Category: too much government

Categories
general freedom media and media people property rights too much government

Naked Truth Up North

In the U.S., broadcasters and savvy consumers worry about the behavior of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the electromagnetic spectrum not by defending property rights, but by licensing segments of the spectrum within locales. The FCC even regulates content to some extent, by threat of withdrawing licensure.

But it could be worse. We could be in Canada.

How so? Well, Canadian politicians have long picked at a cultural scab: their identity crisis, their fear of being overshadowed by the U.S. So, up north, regulation of broadcast content centers on the promotion of “Canadian” artistry and talent in place of programming generated elsewhere, chiefly America.

Yes, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has quotas.

And like all quota systems, it has long ago embraced absurdity.

The latest nonsense?

The demand that two Canadian porn channels provide more home-grown pornography. In addition, the channels have been charged with not been providing enough closed captioning. (Just what adult movies need, careful transcription.)

AOV XXX Action Clips and AOV Maleflixxx are on notice, and their respective licenses are under review:

The X-rated specialty channels are supposed to air 35 per cent Canadian programming over the broadcast year and 90 per cent of its content should have captioning.

As part of proposed licence renewals, the commission plans to hear evidence on the apparent non-compliance.

It might be awfully funny to horn in on those hearings, listen to what people will say about upping Canadian porn production to meet standards that encourage, uh, national pride.

But the dirtiest truth is that most regulation of the airwaves is just as ridiculous, if not quite as nakedly so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency meme porkbarrel politics too much government

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Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Their Power

Boo hoo.

Thirty-three hifalutin members of Colorado’s political elite — state legislators, former legislators, board of education officials, city and county politicians, and assorted insiders — are whining as plaintiffs in what’s called a federal case.

Why? They lost an election … in 1992! Now, as the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals put it, “Plaintiffs claim that they have been deprived of their power over taxation and revenue.”

Over 22 years ago, Coloradans petitioned the Taxpayer Bill of Rights onto the ballot and voters passed it. Known as TABOR, the constitutional amendment limits the growth of government spending, unless voters approve higher spending levels. It also requires voter approval for tax increases, except in an emergency. The politicians objected at the time, but have since lacked both the courage and the democratic sensibility to take the issue back to the people.

Instead, they’re suing to overturn the result.

The legal theory behind the lawsuit? That TABOR limits the legislature’s ability to unilaterally raise taxes or spend money as it pleases, thus denying the state a “fully effective legislature” — thus TABOR violates the federal constitution’s guarantee that each state have a republican form of government.

Last week, the 10th Circuit ruled the state legislators have standing to sue the people of Colorado over the legislators’ right to tax and spend without a bunch of pesky voters getting in the way.

Those who founded our republican form of government would be absolutely astounded … if they could only be stopped, first, from spinning at such high rates of speed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

TSA Follies Exposed

Jason Harrington is a former Transportation Security Administration agent who spent years doing stupid, degrading things to passengers because his superiors demanded it. He deserves credit for blogging about his experiences even before leaving TSA, and for eventually coming clean under a byline.

You can read Harrington’s lengthy account for Politico of how TSA agents routinely behave:

  • They target beautiful women for pat-downs.
  • They target passengers for “random” security checks not because they manifest themselves as security risks but merely for saying something that rubs them the wrong way.
  • They perform all kinds of often humiliating “security” measures that they know are pointless.

All this by routine.

When the multi-million-dollar, ineffectual body scanners were in regular use, agents laughed it up over bodily defects exposed by the scans that they review in a separate room. These scanners weren’t even good at detecting guns or plastic explosives. The problems with them were known even as they were being installed.

All history attests that when people are given petty power to abuse others as “part of the job,” they use that power (and virtually every ordinary use of power in such a context must also be an abuse of it). Employees who refrain are, obviously, “not doing their jobs,” and get fired. So who’s left?

Those who enjoy that sort of thing, or at least assent to it.

So let’s not give anybody this kind of power. We can start by shutting down the TSA.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Are You My Father?

