Category: too much government

Bernie’s Problem?

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, war, foreign policy, blood stained, death, military, illustration

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem. With Hillary Clinton.

Asked about the Clinton Foundation, yesterday, by CNN’s Jake Tapper, host of State of the Union, Bernie re-questioned himself:

Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships?

And Bernie answered, “Yeah, I do.”

How many roads must mainstream media reporters walk down before they investigate and report on the myriad of ethical cracks in the Clinton Foundation?

To the most obvious conflict of interest in the history of the human race, add the fact that even after promising President Obama that the Clinton Foundation would at least be totally transparent with an annual report of all donations . . . well, Hillary welched on the deal, not revealing the donors.

While Bernie’s condemnation of Hillary’s ethical shortcomings was big news, less reported were the senator’s comments regarding whether Mrs. Clinton is “too quick on the draw, too eager to use military force.”

Bernie again was clear: “I worry about that. Yeah, I do. Her support for the War in Iraq was not just an aberration.” Sanders went on to cite Secretary of State Clinton’s role in pushing President Obama to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya and to intervene in Syria.

Hillary’s judgment on issues of war and peace is questionable . . . especially when we don’t know whether or not a foreign leader or his cronies have written big checks to the Clinton Foundation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Dangerous, Incoherent

Hillary Clinton, incoherent, Donald Trump, foreign policy, presidential

Hillary Clinton came out swinging against Donald Trump yesterday. She said electing the man would be an “historic mistake.”

As opposed to her past career in politics, which I would call an historical mistake.

Mrs. Clinton focused in on Mr. Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements. “She ran through Mr Trump’s foreign policy points and rejected each one,” reported the BBC, “calling him thin-skinned, irrational and unprepared.”

Funny, though: I wouldn’t exactly call Mrs. Clinton the opposite: thick-skinned, rational, or prepared.

Take her main charges, then look at the obvious demerit of each:

“Mrs Clinton said a Trump presidency could start overseas wars and ruin the US economy.” Don’t vote Trump — starting wars and ruining the economy is Clinton’s job!

Trump’s “proposals were vague and often nonsensical.” Unlike Clinton’s, whose murky specifics speak of evasion from a to z — and whose policies in Libya and elsewhere made no sense whatsoever, breeding more conflict and opposition in place of the regimes she helped undermine and remove.

“Questioning his relationship with Russian president Vladmir Putin, she said: ‘I’ll leave it to a psychiatrist to explain his affection for tyrants.’” And speaking of perverse affection, her and her husband’s Clinton Foundation has been milking foreign tyrants for years. All very above-board, I’m sure.

“‘This isn’t reality television, this is actual reality,’ she said.” If you ask me, her reality is just as irreal as Trump’s.

We can do better, America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, incoherent, Presidential campaign 2016

ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

The Long Road to Citizens United

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 2, 2016
2 Comments on The Long Road to Citizens United

Krist Novoselic, Citizens United, free speech, fairvote.org

Everybody is familiar with the standard theory regarding the Citizens United decision. Former comedian and current earnest socialist Sarah Silverman puts it this way: “Every politician takes money from Big Money, ever since it was made legal with Citizens United.”

Like most folks who talk this way, she doesn’t give a squeak of context. She barely even indicates that it was a Supreme Court case, 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. She does not mention at all that the ruling overturned the FEC’s act of suppressing a political movie.

But there is a much wider context than such bare facts — and if you want a good synopsis, you could hardly do better than read my friend Krist Novoselic’s calm, reasoned “look at the history of attempts to regulate independent campaign expenditures.”

This “modern history” started with what the New York Times called Richard Nixon’s “revolution in political financing.” The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 “required detailed disclosure of campaign contributions; set campaign contribution limits to candidates, parties and committees; set expenditure limits on campaigns, independent groups and individuals and created the first public financing of presidential campaigns and national conventions.”

And almost immediately the law began suppressing political speech and advertising. And led to a long series of court cases.

And decisions.

And revisions.

That define our times.

Krist (with whom I serve on the board of FairVote.org) provides the context you need to see through what he aptly calls “the hype” about “Citizens United,” as well as how the decision correctly removed the license given to the FEC’s role as “state censorship board.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Citizens United, FairVote, Fairvote.org, free speech, Krist Novoselic

Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility too much government

Fatherland, Socialism and Death!

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 23, 2016
6 Comments on Fatherland, Socialism and Death!

The fall of Venezuela is an atrocity.

The comic elements are clear enough — the further you remove yourself from the poverty, chaos, and collapse. We can wallow in a bit of Schadenfreude, taking glee as some American leftists squirm to explain why the socialist paradise they ballyhooed a mere three years ago now tail-spins to the grave.

The collapse of this socialist experiment offers an enormous level of tragedy. It’s not pretty.

The country’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro, makes his predictable desperation play. Rather than confront his own errors, and the futility of making socialism work in anything like a rigorous form, he boasts. “Venezuela Leader Says US ‘Dreams’ Of Dividing Loyal Military,” reads yesterday’s Reuters report. While no doubt true, this is one of those cases where whatever we dream to the north, our dreams are better than their current reality.

