Category: too much government

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education and schooling too much government

Choosing Choice

Public schools often get lousy report cards.

One big reason is that under the bureaucratically run government monopoly, teachers and administrators have no freedom to try fundamentally different approaches and be rewarded by consumers when they get it right. Educators must obey uniform and stifling standards.

Alas, too many of these public-school staffers are far from eager to shuck the mandatory mediocrity. They’re more worried about keeping their jobs and keeping captive their mis-taught and under-taught students. Such educrats oppose all policies — tax credits, vouchers, more autonomy for charter schools — that help students escape failing classrooms.

The educrats’ prejudice against educational freedom is being abetted by Obama’s “Justice” Department, suing to block school-choice policies in Louisiana on “civil rights” grounds. Obviously, no “civil right” is violated merely because a student attends a private school. But Obama’s lawyers want to make the issue about race regardless. Something about how it’s harder to maintain racial balance if too many children of a particular race leave public schools . . . even if fostering school choice makes it easier for all kids of whatever race to do so.

By Justice’s bogus standard of “justice,” then, actual justice — indeed, actual freedom and opportunity, even actual quality of education — must be shoved aside as irrelevant. What matters is only “racial balance,” no matter the injury to any student’s rights or well-being.

But preserving the jobs of educrats and preserving somebody’s idea of ideal demographics are not the purpose of going to school. The purpose is to learn.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Heap Bad Medicine

Could medical insurance — insurance for “health care” — itself act like a drug?

Are we addicts?

Third-party (“insurance”) payments sure are super-convenient. But their convenience comes at a cost: insurance (and other third-party payers) that remunerate doctors and hospitals directly is what’s driving much of the price inflation in this sector.

Automobile insurance policies overwhelmingly pay the insured, not the mechanics, and we have no automobile repair crisis.

This was related with utmost clarity by Jeffrey A. Singer in his recent Wall Street Journal commentary “The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less.” A patient got an astoundingly better price for a surgery by simply setting aside his insurance program and paying in cash. Singer explains why:

  1. “Hospitals and other providers make their ‘list’ prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators. No one is ever expected to pay the list price.”
  2. “[M]ost people these days don’t have health ‘insurance.’ They have prepaid health plans. They pay premiums to take advantage of a pre-negotiated fee schedule arranged for and administered by a third party.”
  3. “It is the third-party payment system that interferes with true price competition, so ‘market clearing prices’ can’t develop.”

Singer reminds us that specialty services like Lasik eye surgery, which tend not to be covered by insurance policies, have improved in quality and gone down in price.

Alas, as he laments, the United States is “headed in the exact opposite direction” from a real, cost-reducing solution. To a nation addicted to third-party payers in medicine, Obamacare is nothing more than upping the dose of the same old drug.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Work, Shirk, or Bug Out?

Which is better: helping the working poor through regulations on business, mandating employee benefits, and cushy hire-and-fire terms . . . or through higher unemployment benefits, assistance to families, or other direct aid?

Both yield unfortunate consequences.

Italy’s employment policies protect workers, on paper. Whatever the ostensible worker salary is in the country, the mandated benefits cost the employer more than twice as much.

This proved a problem for businessman Fabrizio Pedroni, whose factory near Medona hasn’t made a profit in five years. He blames high taxes, heavy regulatory burden, and low worker productivity. So, while his employees were off on holiday, he packed up his factory and shipped it to Poland.

Actually, the tail end of his move was stymied, for a while, by a hasty union blockade. Pedroni cited this as evidence for his need to bug out in secret. Had he announced the plan, the government would have just taken the property for the benefit of his employees. “I had three options — either close, move the factory, as many other businesses have done, or shoot myself in the head.”

Meanwhile, a new Cato study shows that in 16 of our United States, a “combination of food stamps, temporary cash grants, WIC, and housing assistance is worth a pre-tax value more than $30,000” to families that qualify. For some, it’s much easier to live well unemployed than employed.

