Category: too much government

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national politics & policies too much government

Cash and Consequences

One fine Saturday morning you go shopping and buy a TV, a PC, and other household appliances. Though the bill comes to around $13,000, you pay with cash, having had a recent influx of the green stuff. The next day, the police knock on your door. You immediately fear for your older relatives, thinking this may be bad news.

It is bad news. For you.

The police say they have a warrant to search your house, and proceed to ransack it. You ask why, and they tell you that your large cash purchase was “suspicious” of criminal activity.

They are not interested in your protests . . . until after they had done a lot of damage.

This didn’t happen to you — at least, I hope it didn’t. It happened to Jarl Syvertsen, a 59-year-old Norwegian man. In this case, it turned out that the police didn’t have a warrant at the time of the search. They’d lied. And Mr. Syvertsen notes that, had the police waited till Monday, when the banks were open, the whole issue could have been resolved with a phone call.

You see, Mr. Syvertsen had just received an advance on an inheritance. Quite above-board.

Economist Joseph Salerno relates this story to the “global war on cash,” undertaken to counter drug trafficking, which in turn has eroded civil liberties and privacy.

Some of my friends think that real Americans carry guns. If you want a truer and bluer (or greener) expression of your freedom and opposition to big government — and in general avoid spies in the NSA and elsewhere — there may be no better way than to pay cash.

But guns may be involved, later.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

They’ve Got Mail

Three hundred seventy-eight years of service — that’s a long time. And yet, after that epoch, Great Britain’s Royal Mail is headed for privatization. Times have changed.

News stories can’t help but mention that this is the biggest British privatization move since the unloading of British Rail back in Margaret Thatcher’s day.

Privatization details are notoriously hard to get right. It’s not obvious what to do. But the details are important. And so is the necessity for the privatization: the mail service has shown a profit in recent years, but is prevented from further profitable avenues by capital limitations.

Only as a private company can Royal Mail avail itself of private capital markets.

Were Congress to completely untether the U.S. Postal Service in similar fashion, there would still be the live issue of protection: several classes of mail are still only allowed to the USPS. But the Royal Mail lost its monopoly back in 2006, in part to comply with EU rules. The legislation enabling its privatization was passed two years ago.

The details?

The plan is to give mail employees “10 percent of shares as part of a stock market flotation” in what Business Secretary Vince Cable swears is “the biggest employee share scheme for nearly 30 years.” Might nice — almost as generous as the Oregon owner of Bob’s Red Mill, who gave his company to his employees. It has to “go to someone,” right?

But even with Royal Mail workers being handed a 10 percent stake in the soon-to-be private enterprise, the union for the currently government workers is adamantly opposed to the move.

Who’s surprised?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Junk Sites or National Park?

A national park on the Moon seems like lunacy.

The news that Reps. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) had introduced a bill, H.R. 2617, to create a National Historic Park at the Apollo landing sites immediately turned up on RedEye and similar sardonic news programs, no doubt, because the wording of the bill does not choose “Monument” but “Park.” And a park is something we drive to, park and visit.

At present, visiting the Moon isn’t a live option for anyone, much less a bookable destination for bus tourists, motorists, and motorcycle gangs.

And yet, let’s not roll on the floor, or even LOL: the bill’s fifth “whereas” has a point:

[A]s commercial enterprises and foreign nations acquire the ability to land on the Moon it is necessary to protect the Apollo lunar landing sites for posterity. . . .

A plausible case could be made for this, and congratulations to the legislators for thinking ahead!

But an even more common-sensible case could be made for the opposite policy, allowing private businesses to reclaim the sites for their own benefit, to promote more tourism. Let them preserve the historic sites on their nickel, rather than on the taxpayers’.

Besides, one could look at those landing sites as containing the detritus of previous holiday excursions. Whereas, (a) leaving litter behind on the beach doesn’t make the beach yours; or (b) discarding one’s car on the freeway for a week constitutes abandonment — just so, Apollo’s lunar sites and debris aren’t really U.S. government property any longer.

The abandoned artifacts are junk. Let them belong to the first enterprises that prove otherwise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

D.C. Protectionism

Some things are a bit hard to grasp. One of them is intra-national protectionism.

Most forms of protectionism try to shield businesses within a country from competition outside, using tariffs or price controls to “even the playing field,” so to speak. What these laws do is make goods more costly for consumers within the protected country, in effect taking wealth from consumers and awarding it to the protected businesses.

