“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Quote (from Paine’s “Common Sense”) verified here.
Category: too much government
Yesterday, we discovered that modern America asks police to do “too much.” Which prompts the next question: What should police stop doing?
Here are two immediate reforms where police can do less, while protecting the public more:
(1) End the War on Drugs. Preventing violence and fraud is the rightful role of police. Not preventing people from engaging in activities that are peaceful, however misguided or self-harming. The criminalization of marijuana means more than 150 million Americans are criminals, warranting police involvement.
Now, Mr. Obama has released some convicts serving long drug-related sentences, but we need a president who will go much farther in changing law enforcement priorities.
(2) Stop Using Civil Asset Forfeiture, whereby police steal people’s stuff without charging and convicting those people of any crime. Not only do federal agencies from Justice to the IRS take our property in violation of our rights, but the Feds encourage state and local police to join them in this bad behavior through their “equitable sharing” program.
While Obama has spoken against seizing assets without a criminal conviction, he hasn’t stopped it. And he could at the federal level, with a stroke of his pen — as I have advocated at Townhall. Ending civil asset forfeiture is an executive order actually within his constitutional power.
Would these two steps end all racism or violence or crime? No, no, no.
They would be, however, two steps forward toward a more principled, lawful and respectful style of policing that would better serve to unite rather than divide citizens and police.
It’s a different two-step than reformers have been witnessing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo Credit: Tomasz Iwaniec
When President Obama said, “[W]e ask the police to do too much,” at the memorial service for the five slain Dallas policemen, he was echoing an idea previously expressed.
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters a day earlier. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve,” he added, noting such problems as a lack of mental healthcare, rampant drug abuse, substandard schools and even roaming dogs.
So, what should police stop doing?
Plenty. But I’ll save that answer for tomorrow. Today, let’s pose another: Why so much crime, poverty, and violence in these communities?
Mr. Obama fingered not taxing-and-spending enough on benefits for the poor, including for “decent schools,” “gainful employment,” and “mental health programs.” Yet, after decades of expensive wars on poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, etc., things have only gotten worse.
“We flood communities with so many guns,” the president intoned, “that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock, than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
He’s playing fast and furious with the truth. Books are free at the library. Glocks cost money.
And who is this “we” he keeps bringing up?
Chief Brown mentioned a critical problem Obama did not: “Seventy percent of the African American community is being raised by single women.”
Police cannot solve all our problems, sure, but they especially cannot fix problems exacerbated by the welfare state and the educational system. Big government is no substitute for Mom and Dad.
Even freedom merely offers the opportunity to fix our own problems.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Virginia delegate Beau Correll won’t cast his first ballot vote at the Republican National Convention for Donald Trump, and won’t go to jail, either.
As discussed last Thursday, at issue is a state statute requiring* delegates to vote for the plurality winner of the party’s primary. On the Republican side, that’s Mr. Trump. Yesterday, Federal Judge Robert Payne ruled the law unconstitutional, no law at all, because it violates Correll’s First Amendment rights to speak and associate politically.
“In sum, where the State attempts to interfere with a political party’s internal governance and operation,” the federal judge wrote, “the party is entirely free to ‘cancel out [the State’s] effort’ (Def. Resp. 28) even though the state has expended financial and administrative resources in a primary.”
Love ’em or hate ’em, political parties are private associations, properly protected by the First Amendment.
But is it fair to hold primary elections, at taxpayers’ expense, and then ignore the votes of so many people?
Easy answer: NO.
Sure, Judge Payne correctly struck this statute, but it doesn’t follow that states must foot the bill for party primaries and national conventions or provide legal preference. Up to now, incumbent politicians have quietly legislated a relationship of too-friendly collusion between government and the major parties.
It’s time for citizens to look at initiatives to mandate separation of political party and state.
