Category: too much government

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folly ideological culture too much government

Apocalypse California

Gavin Newsom, California, reparations, racism

The Democratic Party is a victim of its own success. Nowhere can we see that more clearly than in California.

Democrats have succeeded by pushing “victimhood,” gaining power by focusing on special groups, declaring them oppressed and offering compensation — though still never comes the day of full escape from the burden of this oppression.

Many stories of oppression are true.But no sized sliver of truth can guarantee that compensation attempts will redound to the liberation of the aggrieved.

California’s Democrats will face this soon.

Over slavery! And racism.

Never a slave state, California has been flirting, officially, with reparations. Several cities have “explored” the idea. An official “Reparations Task Force,” established by state law, has recommended a formal apology for slavery (in other states, over a hundred-​and-​fifty years ago). It’s also talking about giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to Black Californians, descendants of slaves or not. 

The task force is scheduled to make explicit and detailed recommendations —  on July 1.

Which puts Democrats on the spot.

Powerful Democrats such as Governor Gavin Newsom. Considered a rising presidential aspirant should the current 82-​year-​old decide not to run again, Newsom signed the law to officially look at reparations … but then seemed less than fond of the price-​tag. More than twice the yearly state budget!

Now the governor is keeping his mouth shut awaiting the final report.

And, as George Skelton at the L.A. Times asks, then what? Well, that is when “the governor and lawmakers will need to emerge from cover, face the public and devise a better response.”

But up until July they can still pretend.

Then, Democrats will have to face the reparations issue squarely — and in the context of the complete failure of their state, the blame for which they cannot place upon Republicans, much less long-​dead racist slave-owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom judiciary too much government

Hollowed-​Out America

covid, freedom, hysteria

While Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s comments in Arizona v. Mayorkas are worth studying in full — the case is about immigration — his thoughts on the late pandemic panic stand out.

“Since March 2020,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes,” and the judge goes through a long list of decrees, including:

  • Closing churches but not casinos
  • Threatening violators with both civil penalties and criminal sanctions
  • Surveilling church parking lots, recording license plates, and issuing warnings against attending even outdoor services.

And he adds that the federal government got in on the tyrannies.

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces,” he notes. “They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” Gorsuch acknowledges this is not exactly a revelation: “Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

There is a deeper problem, though, for the “concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.”

All the way through the pandemic, and even now, we have been barraged by messages about “misinformation and disinformation” about the disease and the treatments (proactive and reactive) against it. And the people in power — bureaucrats as well as politicians — were called “experts” while actual experts (along with earnest amateurs) were hounded, their ideas suppressed. 

Now we know that much of what was then held as good information was in error, even lies. 

Very unsound governance: Gorsuch characterizes it “a shell of a democracy.” 

“Hollow.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Survival Requirements

climate change, global warming, energy, EPA

Suppose you have a roof. Now you punch holes in the roof. The next time it rains, do the holes help or hurt? You’ve still got a roof, right? Mostly?

Actually, it’s bad to have holes in your roof. And the more holes you have, the worse it gets.

I elaborate this object lesson not primarily for you and your common-​sensical friends, but to those determined to make it ever-​harder for us to provide ourselves with food, clothing, and shelter by progressively crippling our means of doing so.

Example? The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to kill uninterrupted generation of power in the United States.

New rules the EPA has proposed would require plants powered by coal or gas to eliminate almost all of their carbon emissions by 2040. The plants would have to shut down or switch to less reliable sources of electricity like the sun (unhelpful when it’s cloudy or post-​sunset), wind (unhelpful when there’s no wind), and wishful thinking (never helpful).

Fossil-​fueled power plants provide some 60 percent of production of electricity in the country. Jim Matheson, head of National Rural Electric Cooperative Associations, warns that the EPA rules would put the reliability of the power grid at risk.

Yes. Rolling blackouts currently the norm in a few states especially plagued by anti-​energy policies would become the norm throughout the country.

Like us, proponents of such policies may already know that deliberately creating shortages of energy is bad. 

Unlike us, though, they may think that others, and not themselves, will bear the brunt of the downpour.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Flush The White House

water pipes, ecology, Joe Biden, dishwasher, toilets

The people who gave America the double- and triple-​flush toilet have set their sights on our automatic dishwashers.