In the United States’ capital district, politicians are in the process of pushing through a “living wage” bill that would apply only to big box stores like Costco and Walmart. While Costco and Walmart will be required to pay their employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour, other companies in the district could still pay wages as low as $8.25.

Doesn’t seem exactly fair, does it? The bill has been pushed by organized labor to supposedly help smaller retailers, but — surprise, surprise — exempts unionized grocery chains such as Giant and Safeway.

On the one hand, the Washington, D.C. city council is punishing Walmart, forcing it to pay more than its competitors for labor. On the other hand, the city has spent $40 million in direct subsidies to the company and another $28 million to advance projects that involve building six new Walmarts.

“I can’t imagine that they will proceed on any of the unbuilt stores if this bill passes,” says Grant Ehat, the principal of the company building the two Walmart projects already underway.

Mayor Vincent Gray expressed his hope to “find a way to, say, thread the needle” between the company and the council.

Or our nation’s capital might experiment with common sense laws, equally applied.

Yes, Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency too much government

Illinois Pension Ills

When it comes to the full faith and credit of the Great State of Illinois, three major credit rating companies judge it the lowest in the union. The problem is that state politicians made pension promises they didn’t pay for and still aren’t.

How bad is it? Illinois’s total unfunded pension liability now tops $200 billion dollars – that’s roughly 250 percent of the state’s annual revenue. And growing.

But take, heart!

Gov. Pat Quinn just said that the massive pension shortfall will grow at a slower pace than previously thought, $5 million (instead of $17 million) a day.

Whoopee!

Folks at the Illinois Policy Institute are a little mystified by this pronouncement, though. The projection seems based more on wishes and hope than the straight dope. Besides, “this isn’t the first time the state has predicted that the growth in the state’s unfunded liability would slow,” Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Ingram writes, noting that “the exact same prediction was made last year based on the actuarial projections made in fiscal year 2011. The systems predicted that the unfunded liability would grow by ‘only’ $5.3 billion in fiscal year 2012.”

The conventional wisdom blames too many years of the legislature shorting the annual payments to the five public-employee retirement funds.

Another way to look at it is simply that politicians are a whole lot better at promising than delivering, and defined benefit (rather than defined contribution) pensions are too tempting to trust to any politician.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

On the Wire

There’s something worse than “printing the myth”: printing government press releases and calling that “journalism.”

In those cases where folks in today’s news media do get their watchdog legs underneath them and yet their questions go unanswered, we citizens need be mightily concerned.

“The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment,” the Washington Post reported yesterday.

What did they refuse to comment on?

Wiretap stats.

Spokespeople for the Obama Administration have been repeating incessantly that we ought not worry about them grabbing all our phone and Internet and financial information and communications. After all, they tell us, to actually delve into that mountain of metadata to gaze at your personal stuff, the Feds have to lug a rubber stamp across town to a secret court to get approval.

But, lo and behold: the Administrative Office of the United States Court released figures on the number of federal wiretaps in criminal investigations, showing that wiretaps had spiked up 71 percent in 2012. Such wiretaps by state and local police increased only 5 percent.

The average number of federal wiretaps between 1997 and 2009 were 550. But in 2010 the number soared to 1,207. The number went down to 792 the next year and then shot back up to 1,354 last year — a 147 percent increase over the 1997-2009 period.

The report further notes that “A single wiretap can sweep up thousands of communications.” For instance, one wiretap in Los Angeles intercepted more than 185,000 calls — nine of every ten deemed non-incriminating.

Why worry about governments having too much power? Governments have been known to use the power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

The Wars on Dogs, Drugs, Etc.

China is waging a war on dogs taller than 13.7 inches. The basis is a long-dormant law prohibiting Beijing residents from owning dogs “too big” for — well, for the law prohibiting dogs that big.

In addition to losing their furry friends, flouters are subject to fines but not jail time. In other respects, though, the war resembles many silly but dangerous wars on wrongly banned things.

