Category: too much government

Categories
too much government

Where the Jobs Are

Sixteen days. The federal government went into shutdown mode for that long, if a soft shutdown, with most services carrying on — and some government bureaus going into overkill mode to stick it to citizens.

But during those 16 axial rotations, some of the things that carried on “business as usual”-wise might surprise you.

Federal job applications, for instance.

“The government is still aggressively hiring,” informs Lily Whiteman. In a fascinating Washington Post article, Annys Shin quotes this author of How to Land a Top-Paying Federal Job to help explain the weird fact that, during the shutdown, the government was bombarded with job applications, and was even advertising a few positions. But, as Whiteman stated, it’s hardly inexplicable. Government is “where the jobs are.”

And, as Shin’s reportage makes clear, this popularity of federal work

reflects the continued weakness of the job market, four years out from the end of the Great Recession, federal hiring experts said. As much as the public sector has been buffeted by turmoil in recent months, it is still seen as a haven from something even more uncertain: the private sector.

The federal government is alive and well and siphoning wealth in large gulps. The best way to spark a sputtering private-sector job recovery isn’t more government, but for Congress to go into a long, long repeal session, and jettison our most burdensome programs, taxes, spending, regulations, and unfulfillable promises.

It’s no wonder the Great Recession is still going on. After all, Big Government is still going on and on and on and on . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Affordable [sic] Healthcare [sick]

The Pelosi-Obama Affordable Care Act was passed as a pig-in-a-poke. Now with that poke open, with the pig fully emergent as of next year, what do we know about “Obamacare”?

  1. It’s not socialized medicine, but it is heavily regulated- and subsidized-medicine, almost designed not to work. Its inevitable failures will be said to require more government as “fixes,” eventually (some Democrats hope) going all the way to, yes, socialized medicine.

  2. It’s chockfull of new subsidies, which raise medical costs by making demand for services even more inelastic . . . and thus can only increase taxpayer burdens and more strain on budgets. The original reason so many Americans opposed the reform was that promoting a new “entitlement” even as the old entitlements of Social Security and Medicaid teetered further into insolvency was the very opposite of common sense.
  3. It’s filled with new “mandates” at every level, for businesses as well as individuals. A few have been postponed, but the bulk of the increased regulations are indeed going into effect next year. That will generally raise prices.

But by how much? Well, a new all-state study predicts that

insurance premiums will increase under the first year of Obamacare in 45 of 50 states. This finding flies in the face of President Obama’s promise that his health care overhaul would cause premiums “for the typical family” to fall by $2500.

Why the decrease in five states?

Those had already embraced the goofy over-regulations that Democrats just seem to love.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Resistance Is Not Futile

Who says signing up for Obamacare is all snarls and snafus?

Thirty-year-old law student Brian Mahoney already had a high-deductible, low-premium insurance plan. But the day the Obamacare exchanges went online, he decided to check it out. For him, unlike thousands of others, signing up was easy.

Great. Except that . . . Mahoney had been paying for medical insurance, and now he’s on Medicaid. The website told him he was eligible. Thus, the “success” here is the triumph of making a capable adult less self-responsible and more dependent on government handouts.

And that’s bad. If we care about our freedom, what we must do is resist appeals, or demands, that we forfeit control over our lives — even if offered a mess of pottage in return. Refuse to cooperate with the bureaucrats and politicians. Not become martyrs, but resist to the extent that we can resist. Even if it’s, well, more than a tad inconvenient. Certainly we should not submit to new chains and crutches eagerly.

A reader at the Hot Air blog reports that when he asked his doctor about “about how our electronic records would be used and protected” under the Obamacare regime, the doctor replied: “We’re not keeping electronic records. We refuse to comply with Obamacare. We’re not switching over.”

Good for you, Doc. We need more like you.

I certainly don’t want my medical records in the hands of government . . . to name just one of the things having to do with me, my rights and my life that I don’t want government anywhere near.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Something to Protect

Blasé about sweeping government surveillance? Think you have “nothing to hide”?

I bet you do.

Ever draw curtains? You have “something to hide.” If you balk when a con man says, “I need your birthday and Social Security Number,” you have “something to hide.” When you feel comfortable giving certain information about yourself to some persons but not others, you demonstrate your preference to hide some things from some people.

That’s not nothing.