Of course the Venezuelan military should turn on Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s inheritor, protecting the right of recall, which Maduro is denying. By painting the U. S. as the bad guy, Maduro hopes to unite his people — especially his armed forces — around him. That’s what a desperate demagogic dynast does. Citizens and subjects traditionally abandon skepticism about their leaders when they feel threatened from the outside.

Which is one reason it would be a mistake for the U. S. to intervene.

Reuters poetically reports that the military is still united behind the socialist government, and resists the recall referendum, singing “Fatherland, Socialism, or Death!”

Wrong conjunction. Not “or” but “and” . . . if you insist on socialism.

The government, military pressure or no, should allow the recall vote, and soon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags creeping socialism, poverty, rationing, shortages, socialism, Venezuela

education and schooling folly ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Toiletarianism

toilet, bathroom, trans, transgender, sex, gender, law, folly

President Obama and other politicians are taking a wide stance over the nation’s public restrooms. Important bathroom policy will finally be determined at the highest levels.

Last week, public educators nationwide received a legalistically-worded letter from the Departments of Justice and Education explaining how to legally treat transgender students under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. CNN boiled it down to “Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.”

Friendly federal “guidance” comes after dueling lawsuits between the Feds and North Carolina over that state’s House Bill 2, which establishes statewide restroom regulations. Those regs require that transgender folks use the bathroom appropriate to the sex listed on their birth certificate (whether Kenyan, Canadian or other).

Obama wants Americans to choose the restroom matching their self-chosen “gender identity.” Conservatives seem most worried that his policy is so loosely defined as to allow non-transgender male persons to simply claim to be transgender in order to shower with the girls volley-ball team or lurk in the powder room.

“Have we gone stark raving nuts?” questioned Sen. Ted Cruz, proclaiming: “Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls.”

In California, there’s legislation to force businesses to make “all single-stall public restrooms” gender neutral. “Let’s make a clear statement that, if you want to go pee, by all means help yourself,” argued the proposal’s author.

Transgender people should be treated with care and respect, as should every person. But do we really need a national bathroom policy designed for maximum division in an election year?

Before politicians solve today’s glaring non-problem in public restrooms, they should solve a real problem first.

Just one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bathroom, folly, gender, law, sex, toilet, trans, transgender

Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture nannyism too much government

Failure and the Five-Day Weekend

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 6, 2016
3 Comments on Failure and the Five-Day Weekend

Venezuela, socialism, failure, work day, illustration

Socialists often brag how their activism — through unions — gave the modern world its five-day workweek. One could spend a book picking at this boast, but no need: it’s overshadowed by the latest.

A socialist country has just reduced the workweek to two days! Hooray for socialism!

Or, no cheers at all. For this epochal move occurred in Venezuela, the “world’s worst performing economy,” with an inflation rate soaring to 720 percent and an absence of food, toilet paper, and . . . electricity: “President Nicolás Maduro will furlough the country’s public employees,” Nick Miroff writes in the Washington Post, “who account for a third of the labor force — for the bulk of the week, so they can sit through rolling blackouts at home rather than in the office.”

It’s only government employees who get the five-day weekend. And this is not a sign of socialist efficiency (heh heh), ushering in a Marxist utopia.

Another nation ruined by socialism and technocracy!

But not just any nation. Venezuela can boast one of the largest oil reserves in the world. If Norway and Alaska and desert sheiks can milk their underground deposits and distribute goodies to their people, why cannot Venezuelans manage it?

Because they extended socialist planning beyond a kleptocratic sharing scheme. Experts had advised them decades ago to build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, live off low- or no-priced electricity as well as oil sales. Today, oil goes cheap . . . and there’s a drought, too little water behind the dam.

Now Venezuelans are trying to burn oil to generate electricity — mostly without success. Socialism has it all — rampant corruption and catastrophic inefficiency.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags government failure, socialism, unions, Venezuela, Venezuelans

Accountability folly moral hazard too much government

When in Rome

Italy, housing, corruption, government, bureaucracy

Americans concerned with government corruption really should study Italy.

Why?

“You know Italians,” septuagenarian Elio Ciampanella was quoted in the New York Times last week. “If there is a law, they will try to find ways to go around it!”

But it is not just ordinary citizens — the people — who are evading bad laws. It is government workers who won’t do their jobs, and who engage in a wide range of corrupt deals and shady incompetence.

I know, this seems awfully unfair to the Italians. What I’ve said is the case with governments around the world. But not equally. (Scandinavian countries have a long history of government worker probity, if not ultra-competence.) And Italians do have a well-earned reputation for government corruption.

Arguably, it’s the form freedom takes in Italy.

Be that true or not, Mr. Ciampanella’s story, as related in the Times, is a fascinating one. He asked for a government-subsidized apartment, and had to wait ten years to get one . . . only to discover the problem wasn’t a lack of apartments, but a surfeit.

