Category: too much government

C Is For Curmudgeon

Every writer can count among his loyal readers at least one curmudgeon. I have several. Today we consider the criticism of one special curmudgeon.

Let’s call him “Mr. C.”

Mr. C. agrees with my last several invokings of Common Sense. But he wonders, “Sure the [insert expletive here] of Republican presidential candidates are annoying, but never forget: the best Democratic candidate is worse than the worst Republican candidate.”

Mr. C. doesn’t mind ridiculing Trump, or questioning the savvy of Santorum. But, he tells me, “the very existence of a self-professed ‘socialist’ on the Democratic side suggests just how bad things have gotten.”

I don’t disagree. But should I agree with Mr. C. when he insists that “to call oneself a ‘socialist’ at this point in time is worse than calling oneself a ‘Ku Kluxer’”?

Further, Mr. C. informs me, it’s not just the candidate whose initials are “B.S.” who says outrageously commie, er, socialistic things.

“Hillary C.,” he insists, “trumps both Elizabeth Warren [who isn’t running] and B.S. with a whole wheelbarrow load of b.s. She just came out for ‘encouraging’ profit sharing by a business with its workers.”

What could be wrong with that?

Mr. C. has an answer: “All sorts of businesses engage in employee profit-sharing, aiming to encourage the proverbial ‘skin in the game.’ But forcing this is bad for many reasons.”

Again I agree. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is just a sneaky way to play Robin Hood, without addressing the real issue behind all other issues, a lagging, red-tape bound economy.

Or, as was told to another Mr. C. years ago, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

folly free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies too much government

A British Puzzle

Most folks think minimum wage laws are there to help the poor in particular and everybody in general. But economist Scott Sumner, exploring “Britain’s new minimum wage: Is there a hidden agenda?” finds Britain’s new Tory double whammy of decreasing welfare payments while hiking mandatory minimum wage something of a mystery:

Why would a Conservative government sharply increase the minimum wage, in a budget that in many other respects favored small government? The minimum wage is currently 6.50 pounds/hour, and 9 pounds/hour is almost $14/hour in US terms. Also recall that average incomes in the UK are lower than in the US.

He finds a possible reason: to dissuade immigration. Migrants usually have low skills, in part because of language difficulties, so they cannot command high wages — market wages, of course, being defined by worker productivity.

Could the new minimum wage be there to influence migration without doing so directly?

Sumner goes on to discuss the racist origins of the minimum wage in America, Australia, and South Africa. The purpose was pretty clearly to hurt poor workers. Minimum wage laws were established to protect white workers from cheap competition by darker skinned folk.

Sumner’s postscript is interesting: “The [American] Democratic surge of interest in the minimum wage occurred soon after the GOP surge of interest in immigration restriction. Let’s see if the GOP jumps on the minimum wage bandwagon.”

Of course, for every advocate of a class-based, favoritist policy who argues deceptively, there are dozens who are merely mistaken.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Britain, labor unions, minimum wage, racism, Scott Sumner

education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Pushers

When I was a teenager, my mom attended nursing school and became very interested in nutrition. This had consequences.

She stopped buying sugary cereals, for instance. Well! We could not supinely accept this. My younger brother hid Cap’n Crunch and other stuff like that under his bed; and when we wanted a bedtime snack, we’d find him and barter on the black market.

I cite those halcyon days of determined resistance as a relatively benign example of adults regulating kids. Parents have that job. Mom was certainly within her rights. Yet children, although they should gladly obey all reasonable parental injunctions, can only be expected to resist when parental prerogatives stray into sugary-cereal-banning territory.

How much more enthusiastically, then, must we cheer kids who valiantly evade not the proper authority of parents but the improper, pushy, Puritanical programs of joy-stomping institutional busybodies?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Are you by any chance referring to the efforts of Michelle Obama and snivelingly acquiescent educrats to expel anything tasty from school lunchrooms across the land, as if innocuous condiments were the equivalent of strychnine?” Correct!

I’m also talking about kids “caught bringing — and even selling[!!] — salt, pepper, and sugar” to rescue their taste buds from the arbitrarily bland fare.

Good going, guys! And if moms and dads want to take this Declaration of Independence even further, let them yank their kids out of these places and find another way to teach them the ABCs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags education, Michelle Obama, public education

crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Armed Americans

Scared? “July 4 terrorist attack on U.S. soil a legitimate threat, officials warn” — headlines the Washington Times.

Scared now?

Last weekend on Fox News Sunday, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Tx.) expressed his extreme concern that “Syrian and ISIS recruiters can use the Internet at lightning speeds to recruit followers in the United States . . . and then activate them to do whatever they want to do. Whether it’s military installations, law enforcement or possibly a Fourth of July event parade.”

Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director, told CBS This Morning, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States. That’s how serious this is.”

In the last three weeks, the FBI has arrested ten U.S. citizens allegedly plotting attacks here — in solidarity with the Islamic State.

Just a week ago, I suggested we dump the Department of Homeland Security and start anew, because the DHS bureaucracy is hardly the best way to organize government to stop terrorist attacks.

Yet, no matter how well organized, government cannot possibly stop every act of violence.

While contemplating the Independence Day prospect of lone-wolf lunatics or homicidal decapitators and suicide bombers organized “at lightning speeds,” a thought came to mind: We had better depend on ourselves.

If those who will heed “the siren calls” of the Islamic State do get past Homeland Security and our alphabet quilt of security agencies, let’s do everything we can to make certain they still have to face us, armed Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags CIA, Homeland Security, Islam, terrorism

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Marauding Cops

Policemen who perpetrate acts like those I am about to describe should be imprisoned.

That’s not an anti-police statement, it’s a pro-law-and-order one. Anybody who vandalizes the property of innocent people and pointlessly terrorizes them, whether flashing a badge as prelude or not, should be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished.

Santa Ana police raided a medical-marijuana dispensary, a legal business in California. Why? Solely because it lacked a license.

Techdirt.com, which has videos of the raid, suggests that although “having the proper paperwork in place is important” — and it sure seems to be if not-being-raided is also important to you — the shop was in line to get the license. The process had been bogged down by local politics.

Nevertheless, officers on site “treated this lack of proper paperwork like it was the Zeta Cartel operating under its nose. The video captured by the dispensary’s cameras shows heavily-armed cops — some wearing ski masks — smashing through two doors and yelling at the peaceably-assembled customers to lie on the floor.”

We then see the jolly officers sampling the shop’s foodstuffs, playing darts, and ripping cameras off the wall.

They missed a couple. (Hence Techdirt’s extensive video coverage.)

Motive? It seems apparent that they engaged in all this abusive authority-flaunting just because they could.

And there is no real doubt that they knew what they were doing was wrong, and they knew that we would know. That’s why they went for the cameras.

Just like any gang trying to get away with something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Drug War, law, marijuana, police, police abuse

folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Safety, Savings and Symbolism

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 25, 2015
2 Comments on Safety, Savings and Symbolism

How can the U. S. save $2.5 billion a year, reduce the federal workforce by 4,000 hires, and engage in a symbolic act of undoubted patriotism, all at the same time?

Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt A. Mayer, a former DHS employee who claims to have “written more on DHS than just about anyone,” writes in Reason that dismantling DHS would increase co-ordination and decrease inefficiencies.

Since DHS was put in place, in 2003, to increase governmental co-ordination in the face of terrorist threats, Mayer’s charge that it serves the opposite cause should . . . give us pause.

Establishing the DHS didn’t get rid of turf wars. Why would it? It increased the turf rather than merely reroute chains of communication and command. All other agencies still exist. Extra turf exacerbates co-ordination difficulty.

And then there’s what state and local law enforcement faces: “the multi-headed hydra.” The federal operation remains fragmented, which “only ensures that key items will fall through the cracks between these departments, whose personnel spend far too much time fighting each other for primacy than they should. Our enemies couldn’t ask for a more fertile environment within which to attack us.”

I added the italics, for emphasis.

Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency on consolidating bureaucratic departments in the nation’s capital, but delivered, instead, new departments, the “logic” of adding new bureaucracies onto old has proven to be the “easy answer” for insiders. But a transparent failure, for everyone else.

So, start over. Get rid of the inefficient monster.

And take heart: republics don’t have “homelands”; empires do. Let’s stop playing the wrong game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags law, National Security Agency, NSA, police, terrorism

folly general freedom too much government

Under the Law, Not Beneath It

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 17, 2015
3 Comments on Under the Law, Not Beneath It

Celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum this week, I noted how a document intended to serve the very upper classes, by limiting each others’ powers, led to liberty for all.

The Nation, on the other hand, used it to excoriate the Citizens United ruling.

“Magna Carta reminds us that no man is above the law,” wrote John Nichols on Monday. “But it should not be imagined that Magna Carta established democracy, or anything akin to it.”

Of course the Magna Carta did not establish democracy. No one said it did. And neither Britain nor America has pure democracy, if you define it . . . in Nichols fashion. What is he driving at?

If we respect the notion that the rule of law must apply to all . . . then surely it must apply to corporations.

And, surely, the best celebration of those premises in the United States must be the extension of the movement to amend the US Constitution to declare that corporations are not people, money is not speech, and citizens and their elected representatives have the authority to organize elections — and systems of governance — where our votes matter more than their dollars.

