“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Quote (from Paine’s “Common Sense”) verified here.
Category: too much government
Yesterday, we discovered that modern America asks police to do “too much.” Which prompts the next question: What should police stop doing?
Here are two immediate reforms where police can do less, while protecting the public more:
(1) End the War on Drugs. Preventing violence and fraud is the rightful role of police. Not preventing people from engaging in activities that are peaceful, however misguided or self-harming. The criminalization of marijuana means more than 150 million Americans are criminals, warranting police involvement.
Now, Mr. Obama has released some convicts serving long drug-related sentences, but we need a president who will go much farther in changing law enforcement priorities.
(2) Stop Using Civil Asset Forfeiture, whereby police steal people’s stuff without charging and convicting those people of any crime. Not only do federal agencies from Justice to the IRS take our property in violation of our rights, but the Feds encourage state and local police to join them in this bad behavior through their “equitable sharing” program.
While Obama has spoken against seizing assets without a criminal conviction, he hasn’t stopped it. And he could at the federal level, with a stroke of his pen — as I have advocated at Townhall. Ending civil asset forfeiture is an executive order actually within his constitutional power.
Would these two steps end all racism or violence or crime? No, no, no.
They would be, however, two steps forward toward a more principled, lawful and respectful style of policing that would better serve to unite rather than divide citizens and police.
It’s a different two-step than reformers have been witnessing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo Credit: Tomasz Iwaniec
When President Obama said, “[W]e ask the police to do too much,” at the memorial service for the five slain Dallas policemen, he was echoing an idea previously expressed.
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters a day earlier. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve,” he added, noting such problems as a lack of mental healthcare, rampant drug abuse, substandard schools and even roaming dogs.
So, what should police stop doing?
Plenty. But I’ll save that answer for tomorrow. Today, let’s pose another: Why so much crime, poverty, and violence in these communities?
Mr. Obama fingered not taxing-and-spending enough on benefits for the poor, including for “decent schools,” “gainful employment,” and “mental health programs.” Yet, after decades of expensive wars on poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, etc., things have only gotten worse.
“We flood communities with so many guns,” the president intoned, “that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock, than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
He’s playing fast and furious with the truth. Books are free at the library. Glocks cost money.
And who is this “we” he keeps bringing up?
Chief Brown mentioned a critical problem Obama did not: “Seventy percent of the African American community is being raised by single women.”
Police cannot solve all our problems, sure, but they especially cannot fix problems exacerbated by the welfare state and the educational system. Big government is no substitute for Mom and Dad.
Even freedom merely offers the opportunity to fix our own problems.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Virginia delegate Beau Correll won’t cast his first ballot vote at the Republican National Convention for Donald Trump, and won’t go to jail, either.
As discussed last Thursday, at issue is a state statute requiring* delegates to vote for the plurality winner of the party’s primary. On the Republican side, that’s Mr. Trump. Yesterday, Federal Judge Robert Payne ruled the law unconstitutional, no law at all, because it violates Correll’s First Amendment rights to speak and associate politically.
“In sum, where the State attempts to interfere with a political party’s internal governance and operation,” the federal judge wrote, “the party is entirely free to ‘cancel out [the State’s] effort’ (Def. Resp. 28) even though the state has expended financial and administrative resources in a primary.”
Love ’em or hate ’em, political parties are private associations, properly protected by the First Amendment.
But is it fair to hold primary elections, at taxpayers’ expense, and then ignore the votes of so many people?
Easy answer: NO.
Sure, Judge Payne correctly struck this statute, but it doesn’t follow that states must foot the bill for party primaries and national conventions or provide legal preference. Up to now, incumbent politicians have quietly legislated a relationship of too-friendly collusion between government and the major parties.
It’s time for citizens to look at initiatives to mandate separation of political party and state.
More immediately, the implications for the coming GOP convention in Cleveland are obvious and far-reaching. “The Court’s decision,” as Correll’s attorney David Rivkin summarized, “follows more than 40 years of precedent in firmly rejecting Donald Trump’s legal opinion that delegates are obligated by law to vote for him.”
The delegates are free.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Penalty for non-compliance? One year in prison.
Original photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr
After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it time to get guns out of the hands of . . . licensed security guards?
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in The Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company.
Mateen’s government credentials included “a Florida state-issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.” Twice, he was investigated by the FBI, in 2013 and again in 2014, and cleared — investigations closed.
Should we talk about security failures?
Instead, a filibuster by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and a sit-in protest by House Democrats changed the channel to gun control. The Senate voted on four bills that threatened more than the Second Amendment. Our Fifth Amendment rights to due process were also in the sights of crusading Democrats and appeasing Republicans and still are.
Not to mention the Ninth Amendment, freedom to do all manner of things, including travel.
Hillary Clinton says that “if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun.” Yet, the problem comes in government simply declaring someone too dangerous to fly or to buy a gun, without ever publicly bringing a charge — you know, with evidence — much less convicting that person of a crime.
Having a government agent place a name on a secret list doesn’t even approximate due process of law. And, accordingly, doesn’t justify stripping a person of fundamental liberties.
Terrorism is terrifying . . . but not any more so than politicians who, in pursuit of their political agendas, don’t think twice about our freedoms or their constitutional limitations.
It’s not all right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Romanticism. The yearning for greatness; the need for speed. Efficiency! It’s all there in California’s high-speed rail project — hopes and dreams and a sense of the grandeur of progress.
And yet the bullet train project, approved by voters in 2008, is a fiasco.
One can blame the voters, I suppose. At least the 53.7 percent who said yes to a referendum authorizing a 9.95 billion bond. Just to get the project started.
But we shouldn’t, really. All the people pushing the bullet train notion (from Los Angeles to the Bay) said that most of the investment would come from private investors. Further, it would require no ongoing subsidies.
Those assurances, however, “were at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con,” writes Virginia Postrel for Bloomberg.
How bad is it? Total construction cost went from a $33 billion to $68 billion — despite route trimming. The first segment, which is understood to be the easiest to build (shooting through an empty stretch), is four years behind schedule, and still lacks necessary land.
The list of failures goes on and on, and includes a dearth of investors. And then there’s the estimate of the company who got the first bid on the project. It says that the line will almost certainly not be self-sustaining.
“The question now,” Postrel concludes, “is when they’ll have the guts to pull the plug.”
Corruption, hope without realism, business as usual — all these are revealed in the project. And wasn’t the second season of True Detective about this? Let’s hope this real-world fiasco ends with less bloodshed.
Californians have already lost enough in treasure!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