Yes, the government owned too many apartments to keep track of!

And so they didn’t.

And gave special deals to “special people.”

In other words: incompetence and corruption as a way of life.

Market institutions that behave so chaotically and with so little attention to efficiency go out of business. But government? That’s “necessary,” so: too big to fail. And so, commonly excused.

No wonder, then, that the common-sense approach to government is to limit it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bureaucracy, corruption, housing, Italy

general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Drinking Gourd

$20, currency, twenty dollar, Jackson, Hamilton, Tubman, illustration

By now, most people are probably OK with Treasury’s plan to oust Andrew Jackson off the face of the $20 Federal Reserve Note and replace him with Harriet Tubman.

I certainly am. Ms. Tubman was a great hero of freedom. President Jackson has a more . . . mixed legacy.

The original plan to rotate Alexander Hamilton off the ten spot met with pushback as a result of his rising popularity from the Broadway play, Hamilton. Besides, Hamilton deserves blame—er, placement on the nation’s official paper money. Hamilton devised the first national banking system. Andrew Jackson, decades after Hamilton’s death, nixed that insider-mercantile scheme by refusing to re-authorize the central bank of the day, setting up a very different system for the Treasury and America’s banks.

Less than a century later, Hamilton’s idea was revived in the form of the Federal Reserve. Which we benefit/suffer from to this very day.

But in a bizarre twist, Jackson was not simply replaced. He was demoted. Tubman is to be placed on the note’s obverse, and Jackson moved to the back of the bus, er, note. The reverse.

I would have preferred to revive Old Hickory years from now, after the Federal Reserve dissolved, to be featured on a private bank’s note. After all, private banks did that for years between Jackson’s time and the modern period.

Bank notes don’t need the imprimatur of government.

That would allow us to place, on the flip side of the sawbuck, a more suitable image — of the Big Dipper, which served escaped slaves as a direction, to go north: “follow the Drinking Gourd.”

Additionally, the Big Dipper suggests bailouts, doesn’t it?

We’ll have plenty more before the system is changed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags $20, Andrew Jackson, bank note, currency, fiat money, Hamilton, money, treasury, Tubman

folly general freedom national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Procrastinators’ Weekend

Usually, April 15 is the deadline date, in these United States, to file taxes or apply for an extension. This year it is April 18.

Why? Many of us think of the Fifteenth of April as Tax Day. It seems strange and arbitrary when it is jiggered with. And kind of annoying.

But a postponement of taxes could be a postponement we might all appreciate as a tiny (ever so slight) reprieve.

So, again, why this year’s three-day extra leeway?

First off, it is regularly postponed when the day falls on a Saturday or Sunday.

Could it be that the “Nothing Gets Done on Friday” Rule has been acknowledged by the fine folks at the Internal Revenue Service?

No.

People in Maine and Massachusetts celebrate Patriots Day on April 18, so their tax day is set another day later, April 19.

Which begs the question. Why the 18th in the first place?

Well, because of Emancipation Day, usually celebrated in Washington, DC, on April 16.

Because the 16th settles on a Saturday this year, and because the day is a traditional day off for federal workers, the holiday shifts a day in advance, to this Friday, the 15th. So, Emancipation Day — commemorating the signing of the Emancipation Act by President Abraham Lincoln — trumps Tax Filing Day.

Apt, since it might seem cruel to Americans to have Tax Day, marking the subservience of a whole population to its government, fall on something called Emancipation Day.

After all, consider: holding them on the same day? Hmmm. Might get people thinking.

Bigwigs in DC don’t want that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Fed Up With Taxes, slavery, tax, Tax Day

folly general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

The Hypocrisy Gap

wage gap, pay gap, sexism, Equal Pay Day, illustration

You may have missed it. I wasn’t so lucky. This past Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day.”

“[T]he typical woman who works full-time earns 79-cents for every dollar that a typical man makes,” President Barack Obama said, repeating what we have already been told ad nauseum about the “wage gap” between men and women.

The “detailed calculation” used to determine this “gender wage gap”?

“Experts” simply added up all the money earned by all the men and all the women (subcategoried) and then divided by the number of men and women, respectively. No accounting for

the actual jobs performed,
hours worked,
education,
risk,
work history

. . . or any other factor.

Using this statistic make sense if all people — brain surgeons and taxi drivers alike, having worked every day for the last 40 years or re-entering the workforce after decades away — should earn the exact same amount.

Communism.

It is already illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work. Yet, on the WhiteHouse.gov page entitled, “This Is Why Today is Equal Pay Day,” the prez says “we must rid our society of the injustice that is pay discrimination.” The website insists that, Obama “has made equal pay a top priority.”

Then, why does a pay gap exist between the men and women working for Mr. Obama? According to the Washington Post, “The White House has not narrowed the gap between the average pay of male and female employees since President Obama’s first year in office . . .”

The good news? Equal Pay Day is over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Equal Pay Day, equal protection, gender pay gap, sex equality, wages