Sure, Mr. Nichols, corporations shouldn’t be above the law. But they shouldn’t be below it, either. And in America we have rights to free speech and press. Those rights “surely . . . must apply to corporations.”

Let’s increase the liberating powers of democracy: open up ballot access, de-privilege incumbents, count votes in a non-mere-plurality-wins fashion.

But let’s not throw out equal rights under the law, even in the name of democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Citizens United, corporations, magna carta, The Nation

folly general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Political Theatrics

Our suspicions have been proved: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doesn’t secure much of anything; it is mere “security theater.”

After revelations that TSA screeners failed to find weapons and other deadly contraband in 96 percent of tests, David A. Graham, writing for The Atlantic, asked “what kind of theater this is. . . . A period drama, satirizing the 2000s? Vaudeville farce?”

Easy answer: the genre is “statism.”

Statism is the worship of government, or the reliance upon government to do many more than a few tasks. It is very old.

The ancient states arose from conquest, developing as a way to milk the masses for the benefit of the few. That’s what states traditionally do: use force to move wealth from one group to another.

Along the way, the states did do some good. Amidst all their horrors.

But mostly rulers just leveraged myth and bluster to cover crimes.

In more recent times, in this great country, the idea arose that the state should be limited to a few necessary jobs, tightly controlled by the people so that government might actually defend rights, not abridge them.

But this revolutionary democratic-republican ideology did not alter the basic nature of reality, turning the sow’s purse of the conquerors’ art into the gold of the Public Interest.

Without our vigilance, government always reverts back to its roots.

The TSA is simply the latest myth-and-bluster-backed scam aiding the ludicrous notion that government is all-powerful . . . while providing only faux security. Get rid of it; let its people go. Then watch airlines come up with more effective, less intrusive, more passenger-friendly security systems.

Want theater? Try “vigilance theater.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags security, statism, terrorism, TSA

general freedom government transparency national politics & policies privacy too much government

Rand to the Rescue

Nothing gets done in Washington?

Tell that to Kentucky Senator and presidential hopeful Rand Paul. Last night, he single-handily “repealed” Section 215 of the Patriot Act, ending the federal government’s mass collection of our phone records.

At least, for the next few days.

On the floor of the Senate, Paul blocked the USA Freedom Act, a “compromise” bill passed by the House. It would’ve required private telecoms to keep the data, allowing the government to query that data with a warrant.

“I’m supportive of the part that ends the bulk collection by the government,” said Paul. “My concern is that we might be exchanging bulk collection by the government [with] bulk collection by the phone companies.”

In a Time magazine op-ed, he argued, “We should not be debating modifying an illegal program. We should simply end this illegal program.”

Also last week, the Tea Party Patriots joined the ACLU in agreeing with Paul’s position: the USA Freedom Act doesn’t go far enough . . . to protect our civil rights.

Others warn we aren’t safe without maximum snooping and info-scooping by government:

CIA Director John Brennan called the metadata program “integral to making sure that we’re able to stop terrorists in their tracks.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the expiration amounted to “a serious lapse.”
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence — most famous now for lying to Congress about the existence of the metadata program — declared we “would lose entirely an important capability that helps us identify potential U.S.-based associates of foreign terrorists.”

Yet, there’s not a single case where this bulk phone data helped capture a terrorist or stop an attack.

Sen. Paul believes “we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution.”

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, freedom act, patriot act, privacy, Rand Paul, security, Senate

crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom too much government

Under Their Thumb

What if police grabbed your children off the street and held them for five hours?

Alexander and Danielle Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, have been investigated three times. First, when their children were discovered playing by themselves in a park a block from their home. The second time when police picked up the kids walking home from a park about a mile away. The third investigation was launched when the Meitiv’s 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were arrested and held for five hours for walking home from a different park.

Nothing came of the first investigation. In the second, CPS originally found the couple guilty of “unsubstantiated neglect.” But last week, the Meitivs received a letter from Maryland’s Child Protective Services (CPS) now ruling out neglect in the second investigation.

Gee whiz, it’s good news. But the Meitivs still have investigation No. 3 to contend with. And CPS remains completely mum on whether the agency’s letter means the Meitivs and other parents can now freely allow their kids to walk to and from public parks and other venues.

Or not.

Can we really live in the “Land of the Free” and our children not be free to walk in public? What kind of freedom is that?

If the Constitution isn’t sufficient to stop police and child welfare [sic] agencies from snatching kids off the street, terrifying them, investigating their parents and threatening to take those children, we need to pass new laws granting children the right to walk down the street . . .

. . . as long as it’s okay with their parents.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags children, constitution, free range, kids, law