No wonder unemployment persists. And economic recovery is so slow.

In both cases, programs to help everyday folks hurt them in the long run, undermining productivity, increasing dependence, and scuttling the source of progress: business enterprise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Unions of Opposites

Not everything in Dr. Obama’s garden is coming up roses.

Even erstwhile — or perhaps masochistic — supporters of the thorny “Obamacare” legislation have sought exemptions from its costs and mandates, or complained about its “unexpected” destructive impact.

The AFL-CIO, for example, laments that employers otherwise subject to Obamacare mandates need not provide health insurance for employees working less than a certain number of hours. To get below the threshold, some big employers are systematically slashing employee hours. This trend may “[destroy] the 40-hour work week.” Oops.

Also thanks to Obamacare, some health insurance coverage is being excised from existing compensation packages, such as coverage for employees’ spouses. United Parcel Service has just joined the ranks of employers lopping such benefits. The company says Obamacare’s costs and mandates are a big part of the reason.

Not so fast, UPS! Isn’t this a biased misreading of the situation, as some experts claim? Bear with me here. According to the New York Times, “Several health care experts . . . said they believed the company was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.” See, it’s not that UPS is trying to lessen the impact of cost increases; they’re only trying to reduce costs.

“Apples and oranges” or “six of one/half dozen of the other”?

One may as well pretend that persons breaking out of jail seek freedom when in fact they are merely endeavoring to escape imprisonment.

Let us not confuse such starkly opposite things. Thank you, experts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The Tyrants’ M.O.

Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”

Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.

If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form . . . you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)

The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:

  1. Information gets leaked.
  2. The government denies it.
  3. Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
  4. Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
  5. The government makes further denials . . .

And repeat ad nauseam.

Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.

Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.

And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.

Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

Top Cop Says Stop

I agree with Eric Holder, the Attorney General of these United States of America: His gang at the federal Department of Justice should stop unfairly locking people up.

At the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Mr. Holder admitted that, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.”

Specifically, the AG argued for “fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,” acknowledging “they oftentimes generate unfairly long sentences,” which breeds “disrespect for the system.”

Unfair long jaunts in prison do tend to ruin people’s lives — er . . . unfairly. Bad system.

Holder also pointed to the enormous cost of incarceration: $80 billion annually. Since 1980, our population has grown about 33 percent and our prison population 800 percent.

So, to hand out fewer of the “excessive prison terms” the DOJ has been meting out for decades, Holder is changing Department of Justice policies for charging “low-level” and “non-violent” suspected drug offenders – so they don’t face mandatory minimum sentences.

Like me, the ACLU is “thrilled.” But while calling Holder’s policy pivot “a great step,” Julie Stewart, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, added, “what’s being proposed here is very modest.”

A federal public defender in Virginia points out that prosecutors are likely to continue using mandatory minimums as a weapon, saying, “There is a real difference between general guidance from the attorney general and actually taking actions on the ground.”

The Department of “Justice” is locking people up “unnecessarily.” Attorney General Holder speaks out against it, but it is his job to actually stop it. Now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

Nuking the Net?

The military network that later combined with other networks to “make the Internet” was started out with an interesting purpose: to establish a communication system that could withstand nuclear strikes.

What if the United States were hit by multiple nuclear bombardments? How would survivors communicate? The protocols of the Internet allow for radical decentralization, which allows communications to get around nuked hubs.

Now, around the world, governments are trying to control this decentralized Net, taking down or otherwise preventing citizen access to Web services and sites (China, Britain, Australia, for example), and (most resolutely in China and the United States) preventing communication that cannot be “listened in” upon.

It’s almost as if governments are “nuking the Internet.”

The latest case? Lavabit. This Internet company has specialized in encrypted communications. Last week its owner and operator, Ladar Levison, made a public statement:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on — the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Levison hazarded that, “if the American public knew what the government was doing,” the government “wouldn’t be allowed to do it any more.” But so far, he’s speaking very carefully and not elaborating on what the government wanted him to do with his company.