More immediately, the implications for the coming GOP convention in Cleveland are obvious and far-reaching. “The Court’s decision,” as Correll’s attorney David Rivkin summarized, “follows more than 40 years of precedent in firmly rejecting Donald Trump’s legal opinion that delegates are obligated by law to vote for him.”
The delegates are free.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Penalty for non-compliance? One year in prison.
Original photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr
After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it time to get guns out of the hands of . . . licensed security guards?
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in The Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company.
Mateen’s government credentials included “a Florida state-issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.” Twice, he was investigated by the FBI, in 2013 and again in 2014, and cleared — investigations closed.
Should we talk about security failures?
Instead, a filibuster by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and a sit-in protest by House Democrats changed the channel to gun control. The Senate voted on four bills that threatened more than the Second Amendment. Our Fifth Amendment rights to due process were also in the sights of crusading Democrats and appeasing Republicans and still are.
Not to mention the Ninth Amendment, freedom to do all manner of things, including travel.
Hillary Clinton says that “if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun.” Yet, the problem comes in government simply declaring someone too dangerous to fly or to buy a gun, without ever publicly bringing a charge — you know, with evidence — much less convicting that person of a crime.
Having a government agent place a name on a secret list doesn’t even approximate due process of law. And, accordingly, doesn’t justify stripping a person of fundamental liberties.
Terrorism is terrifying . . . but not any more so than politicians who, in pursuit of their political agendas, don’t think twice about our freedoms or their constitutional limitations.
It’s not all right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Romanticism. The yearning for greatness; the need for speed. Efficiency! It’s all there in California’s high-speed rail project — hopes and dreams and a sense of the grandeur of progress.
And yet the bullet train project, approved by voters in 2008, is a fiasco.
One can blame the voters, I suppose. At least the 53.7 percent who said yes to a referendum authorizing a 9.95 billion bond. Just to get the project started.
But we shouldn’t, really. All the people pushing the bullet train notion (from Los Angeles to the Bay) said that most of the investment would come from private investors. Further, it would require no ongoing subsidies.
Those assurances, however, “were at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con,” writes Virginia Postrel for Bloomberg.
How bad is it? Total construction cost went from a $33 billion to $68 billion — despite route trimming. The first segment, which is understood to be the easiest to build (shooting through an empty stretch), is four years behind schedule, and still lacks necessary land.
The list of failures goes on and on, and includes a dearth of investors. And then there’s the estimate of the company who got the first bid on the project. It says that the line will almost certainly not be self-sustaining.
“The question now,” Postrel concludes, “is when they’ll have the guts to pull the plug.”
Corruption, hope without realism, business as usual — all these are revealed in the project. And wasn’t the second season of True Detective about this? Let’s hope this real-world fiasco ends with less bloodshed.
Californians have already lost enough in treasure!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I am not a writer by trade. I don’t make a living off of these daily and weekly writing gigs. I give this stuff away, for free. The donations I ask for are there to cover bandwidth, website expertise, artwork, etc. They don’t cover my contributions.
But that doesn’t disqualify me from my occasional wonder and amazement (and worse) at how intellectual “property” is handled in America.
This week a Los Angeles jury found that the great rock band “Led Zeppelin did not plagiarize the opening chords of the rock epic Stairway to Heaven from the U.S. band Spirit,” the BBC reports. “It said the riff Led Zeppelin was accused of taking from Spirit’s 1967 song Taurus ‘was not intrinsically similar’ to Stairway’s opening.”
So, my surprise, and perhaps yours too, is that a riff, a mere riff, taken from one song and put into another, could be actionable at law. It seems to me that this would be like suing over an essay title (one has no private property rights to your headlines, no matter how original), or clever turn of phrase. Writers copy this stuff all the time. Even more commonly, they inadvertently regurgitate these writerly “riffs” from the far corners of their minds, or even think up these things separately.
But honestly, I didn’t think one could sue over a riff. Riffs and chord progressions vary in originality, but some of the best songs use the same three chords, so there is a lot of apparent “stealing” going on.