Well, that’s not quite right. It was Congress that gave us the regulations that turned our toilets into a nightmare of clogging and extra time with plungers and flush levers. I wrote about this nightmare for years, advising readers to “Flush Congress.”

Now it isn’t Congress directly, but “the White House” — and the Department of Energy in particular, according to a story in The Epoch Times. “The Administration is using all the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” states Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

She’s talking about new efficiency standards for power and water usage which the DOE insists will “cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers.”

But anyone who has endured the toilets that came out in the 1990s knows that these putatively well-​intentioned schemes burst the pipes, so to speak, making a mess and a mockery of any concept of efficiency. The Biden is enthusiastically pushing the piety that intentions matter most in regulation — the If We Mandate It, It Shall Be philosophy. Yet,The Epoch Times contrasts the current administration with the previous: “Trump criticized the push to raise efficiency standards, arguing that they made some appliances work less effectively and so were counterproductive” … and then mentions the multiple flushes of toilets that I cannot help but remember.

Trump’s surely right; The Biden’s surely wrong. And the ultimate result will be to raise the costs of appliances, thus hitting the poor hardest. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Public TV Vetoed

Public TV, television, state media, propaganda

One shouldn’t need the latest ratcheting-​up of the culture wars to oppose what we call, in America, “public radio and TV.” Taxpayer-​subsidized broadcast media is a bad idea. Period. Full stop.

Defund NPR. Defund PBS. No more state-​run or ‑subsidized media.

And, thankfully, that point was made by Governor Kevin Stitt when he vetoed the Oklahoma legislature’s renewed funding for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority. 

“OETA, to us, is an outdated system,” he told Fox News. “You know, the big, big question is why are we spending taxpayer dollars to prop up or compete with the private sector and run television stations?”

But he didn’t stop there. “And then when you go through all of the programing that’s happening and the indoctrination and over-​sexualization of our children, it’s just really problematic, and it doesn’t line up with Oklahoma values.”

What this implies is that wasting taxpayer money on “public supported” media was fine with Republicans like Stitt. Until a really flagrant violation of their sensibilities.

Sure, the current gender and “critical race theory” nonsense that taxpayer-​subsidized media pushes is beyond the pale.

But so is the smug establishment progressivism of “public media” culture more generally.

The whole point of taxes and government spending is to promote the general welfare, or so the standard theory runs. But there’s nothing “general” about the extreme sectarianism of “public radio and TV,” with less well-​to-​do taxpayers subsidizing the far wealthier public media audience.

It would have been far more inspiring had Governor Stitt dared oppose factional subsidies prior to the latest culture war strife. Indeed, maybe we wouldn’t be now enduring CRT and transgenderism and other aspects of cultural Marxism had conservatives actually stuck to republican principles long ago. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets media and media people political economy too much government

Incredulity Doesn’t Cut It

dumpster fire, regulations, privatization

One of the objections people often make to the idea of private enterprise as a solution to government inefficiency is The Argument from Incredulity.

It’s not an argument at all, actually, just a harrumph and a guffaw: we cannot have free-​market police, or fire suppression, or … garbage collection!

But of course all those things are successfully managed in the private sector.

No media outfit has a longer history of pointing this out than Reason magazine. So when the editors of Reason brought us Joe Lancaster’s “Government Waste Monopoly Pits Private Dumpster Business Against Garbage Bureaucrats,” yesterday, I hope they took a moment to revel in a little nostalgia. For this is the kind of story that made Reason what it is today, one of the best sources for retail political economy.

The tale tells of Steven Hedrick, an Arkansas man who put together a business renting out dumpsters — like you often see on construction sites, but smaller — which he would haul away after customers filled them. He built the business without ever going into debt, and then … came the government. 

“[I]n April 2022, the City Council in Holiday Island passed Ordinance 2022-​004, which required all residents and businesses within the city to contract with the county sanitation authority, Carroll County Solid Waste (CCSW), for trash pickup and disposal services,” Reason informs us. “Anyone using private companies would have to switch, and anyone who did not have contracted trash service would have to sign up.”

And Hedrick’s little business must be … dumped.

What this is, at base? Sheer bigotry: preferring monopoly government to competitive private services.

For those of us who’ve been reading Reason for decades, it sports a familiar smell.

Just not a good odor, for the drive to monopolize everything stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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