Van Jones, the president’s controversial former green jobs czar, must have been struck by lightning yesterday en route to taping ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Discussing President Obama’s new “My Brother’s Keeper” program to “build pathways to success” for at-risk “children of color,” Van Jones embraced a notion of corporate personhood far beyond anything previously expressed . . . well, by anyone.

First, Jones advanced the new Obama initiative as just another bailout: “Listen, everybody else . . . got in trouble in America. Wall Street got in trouble; we were there for them. The auto industry got in trouble; we were there for the auto industry. You got a whole generation of young kids who are clearly in trouble.”

A bailout isn’t a dad, though.

And functioning fathers are “essential,” argued Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Noting that fatherless kids are 20 times more likely to go to prison and nine times more likely to drop out of school, she applauded the president’s statement that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”

MacDonald also highlighted that a whopping 73 percent of black children are now born to single mothers, and that three decades of social programs “haven’t made much difference.”

“Do you think you need anybody to tell us how terrible this is?” Van Jones, who is black, pointedly asked Mac Donald. “We work on it every day. We need corporate America to step up.”

Jones wants corporations to be fathers to our children? That’s taking personhood for corporations too far.

And asking too little of men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access free trade & free markets insider corruption too much government

King Kevin and Company

Oh, how the other half lives!

And lies.

By “other half,” I don’t mean “the wealthy.” They’re as honest as any other group. No, I’m talking about those with their hands on the levers of government power . . . along with their subsidy-seeking cronies.

Mayor Kevin Johnson, an all-star in the National Basketball Association before becoming a politician, is splurging nearly $300 million tax dollars — roughly the city’s entire yearly budget — to build the owners of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings a brand new arena.

People objected, with 23,000 citizens signing petitions to put this lavish subsidy to a vote. Yesterday, a judge ruled that the measure would be kept off the ballot: errors in the wording of the petition “disqualified” it.

In a prepared sore-winner statement, Mayor Johnson called the petitioners “outsiders” who “have tried to undermine the right of Sacramento to control the destiny of our Kings, our downtown and our future.”

Johnson doesn’t mean the right “of the people” to control. He means his right to dictate for Sacramento even against the will of the majority.

The leader of one group working against a public vote on the arena giveaway attacked local businessman Chris Rufer, charging that “Rufer’s funding . . . is supporting STOP’s effort to steal 4,000 jobs, steal a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform downtown and makes him an accomplice in Seattle’s attempt to steal the Kings.”

Who’s stealing? Those spending their own money so people can vote? Or those blocking a vote so they can spend other people’s money?

“I’m against subsidy, period. It’s simply a moral argument,” Rufer explains. “If it was a subsidy for a fish pond, I’d be against it.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy too much government

Tax the Poor!

There is an argument for taxing the poor. Net beneficiaries of taxation can think about government in a different way than net payers. They might begin to think like children, not like adult supporters of a shared enterprise in defense of the basic institutional framework that in turn supports civilization.

If Americans still took seriously the old republican idea of “no taxation without representation,” some might scandalously invert the mantra as “no franchise without net tax payment,” thus excluding all net tax consumers (politicians, subsidized poor and subsidized business folk) from voting. But that does seem outrageous.

It’s also unworkable. At some point of complexity, calculating net winners and net losers becomes impossible.

Democrats have happily added to that complexity. One odd wrinkle? They’ve so indiscriminately increased the number of taxes in Obamacare (twenty-one!) that they have seemingly taken up the cause of taxing the poor. “Even the lowest income families (earning less than about $19,000 in 2012) will be on the hook,” writes Chris Connover in Forbes, “for nearly $7,000 in Obamacare taxes over the decade that started last year.”

Of course, the poor aren’t the only to pay more under Obamacare. Connover estimates that those in the “top 2 percent” will “end up paying $177,000 over the same decade.”

None of this suggests to me that the net effect of Obamacare will be positive. It’s basically just another hyper-intrusive, reality-distorting government program that will make services more expensive in toto, providing a huge drag on medicinal progress as well.