Thankfully, the jury wisely knew the difference between What Is and What Should Never Be.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The biggest political story of the month? Brexit.
The people of Great Britain will vote, this week, whether to remain in, or exit, the European Union. (Britain+exit=“Brexit,” you see.)
Establishment forces in Britain have engaged in hysterical, hyperbolic overkill, warning of grave disaster were Britain to leave the union. America’s President Barack Obama contributed to this, recently, when he warned that an independent Britain might find itself placed “at the back of the queue” in trade talks.
Tragically, things got more troubling last week when anti-Brexit, pro-union campaigner Jo Cox, a Member of Parliament and prominent Labour Party activist, was brutally slain last week in front of her local library. The man had just left a mental health facility, after requesting help.
At first, major media reported that the killer had shouted “Britain First,” an old patriotic motto as well as the name of a pro-Brexit political party, while shooting and stabbing her. Of the several eyewitnesses to have allegedly testified to this murderous shout, only one is sticking to the story . . . a member of the British Nationalist Party, which is antagonistic to Britain First. Other eyewitnesses deny the story.
Next, both sides promised to cease campaigning, out of good taste. Still, polls fluctuated, while remaining close.
Much of the furor has risen over immigration policy, especially fears about EU laxity towards Muslim refugees.
But the bedrock issue is Big Government. The EU is not effectively controlled by citizens; indeed, membership representation is mostly show, a mockery of republican government.
That is why, if I were British, I’d vote to Brexit.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it finally time to get guns out of the hands of . . . licensed security guards?
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company, and his government credentials included “a Florida state-issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.”
Not to mention that Omar Mateen was twice investigated by the FBI — in 2013 and again in 2014 — and cleared by the agency both times. Though on the terrorist watch list for a while, he was removed from that list after the FBI closed its investigations.
So we need more and tougher background checks? Must the FBI check every gun purchaser three times, is that the charm?
Even if the Feds blocked gun sales to those on the terrorist watch list and the “no-fly” list, it wouldn’t have affected Mateen, for he wasn’t on these lists when he purchased his Sig MCX.
Nevertheless, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy led a 14-hour filibuster to bring attention to his gun control legislation . . . that wouldn’t have stopped the Orlando massacre . . . or the shooting in Newtown.
“I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me,” tweeted Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.”
If our government ever uses a secret list developed by security agencies to deny citizens their rights, without due legal process, without innocence until proven guilty, we will sorely need our Second Amendment rights.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This weekend, the Swiss people rejected the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with a whopping 77 percent against.
That’s the kind of overwhelming result that one finds in America for, say, term limits. And 23 percent, you might notice, is about the percentage of the population in America of hard-core “liberal” progressives, the kind of people usually in support of such measures.
In Switzerland’s case, it was a measure put on the ballot by one group, Bien-CH. But if you are thinking “socialism,” the group insists that that’s the wrong way to think about the plan. UBI is needed, the group’s website says, “to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies” facing a declining need for workers as a result of technological advance.
Yes, UBI is a policy designed to accommodate the coming horde of robots! How? By “increasing demand” by spreading out wealth from the connected-to-tech few to the witless-about-tech many. (How vulgar Keynesian.)
The Swiss government urged a No vote, fearing a need to raise taxes by fifty percent. Quite a hike.
Meanwhile, the notion garners worldwide interest, and even libertarian social scientist Charles Murray promotes this guaranteed income idea (under a different initialism), mostly to streamline the costly bulk of the welfare state.
I’m dubious.
After all, about our latest industrial revolution, in artificial intelligence and in robotics: I say open up labor and entrepreneurial markets from excessive regulation, and allow networking advances to transform capitalism on its own terms, with person-to-person (P2P) cooperation (think AirBnB and Uber and Lyft) and much more.
The best is coming, I bet. If clunky proposals like UBI don’t get in the way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
