Category: 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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

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

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Maduro, Venezuela

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.

PDF for printing