Category: too much government

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ideological culture The Draft too much government

How Un-​Warlike

It’s war!

A common refrain regarding the coronavirus. “This is our World War II,” say media mavens and politicians … who have never had to endure anything like World War II.

The utter vapidity of the “war” response was explained very well by Peter Schiff on a recent episode of The Tom Woods Show. Schiff is famously bearish on the American economy, which he has argued for years is addicted to debt and consumption but not production and responsibility. He notes how different this new “war” is. 

Folks today, he argues, have no more idea how World War II was won than how the economy works.

  1. Politicians increased taxes during the war.
  2. Americans were not bailed out: they had to struggle to survive, even on the home front, as
  3. they had to do without creature comforts. Taxes on goods and services sky-​rocketed, to pay for the war …
  4. in which many young men died.
  5. Middle-​class wealth was tapped like never before, to win the two-​front war, and one mechanism to aid the effort was the withholding tax …

which now we are talking about suspending.

What is widely being proposed today is not the “socialism” of war, where lives and wealth are conscripted.* What is being proposed is the “socialism” of bailouts and sugar-​plum fairies, where consumers are coddled.

And unlike in World War II, Schiff contends, there is no vast private wealth to tax to pay for what is deemed necessary. Instead, we have debt. 

It is indeed a strange war where we fight the threat of any harm coming to us, or any sacrifice required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* We should oppose the conscription of individuals, as was done in the First and Second World War as well as Korea and Vietnam. Not only does it violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude, it was not needed then, nor is it now. More on this later in the week.

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From a photo by Nick M

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Exceptions Disprove the Rules

freedom, prohibition, rules, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy,

“I’ve instructed my prosecutors not to charge certain low-​level nonviolent offenses to avoid people being held in jail unnecessarily,” Maryland’s Attorney General Marilyn Mosby informed the state’s Republican governor. She also urged the governor “to release all inmates in state prisons who are over 60,” explains The Washington Times, “approved for parole or scheduled to complete their sentences within the next year.”

This is all to avoid a prison pandemic. Meanwhile, the “Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-​19 tests,” Reason magazine tells us, adding that the FDA “has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-​based hand sanitizers.”

Reason’s Robby Soave asks the obvious question: “Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?”

The New York Times reports that Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, tried mightily to perform tests on subjects, early in the epidemic, to track how the virus was spreading. She was stymied every which way.

By bureaucracies.

The kludge of bad regulations and laws merely adds cost and annoyance during normal times; during emergencies they present major stumbling blocks to public health.

So, when our leaders make special exceptions, they demonstrate that the regulations were always bad — now just worse.

Real leadership would nix these rules, permanently.

And, for that matter, end the war on drugs — and prostitution and other victimless crimes.

One of the infractions Maryland’s AG decided to go lax on, however, is public urination. That crime has victims and ought to remain a public health violation.

Though perhaps not worth imprisonment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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freedom, prohibition, rules, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy,

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general freedom too much government

Are We Graduating from Plastic?

plastic, environmentalism, California, law, prohibitions, bans,

In The Graduate (1967), the young man played by Dustin Hoffman gets advice from an elder. “Just one word: plastics.” “Exactly how do you mean, sir?” “There’s a great future in plastics.”

When the world bans all plastic in 2021, that will be the end of that market opportunity. Other components of civilization will be discontinued in 2022.

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. After all, there’s always the black market.

A plastic-​bag ban is underway in New York City. Four states and five territories have already banned disposable plastic bags, as have countries around the world. New Yorkers are reportedly two-​to-​one in favor. A friend who lives there confirms this widespread resignation.

“I’m not happy about what it [plastic] does to the environment,” says one New Yorker. “But … what it does to my environment if I don’t have them is a nightmare.”

“This is a good thing because it’s helping the environment,” says another.

The problem of trash disposal has been solved. We use garbage cans, pickups, landfills. It’s a problem that must be continuously re-​solved. Like many other problems … such as how to carry groceries.

We adopted plastic bags because they are much more convenient than paper. Convenience, efficiency, effectiveness: many man-​made components of civilization serve these goals.

Reduction to absurdity can persuade only if the listener rejects the absurd. In 1967, the idea of banning plastic bags and plastic straws seemed, to most, absurd. Today, maybe two thirds of New Yorkers lament the inconvenience but add whaddyagonnado … when you gotta protect the environment?

That this measure will not protect much of anything, but merely allow activists to think well of themselves is, itself, absurd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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plastic, environmentalism, California, law, prohibitions, bans,

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insider corruption too much government

Engineering Government Limits

Oregon, licensing, Mat, traffic,

Lord Acton’s Law of Power states the chief problem of government: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

It has broad application.