Philosopher Harry Binswanger, however, says he is not worried. “I have no secrets. Those who raise the specter of Big Brother are not on a wrong basic premise, but they are being unrealistic: when and if we fall into the grip of totalitarianism, there will be nothing to stop the dictatorship from spying on us by any means it wishes. Such a regime does not require that the tools have been set up in advance.” Some reining in may be appropriate, but “alarmism” is unwarranted.

It’s warranted.

Totalitarianism doesn’t happen with a flip of the switch. Tyranny works from precedents. Daily encroachments help establish it.

And our government violates our rights in the here and now, in days prior to any fully Orwellian dystopia. The tools usable tomorrow by an American-style GPU or Gestapo to violate our rights can be thus used today by an IRS or NSA.

Our governments snoop on us unwarrantedly today. They hide the extent of their spying on innocent people, today. They have motives to use what they get by their spying — today.

It should stop.

Today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Big Government Blows It

The Obama Administration won’t say how many Americans have successfully navigated the online sign-up during last week’s grand opening of the Affordable Care Act healthcare exchanges . . . if anyone.

To quell the media manhunt, the White House tweeted that Chad Henderson, a mild-mannered 21-year-old Georgia college student with a part-time day-care job, had, through sheer determination of will, managed to sign up for Obamacare at a cost of only 30 percent of his salary.

“I really just wanted to do my part to help out with the entire process,” Henderson said. But Chad was soon found to be hanging out there, suspiciously, finally admitting he hadn’t truthfully grabbed the new entitlement’s brass ring after all.

Chuck Todd announced on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that it had been a “rough first week” for Obamacare. He wondered how the folks who “brought us the most technologically advanced campaign in history . . . blew it this badly on this — their biggest, most important government outreach?”

“[T]hey really had to get this right,” added National Journal’s Ron Fournier, “not just for the healthcare reform, but for the whole idea — that a lot of us believe in — that a strong, effective government can help people through this huge economic and social transition we’re going through.” Fournier admitted that the failure undermined the “central argument that we’re having in this country.”

Even “objective” media folks, who believe government should play a much larger role in running our lives, aren’t so sure it’s up to the job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Billions to Billionaires

I began the week talking about opera. If I end the week discussing football, you can be sure that I’m closer to my home turf.

Which doesn’t make this any easier, for, though many operas stay afloat with taxpayer funds, far more taxpayer money goes to football.

The National Football League, owned by billionaires whose product rakes in big bucks through ticket sales and eye-popping broadcast fees, could certainly support itself. And yet these rich folk don’t merely pass the hat, they wave guns under the table, extorting money out of taxpayers across the country.

Writing in The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook surveys the damage. He might as well channel Carl Sagan, for the answer to “how much do taxpayers waste on football?” is “billions and billions.”

Santa Clara’s new “home” for the 49ers is a $1.3 billion stadium, which, writes Easterbrook, although largely “underwritten by the public,” will drive revenue that will mostly “be pocketed by Denise DeBartolo York, whose net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion, and members of her family.”

So much of subsidy ends up helping mainly the rich. Opera? Mainly an upper class thing. Football? It may reach the lowbrow, but boy, do the rich make out like bandits, off the taxpayers.

Indeed, argues Easterbrook, this is worse than the bailouts. “Public handouts for modern professional football never end and are never repaid.”

If you don’t oppose subsidies to football, which are obviously unnecessary transfer payments from the poor to the super rich, what subsidy would you oppose?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The Mysterious Barricades

One might wonder: Do we really need the government we don’t notice when it is gone?

Which perhaps explains why national monuments have been cordoned off during the federal government budget stalemate: Not merely shut down and left unswept and poorly lit, but barricaded. With guards.

Is there any practical reason to shut down outdoor monuments like the Jefferson Memorial? Or the Lincoln? Doesn’t it cost more to truck in barricades, print “closed” signs and post guards? Seems the executive branch is expressing a “stick it to the citizenry” message, a strategy of maximizing public pain.

Childish. Apparently those at the helm think our government is theirs to roll up and take away.

But try to send that message to aged war veterans, determined to pay their respects at the World War II War Memorial, according to the Washington Post:

The graying and stooped men, wearing blue baseball caps, red T-shirts and garlands of red, white and blue flowers, surged forward, accompanied by members of Congress — the same lawmakers who, hours earlier, had triggered a government shutdown by failing to pass a budget resolution.

A shout went up. The barricades had been moved — it was unclear by whom.

