board.

Exhibit 112 is the new nationwide push to stomp the gig economy.

Especially freelancing.

This follows Exhibit 111, the recent and so far successful push to stop independent contractors from engaging in voluntary transactions in California. (Many lawsuits are underway.)

After scanning the coiled legalese of 111 — I mean AB5, California’s law — many companies decided that ending relationships with California-based freelancers was prudence with a capital P. And that rhymes with G, and that stands for Golden. Which the Golden State used to, uh, B.

Not every self-employed person has been thrown out onto the street. There are carve-outs. Actually, the only known victims are taxi drivers, cleaners, nurses, comedians, writers, editors, musicians, transcriptionists, citizen initiative petitioners, etc., etc.

The crackdown on non-9-to-5 work arrangements has also resulted in much gnashing of teeth by gig-seekers of all ideological stripes.

Obviously, then, such massive destruction of economic freedom must be inflicted on the federal level too. So House Democrats put AB5’s gig-killing provisions into Exhibit 112, that is, into HR2474, pending legislation.

Democratic candidates for president Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have endorsed the California statute, a national version, or both.

Ludwig von Mises had a word for this. He called socialism “destructionist.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags California, labor, progressivism, socialism

too much government

Nixed Ski Trek App Flap

Tread Share, regulations, Colorado, environmentalism,

In Colorado, like other states, the people’s ingenuity often surprises. And in the Rocky Mountain State, like elsewhere, governments are known to worry about what free people do — and, unsurprisingly, often get in the way.

A popular new ride-sharing app, called TreadShare, hit the market last month, designed to alleviate traffic on I-70, the route from Denver to popular skiing destinations. The app makes the trip to the mountain slopes far cheaper than Uber of Lyft — not to mention easier on the environment.

So, of course, the State of Colorado has superciliously suppressed this innovation. Over safety worries, allegedly.

“The idea behind the app is for carpoolers to share the cost of gas and mileage, incentivizing the drivers to bring additional passengers and the passengers to get a cheap ride up to the mountains,” writes Taylor Sienkiewicz in Summit Daily. “Shortly following the launch, TreadShare received a ‘cease and desist’ letter from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. This caused TreadShare to shut down operations and another similar app, Gondola, not to launch.”

Not receiving an apparently required $111,250 annual license, nor proof the company performs background checks on all drivers, the state government has “helpfully” squelched these two ride-sharing services.

What about safety? The Colorado State Patrol, whose job is ostensibly to maximize highway traffic safety, might wish to work with the app-makers to provide any useful security features.

But preventing organized carpooling through pricey up-front licensing requirements and ridiculous red tape doesn’t seem like promoting safety, but more like typical high-handed government regulatory overreach.

Thankfully, citizen activists have formed a group and are petitioning the legislature to join the rest of the Centennial State in the modern world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Colorado, environmentalism, regulations, Tread Share

initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Gig Is Up

California, gig, freelance, law, control, interference, intervention, labor,

Eventually, champions of government intervention, of all forms of thwarting independent judgment and killing dreams, find themselves under assault. From the public.

And you don’t need an economics degree to grasp why.

Initially, an intervention prevents other people from pursuing projects, getting jobs, earning a living. Then, finally, government meddling goes a step too far. Maybe lawmakers had “good intentions,” but hey! This is me now!

Your legislation needs tweaking!

This is where we are in California’s attack on the so-called gig economy. Hatched to “protect” Uber drivers or some such nonsense, Assembly Bill 5 makes it massively harder for companies to classify freelancers as independent contractors. After it was signed into law, many companies—from blogs to transcription services—told California-based freelancers adios.

Millions of people lost work and options.

What walks of life are affected? All.

“California’s new gig worker law is . . . threatening all performing arts,” complains Brendan Rawson at CalMatters.org. California has “overreached.” Gotta nip-and-tuck that otherwise “worthy” bill! Use only the magic arbitrary intervention in our lives that works!

Not everybody now being hurt was previously okay with pushing other people around, of course. I’ve never been a fan. One of my missions is defending the right of citizen initiative. Well, AB5 makes it much harder and more expensive for petition campaigns to hire people for such gigs as collecting signatures for an initiative in California.

AB5 attacks earning a living, speaking freely, associating freely, and petitioning one’s government freely. Maybe the law will be rescinded. But there’s more mischief where that came from.

So let’s protect other people’s freedom . . . and stop the overreach before it reaches us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Dairo Cervantes

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Tags California, control, freelance, gig, interference, intervention, labor, law

ideological culture too much government

Disemploying Des Moines

Remember during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, when she promised “to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”?

She seemed surprisingly surprised that coal miners were so displeased.

Have no fear, however — quickly she highlighted her $30 billion plan to provide sustenance and re-training to these soon-to-be displaced miners.

Leading in the latest Iowa poll, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) opines his own deep commitment to enacting “Medicare for All” and, by the magic of Washington statecraft, summarily executing private health insurance in these United States.