It’s almost as if Congress nuked the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Hard Case for Soft Paternalism

Not long after I noted a new form of paternalism, David Brooks, from his perch as token conservative at The New York Times, devoted a column to the idea that governments should “nudge” people to act better, rather than force them.

He is enthusiastic. “[I]n practice, it is hard to feel that my decision-making powers have been weakened because when I got my driver’s license enrolling in organ donation was the default option.” He thinks the reality of “soft paternalism” is innocuous in terms of coercion, powerful in terms of consequences, like more donated organs.

Still, he sees the skeptical, anti-paternalist case: “Do we want government stepping in to protect us from our own mistakes? Many people argue no. This kind of soft paternalism will inevitably slide into a hard paternalism, with government elites manipulating us into doing the sorts of things they want us to do.”

But, he argues, this just hasn’t happened. There’s no evidence for this slippery slope.

Not so fast. Economist Donald Boudreaux can explain the lack of data: the reason we see so little move from soft (option-based) paternalism to hard (force-based) paternalism is that most paternalism starts out hard and gets tougher as it goes along: “One reason why the empirical record isn’t more full of nudges turning into diktats is that government typically issues diktats from the get-go.” Paternalists tend to forgo the suggestion for the compulsion.

And their current emphasis on nudging will likely change once their nudging gets them nowhere near their Nirvana. We know this not from direct evidence about soft paternalism, but about the history of government in general and the enduring popularity of paternalism in its hardest of forms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government U.S. Constitution

Stopping “Stop and Frisk”

It doesn’t seem at all surprising that New York Mayor Bloomberg supports both his unconstitutional anti-Big Gulp paternalism and his now-overruled “Stop and Frisk” police state nastiness. It’s “for our good,” not any wise dedication to principle, that he wants to prevent us from drinking big sugary sodas, and “for the peace” that he wants police to stop and manhandle thousands, millions of “suspicious looking” people.

Both policies clearly impinge on individual liberty. The former, in that it prevents people from peacefully doing what they want. The latter, in that it treats innocent people as guilty, as “suspicious” just because of the way they appear — mainly their clothing choices, age, and (especially) race.

The judicial ruling is, in its own way, inspiring. “The goals of liberty and safety may be in tension, but they can coexist,” Judge Shira Scheindlin writes, adding that “the Constitution mandates it.” The ruling is also something of an education, for the judge notes that it’s not her business to make policing effective. It’s to make policing constitutional. Constitutional limits are necessary to rein in the potential of government to morph into tyranny.

And “stop and frisk” sure seems like tyranny to the people continually harassed on the streets. After all, the judge found that “the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent, not criminal.” Treating innocent citizens like criminals doesn’t inspire respect for the law.

And it sure is nice to see Bloomberg take another big gulp from a judicial ruling limiting his power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

One Helluva Policy

Protecting the peace isn’t easy. Sometimes it calls for extraordinary action. Like a recent police assault to capture and kill an outlaw . . .

In this case, the targeted outlaw wasn’t really a person at all, but a fawn named Giggles.

The baby deer was being illegally held by the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter and farm near Kenosha, Wisconsin, without the required state permit. Giggles had been nursed back to health by shelter employees, who told reporters they were within days of moving the fawn to an Illinois wildlife facility.

Four sheriff deputies and nine Department of Natural Resources agents took the heavily-armed SWAT-like approach, and, through “aerial surveillance,” were able descend upon the fawn and kill it.

It is policy to euthanize because of the potential for disease and danger to humans.

“That’s one hell of a policy,” said the man who had cared for the dangerous Giggles.

Why the rush to kill this deer? And, why not make a phone call to talk to the folks at the Society of St. Francis, instead of a launching a military-style assault?

“If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust,” DNR spokeswomen Jennifer Niemeyer explained, “they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up.”

Right. No quarter is given to outlaws. Even if they are innocent forest creatures who had received illegal charity from well-meaning humanitarians.

This is Common Sense? I’m Paul Jacob.