Was it a congressman? A park policeman humanely modifying his orders? A vet? No credit was taken . . . The old men rolled and marched and hobbled forward, enthusiastic. One of the congressmen present declared it “the best civil disobedience we’ve seen in Washington for a long time.”

Common sense triumphs over the monstrous stupidity of official Washington.

Glad to be on the side of Common Sense, I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies political challengers too much government

Losing with Obamacare

Democrats and their many shills in the major media decry Republican intransigence and “absolutism” on the “settled matter” (un)popularly known as Obamacare. Yesterday, rather than give an inch to the House Republicans they accuse of intransigence, Senate Democrats voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act, including their own special exemption from it.

The House majority had been demanding the defunding of Obamacare as the price for keeping the government funded overall, but dropped that demand when Senate Democrats shook their heads No. Perhaps Republicans backpedalled because they surmised that they, not Democrats, would likely be blamed for the shut-down . . . Sen. Ted Cruz’s valiant efforts to re-define the debate notwithstanding.

Then Republicans downshifted, demanding a one-year delay in the implementation of Obamacare — granting to regular citizens, as Cruz puts it, the same solicitude Democrats have shown to big corporations — plus the deletion of a widely unpopular tax on medical devices and the repossession of Congress’s “Get-Out-of-Obamacare-Free” card.

Senate Democrats took less than half an hour to thumb their noses at the House, nixing all three provisions and leaving the federal government liable to partial shut-down. Obamacare, at least for the un-politically-connected, starts in earnest today!

Comedian Bill Maher is not alone in chiding Republicans for “refusing to admit” they “lost.”

Republicans, for their part, predict utter devastation from the reform bill’s implementation, and don’t see why the country should suffer from the Democrats’ intransigence.

If Tea Party-inclined Republicans do lose this battle and Obamacare’s bad results do pile up — increasing unemployment and depression, skyrocketing insurance rates, diminished private medical insurance rolls — would the Democrats concede that they’ve lost?

Or would they continue to think they’ve won?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

A Shrill Note

The New York City Opera — the one that just produced an opera about Anna Nicole Smith — may close its doors soon unless it comes up with seven million dollars. That’s the gist of a New York Times story that doubles as an appeal to philanthropic opera buffs.

From comments at the site we learn that some readers feel that the opera house has been mismanaged. Others issue instructions to various deep-pocketed luminaries, telling them that here’s their chance do something for the city and their own legacy. Others heatedly defend the “Anna Nicole” opera against detractors.

Then we have this remark, from someone who calls himself BullMoose: “Tell me again how private charity works better than government subsidies.” That’s it. No argument, just a hit-and-run exclamation of ideological discontent with private enterprises, which don’t invariably succeed. Government-subsidized enterprises don’t necessarily succeed either; but the dole can keep them in operation regardless of whether they are doing something worth doing and doing it well enough to please customers willing to pay.

Private charity works better than funds forcibly extracted from me and other taxpayers because private charity is voluntary. When our contributions are voluntary, it means we don’t have to support artistic or other projects that we have no interest in and may even oppose. We are free to use our own judgment, devoting our limited resources to the things we care about . . . instead of the things BullMoose cares about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

To Dream the “Impossible” Repeal

Senator Ted Cruz’s non-filibuster filibuster, monopolizing the Senate floor for the ninth hour as I type these words, is easy to characterize — if you are Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

Easy to make fun of, especially when the senator read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story for his children — via C-Span.

It’s not a filibuster, since it stops no vote. It’s not even a speed-bump on the way to a vote. It’s something of a demonstration by one senator and a few of his allies to highlight the dangers of the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act, and the necessity to repeal it. Marshaling emails, tweets, and open letters, Cruz hopes to pressure the unmovable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to allow a vote on an amendment to defund Obamacare.

The point is this: Attacking Obamacare can’t help but seem quixotic. Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, we who want less government — who want to limit government — often find ourselves jousting with giants who don’t budge, or (ahem) budget.

So of course we do appear comic, now and then.

But there’s also a reason that when Broadway and then Hollywood turned Cervantes’ classic into a musical, Don Quixote became something of a hero. The dream of justice, of economy, of equality before the law, of humility before the forces of nature, and resilience before the hordes of delusional politicians, does seem impossible.

But not fighting it, whatever peaceful way we can, would be disgraceful.

Ted Cruz is heroic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.