Take traffic lights. They are there to prevent accidents and make navigating roads a better experience for all. The basic idea is to establish and enforce a few basic rules and then let civilization proceed at the pace set by the people themselves. It won’t be perfect, but it won’t be tyranny, either.

But controlling traffic lights is a kind of power. 

And thus open to corruption.

Just ask Mats Järlström. After his wife got a “running a red light ticket” in Beaverton, Oregon — a town characterized on the show Veronica Mars as completely wholesome and innocent of guile — Mr. Järlström researched the yellow light timing system.

Using a sophisticated “extended kinematic equation,” obtained from his work background in Sweden, he sought to right the wrong that led to his wife’s ticket and found himself mired in government overreach.

You see, the Oregon Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying objected to his practicing engineering without a license.

The board sought to bury his findings about how yellow lights have been calibrated in Oregon — which he had shown encouraged behavior that would allow governments to maximize revenue … not safety.

That’s corruption. The intersection lights’ setup turned a safety measure into a means to fleece motorists — and the engineering board corruptly twisted its mission to suppress the truth. 

Thankfully, the Institute for Justice stepped in, and Järlström won in court.

Oregon now has new intersection lighting standards, and the power of the government professional board has been curbed.

A win for limited government!

And Common Sense, which This Is. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Oregon, licensing, Mat, traffic,

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property rights too much government

Zoned Out

zoning, regulations,

There are ways of cultivating community standards without resorting to zoning and similar regulatory regimens by state and local governments. They have been studied, written about, and they can be found here and there around the country, though most famously in Houston, Texas.

But zoning’s the norm in urban and suburban communities.

Ask Marietta Grundlehner.

She had been running an online clothing boutique from her home in Fairfax County, Virginia, and has been forced to shut it down.

Well, a court has ruled that she must remove all her inventory from her home. You can have a home business in Fairfax, but not inventory of goods for sale.

Ms. Grundlehner had been earning, she said, about $30,000 a year as a “LulaRoe Fashion Retailer” in an industry billed by its online organizer as “social retail.” The ecommerce hub, lularoe​.com, makes an enticing pitch for its business model: “Find your joy and fulfillment by creating a positive impact in your community.”

But it was a neighbor who turned her in and sicced the local government on her.

That Fairfax resident sure did not think she was having a “positive impact” in their community.

Grundlehner hopes for a regulatory change to save her business, but Christian Britschgi of Reason has a word for that battle: “uphill.”

Still, online businesses are on the ascendency. Too many run afoul of zoning laws. And online entrepreneurship being the wave of the future, local governments might want to forget their old gentrification utopianism and meet the real world, the place where people actually live. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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zoning, regulations,

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ideological culture international affairs too much government

All the Tyranny in China

second CCP

Are you going to make a big fuss?

I mean, about China — dominated by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Because some people get all bent out of shape over their totalitarian government placing a million or two Muslim Uighurs into re-​education camps surrounded by high walls and razor wire in order to browbeat, brainwash and torture away their ethnic heritage, language, and religious beliefs. 

Folks also complain about the insidious social credit system and the massive surveillance state, both of which would make Orwell blush; the ugly history of Chinese repression in Tibet; threats to invade peaceful neighboring Taiwan and snuff out their budding democratic experiment; not to mention Tiananmen Square. 

Some cannot get over the estimated 400 million babies murdered by the CCP against the will and amidst the anguished cries of their loving parents. Of course, that old “One Child Policy” has been “liberalized” … now permitting two children. 

Moreover, the CCP’s assault on free inquiry and public dialogue is no longer limited to just silencing their own citizens — as infamous attempts to squelch criticism from universities in Australia and here in America, as well as basketball players, show.

Presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said months ago that Chinese President Xi Jinping was “not a dictator” and “has a constituency to answer to.” At Wednesday night’s debate, he was asked about those remarks.

“In terms of whether he’s a dictator,” Bloomberg explained, “he does serve at the behest of the Politburo, of their group of people, but there’s no question he has an enormous amount of power.”

“But he does play to his constituency,” he reiterated. Sure, all 25 unelected communist insiders (ruling over 1.4 billion disenfranchised Chinese).

Acknowledging that their human rights record is “abominable,” Bloomberg agreed that “we should make a fuss, which we have been doing, I suppose.” 

But … “make no mistake about it, we have to deal with China if we’re ever going to solve the climate crisis. We have to deal with them because our economies are inextricably linked.”

Yes, indeed … with eyes wide open to the totalitarian brutality of the CCP’s Xi Jinping-​led, 25-​person dictatorship. 

We need a lot bigger fuss.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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