“The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues,” reports The New York Times. “Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.”

In last night’s debate, CNN’s Abby Phillip read the Vermont senator a question from an Iowa Democratic voter: “Des Moines is an insurance town. What happens to all . . . the health insurance industry here if there is ‘Medicare for All’? What happens to all the jobs and the livelihoods of the people that live in insurance towns like Des Moines?”

“We build in to our ‘Medicare for All’ program a transition fund of many, many billions of dollars,” Sanders explained, “that will provide for up to five years income and health care and job training for those people.”

Come on, don’t get uptight about whether your job — or your whole industry — is terminated. Uncle Bernie will set you up with a new gig, and some cash to hold you over.

Trust Washington to take good care of you.

Or use Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags baby, nanny state, pacifier

nannyism too much government

Politicians & Pain

opioid, crisis, pain, drug, law, politician, ban, prohibition, control, medicine,

Whenever a new panic runs through corporate media and the grapevine — and especially when the lesson is supposed to be ‘we’ve gotta do something!’ — it is time to slow down. And look at the facts.

The opioid crisis is one of those panics.

The almost immediate reaction from politicians has been to point their quivering fingers at doctors and drug companies on the theory that doctors have been over-prescribing opiates, instigated by pharmaceutical companies.

Seems a ‘round up the usual suspects’ approach to public health.

Now there appears to be good research to back up our skepticism. According to Cato’s Jeffrey A. Singer, recent studies show “there is no correlation between opioid prescription volume and non-medical use or opioid use disorder among persons age 12 and over.” Nevertheless, Dr. Singer notes, “policymakers and law enforcement continue to pressure health care practitioners into undertreating patients in pain.”

An under-treatment result is scarier, to me, than the desperate and dangerous self-medication problem that must lie at the core of the crisis we read about. Patients in too much pain because doctors are afraid of government harassment are pushed to unsupervised pain management . . . which looks an awful lot like a simple description of the opioid crisis itself.

Singer provides confirmation of an unintended effect: the fentanyl and heroin overdose rate “continues apace” even as the opioid prescription volume plummets.

“At a recent international breast cancer conference experts stated the under-prescribing of opioids to breast cancer patients in the U.S. is now comparable to treatment in third world countries,” warned Singer.

One word: yikes.

I am tempted to define today’s politics itself as a kind of pain mismanagement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ban, crisis, drug, law, medicine, opioid, pain, politician, prohibition

national politics & policies too much government

Income Inequality Takes Leave?

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 23, 2019
1 Comment on Income Inequality Takes Leave?

While addicts of partisan politics overdosed on impeachment, the Trump Administration wheeled and dealed with Congress to give more than two million federal workers 12 weeks of paid family leave and start up plans to establish a new and separate military service, the Space Force.

“It is long overdue. It doesn’t go far enough,” declared The Washington Post editorial board.

And the editors weren’t referring to the Space Force. It is paid family leave that “represents an important step in the effort to make paid leave a guaranteed right for all U.S. workers.”

Hey, I’m a big fan of paid family leave, but as an earned, negotiated benefit of employment, not some pretend “human right.”

Certainly, the legislation enacted did not bestow a right, but a benefit . . . to be paid for by hard-working taxpayers who likely do not themselves enjoy such generous employment bennies.

“[A]ccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” informs The Post, “only 17 percent of workers have access to paid family leave.”

Once upon a time, government workers did not make as much money as private sector workers but enjoyed far greater job security and more generous benefits. But by measure after measure, public sector employees today make more money too.*

Which brings us to another Post worry: income inequality.

“The Washington, D.C. area, home to the federal government and noted for ‘double-dipping’ salaries,” writes Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner, “is the wealthiest region in the country.”

The new family leave bill throws more money at the nation’s top five richest counties — all in the capital’s metro area.

We are not talking about “rights,” here, but about political “privilege.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Federal workers also receive generous pensions, while 87 percent of the folks paying taxes to fund those pensions lack their own.

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Tags family leave, privileges, rights

Popular too much government

Gloating Time?

net neutrality, censorship, control, FCC,

“The freak-out was something to behold,” I wrote two years ago.

Newly appointed chair of Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, had just nixed ‘net neutrality,’ and reactions from the left end of the political spectrum were overwhelmingly negative.

I, on the other hand, prophesied good times ahead. But we free-market folks were outshouted.

At least on Twitter.

Now, two years later, with something like a free market returned to Internet regulation, Casey Given at the Washington Examiner urges us not to “forget how the Left cried wolf.”

Contrary to doomsayers — whose alarm was that, sans net neutrality, we would experience “the End of the Internet as We Know It” — things are turning out pretty well. Mr. Given tells us that “since the repeal of net neutrality, more than 6 million people have gained access to the internet. Internet speeds have increased as well.”

Which shouldn’t shock. After all, the whole net neutrality mania was fear-based anti-capitalist prejudice.