Impoverishing most of us, along with “the poor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy too much government

NY Democrats Surrender, Sorta

New York State is deeply blue. That’s the color mapmakers use to show Democratic control. That’s also the state the state’s economy is in, depressed by those same Democrats’ policies.

So, to lighten the mood, Governor Andrew Cuomo is splurging $140 million tax dollars for TV ads.

One spot features actor Robert DeNiro acknowledging that “some say we lost our edge,” but then claiming, “Well, today there’s a new New York State, one that’s working to attract businesses and create jobs . . . nurture start-ups and small businesses . . . reduce tax burdens . . .”

“The new New York works for business,” the ad concludes.

The New York Times reports “the governor and lawmakers are” funding the campaign by “draining money from ostensibly independent public authorities for purposes running counter to their missions” — something “common” in state government.

Cuomo told the Times, “By telling the stories of businesses that are already succeeding in our state, we can attract even more economic opportunity and jobs.” So what are these “successes”?

  • Taxpayers handing Fage Yogurt $1.5 million in state incentives to build a factory in Johnstown.
  • Taxpayers providing $3.4 million to help Smith Electric Vehicles build a factory.
  • Taxpayers forking over $40 million to assist BAE Systems, which was hurt by flooding back in 2011.

As much as New York politicians recognize they’ve created an environment that businesses want to move away from — the state’s taxes are the least business friendly in the union — their focus isn’t on reversing the rotten business climate. Instead, they cut insider deals.

Yes, more crony capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Obamacare Results Already In

A reader named Gert, commenting at National Review Online, repeats a notion heard often enough to become cliché.

Gert suggests that to debate Obamacare is “terribly premature. We just don’t have the data to know how it’s working yet.” Give it a chance to play out a bit more. Meantime, forget mere “anecdotes,” like those told by the millions who have lost their insurance despite the president’s repeated assurance that if they liked their coverage, they could keep it, “Period.”

Such advisors speak as if Obamacaresque interference in medicine were a species of interventionism utterly unlike anything before.Will and Ariel Durant's History of Western Civilization

But Obamacare is a type of thing; if we know that this type of thing is destructive by its nature, we can expect Obamacare to also be so. We know enough already — from history, economics, philosophy, psychology — to know that persons free to make their own judgments and act on them peacefully are better off than persons whose every move is mandated or banned.

What enables human beings to produce wealth, solutions, and alternatives in any realm is freedom. With responsibility. Freedom to act and to profit from our actions by choosing, as producers, what goods to provide others; by choosing, as consumers, the products that best suit our needs and circumstances. And to reap the rewards of success, and learn from our failures.

To continue to destroy this freedom in the name of collecting more data is wrong-headed. If the history of mankind so far doesn’t provide enough info to convince someone of the value of liberty, what will?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Startling Subsidy Success

“Moving on from unfulfilling jobs, thanks to health-care law,” was the gleeful headline* on the story spoon-fed to The Washington Post by Families USA, a pro-Obamacare group that maintains a “database of people who have benefitted” from the law (a pretty easy gig, no doubt).

Polly Lower quit her job and says, “It was wonderful.” She didn’t want the job anymore, because she went from “doing payroll, which she liked, to working on her boss’s schedule, which she loathed.”

Take this job and . . .

Eddie Gonzales-Novoa left a job making $88,000 annually, because he wanted to help a cancer-surviving relative start a website for others battling the disease. Now he makes very little, but has more rewarding employment.

Well, if they can afford not to work or to make less in order to do what they want, good for them!

But, if you pay taxes (anyone?), it might not be so good for you. Under the Affordable Care Act, both Eddie and Polly are getting their health insurance subsidized by the taxpayers.

Gonzalez-Novoa’s job change is easy to sympathize with, but why should “the taxpayers” pay for the bill? Might not they have similar dreams of their own to finance?

Lower not only didn’t like her job, she was better off without one — so she receives even more in Obamacare subsidies. She told the Washington Post that she has “adjusted well” to not working.

Sadly, the Post offered no report on how well the taxpayers are adjusting to continuing to work to pay these new subsidies to others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Print headline was different than online headline.