“The Internet had stumbled along just fine until 2015, when President Barack Obama’s FCC put ‘net neutrality’ in place — a point Ajit Pai ably makes in his defense,” I argued two orbits ago. “Do the doom-sayers really believe that a set of regulations that had been in place just a few years was going to ‘ruin the Internet’ and unleash Big Corporations upon the world to the detriment of regular consumers and start-up service providers?”

What most net neutrality advocates wouldn’t acknowledge, at the time, was that net neutrality was supported by key telecom corporations. This should have given them a hint that net neutrality itself was the thing to be most feared: a rigged system for a few at the expense of the many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, control, FCC, Net Neutrality

general freedom ideological culture Second Amendment rights too much government

Whither Away?

“All around the world, earnest fans of socialism insist it has never failed, as critics claim, since ‘true socialism has never really been tried,’” the New York Post editorial board wrote on Tuesday. But socialism has been tried. It just doesn’t turn into the utopia socialists promise.

And the State certainly does not do under socialism what Karl Marx said it would: wither away.

In Venezuela, “Bolivarian” dictator Nicolás Maduro sure isn’t withering away. In defiance of terms as well as term limits, he is not stepping down even as his country spirals downward into starvation and squalor.

His method and madness are not mysteries: he keeps power the old-fashioned way, sheer force.

The Post’s editors note his latest stay-in-office procedure: “He’s going to expand his massive private army to 4 million gunmen by the end of 2020.”

He might be able to do it, since his ruthless regime is supported not only by a well-stocked military, but also boasts an alleged 3.3 million gang-members in the “Bolivarian militia,” exempt from the gun confiscation of 2012.

It turns out (to neither your shock nor mine) that key to making socialism work is the threat of confiscation, control, murder. “Maduro is showing that the sure way to make it ‘succeed,’” says the Post, “is for the self-proclaimed socialists to have all the guns.”

By definition, socialism is the “public” ownership and control of the means of production. By necessity, socialism requires the governing class’s ownership and control of the means of destruction.

And we see that now being used to destroy any opposition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Maduro, Venezuela, socialism, collapse, illustration

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

Plunger Politics

plunger, flag, regulations, laws, Trump, flush,

President Donald Trump may win re-election because he dares speak the truth about toilets.

A Washington Post tweet presents the president talking about the insanity of American plumbing: “People are flushing toilets ten times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water.”

Jeffrey Tucker, in a terrific piece for the American Institute for Economic Research, focuses on our national disgrace: “I know a man — a proxy for tens of millions — who came from a foreign country, threw down $500 per night at a New York hotel, and was astonished to find himself plunging the toilet within the hour of checking in.

“Not surprising,” Tucker writes. “Not unusual. American toilets don’t work right. This is why there are plungers next to every toilet.”

And Tucker suggests that Trump may beat whoever ends up as his Democratic challenger for no better reason than because, every now and then, Trump sides with common sense against bureaucrats, regulators, and politicians. And, in this case, seeks to do something about it.

Would any Democrat dare mention that it is Congress that ruined our commodes?

Of course, Republicans let it happen.

Our toilets, I have long insisted, provide a perfect object lesson for what is wrong with government today. Early in the history of this Common Sense commentary, I explored the theme: it has been over 20 years ago since I wrote of “A Congressman in Your Bowl”; a few years later, when I started writing columns for Townhall.com, I offered “Flush Congress.”

I don’t know precisely what Trump can do regarding either the plumbing issue or the clogged-up Congress issue, but I — plunger in hand — salute him for trying to do something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags flag, flush, laws, plunger, regulations, Trump

international affairs national politics & policies too much government

The New Arms Race

We who grew up in the time of the Apollo missions are more than aware of the arms-race angle to the Soviet and American forays into Earth orbit and beyond.

Now, we must recognize that the space race is no longer mere ornamentation over earthly military competition.

“The United States and China are rapidly building space warfare capabilities,” writes Bill Gertz in the Washington Examiner, “as part of a race to dominate the zone outside Earth’s atmosphere.”

Of course, much of this remains ground support. WHNT News 19 in Alabama quotes the Commander of the U.S. Space and Missile Defense Command at Redstone Arsenal — a Lieutenant General who “will soon become Deputy Commander of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado” — explaining that current space resources must be ever-ready in support of “the war fighter, the soldier on the ground.”

But the “satellites in space” he refers to, the ones with “very unique capabilities,” are not just about ground support. For when Donald Trump proposed a new Space Force military division last year, he wasn’t blowing smoke.

Billions of future dollars, maybe, but not smoke.

In the works?

“AI for space war to stop anti-satellite weapons”;
Capabilities to treat “Space [a]s a warfighting domain similar to air, land and sea”;
Space planes, such as the in-dev X-37B;

and much more.

The Chinese are looking for “space superiority,” says American intelligence, and of course “you know what this means,” as Bugs Bunny liked to say.

War?

At least war profits.

Even France is talking about militarizing space.

Brave new world? Or more of the same, just higher up?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags foreign policy, Space Force, war