  • The rationale is contradictory on its own terms. Critics note that small breeds which are not banned (Jack Russell Terriers) can be more aggressive than large breeds which are banned (English Sheep Dogs).
  • Owning the illegal thing is illegal even if no one’s rights are violated thereby, and regardless of the owner’s actual rights.
  • Enforcers of the bad law have quotas to fulfill.
  • Enforcers receive tips from persons eager to cause trouble, even when they have no real complaint to make.
  • Enforcers conduct scary raids, sometimes mid-night raids, to hunt for the non-dangerous banned thing.

Such features also characterize America’s War on Drugs, hardly limited to cracking down on crack houses full of shady characters. On the basis of real or imaginary information, police violently invade homes to search for drugs. People (and their dogs) are killed during such assaults.

What Radley Balko calls The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (officially published in July) has made America’s War on Drugs, a war on people, and dogs, all the more deadly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

S.O.P. at the IRS

Remember the IRS scandal? I mean the one about how the Internal Revenue Service has been monkey-wrenching the applications for tax-exempt status submitted by politically non-leftward organizations (Tax Prof Blog has the latest).

But politically motivated clogging of an application process is just one way that the IRS abuses us. Victims of its normal forms of abuse have also been coming forward lately, seeing that they now have at least a temporarily receptive audience.

One such is Jeffrey Black, former employee of the Federal Air Marshal Service, who has long tried to fix the problems he sees with the Air Marshals. It seems that not every colleague appreciates it.

After retiring in 2010, Black appeared in a documentary (“Please Remove Your Shoes”) about the pseudo-security measures we have to endure at the airport. Why not? He couldn’t be fired any more, right? But the day the documentary premiered — “almost to the hour” — the IRS notified him that he was being audited. It also slapped a lien on his home.

In the end, their investigation turned up $480 that Black owed the IRS, which he paid; and $8,300 that the IRS owed Black, which IRS didn’t pay.

“Being a veteran of extensive retaliation . . . I am not surprised about this,” he told CNN. “It is basically the only way they can still . . . retaliate against me after I retired.”

The IRS denies that audits are ever politically motivated.

They deny many things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption political challengers too much government

Protesting “Capitalism”?

While Americans appear mildly unsettled or perhaps “ticked off” about recent government revelations, elsewhere in the world citizens move from “unease” to “unrest” and outright “protest.”

The protests that erupted first in Turkey and now in Brazil and elsewhere are filled with the ranks of the young, not a few of whom have noticed something: They are getting a raw deal.

Many of their issues are meat-and-potatoes: lack of jobs, burdensome student debts and, in Brazil, a bus fare rate increase made ugly in the context of cost overruns in taxpayer support for the World Cup and Olympics.

The young Turks protested, at first modestly, over planning for a park, but a harsh police crackdown led to more widespread marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations — which now often bring up questions of the current administration’s repressive anti-modernist, anti-freedom agenda.

This more heroic theme resonates elsewhere, too.

In Bulgaria the issue most protested appears to be police brutality and the general spirit of repression. In Latin America, opposition to corruption has moved from old stand-by to vital question of the day.

The saddest statement I heard was this appraisal, hailing from the BBC, of the general climate: “today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.”

Well, that’s not laissez faire capitalism that’s failed, but crony capitalism. Laissez faire’s truly free markets require a rule of law, the suppression of government corruption, and effective public accountability.

But that’s not what’s dominant. America itself serves, today, not as a beacon of liberty but of institutional control, of crony capitalism.

We need to protest that here, again, in the U.S.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Texas vs. No-Growth Coasts

Governments must rely upon profitable businesses. Without them, government has next to nothing.

And yet “next to nothing” is what governments can do to best help businesses succeed.

Thank Texas Governor Rick Perry for these thoughts . . . and Matthew Yglesias, who commented on Perry’s recent “nuclear-strength” video promotion, inviting businesses to leave places like New York and locate themselves in Texas, which has fewer regulations and no income tax. The ad claims Texas is “big for business.” Yglesias quibbles:

If New York was a terrible place to live, work, and do business, then it would be cheap to live in New York. But New York is not cheap. It’s not Detroit. It’s not even average. It’s, in fact, hellishly expensive. If New York emulated Texas and eliminated its income tax, rich people would bid up the finite supply of New York City land at an even more furious rate—the city wouldn’t see Houston or Dallas growth rates.

I’m no economist, but I have quibbles with Yglesias’s critique. New York is expensive, yes. But the cause of the expense isn’t just that people bid up housing and services. It’s expensive in no small part as a result of all those regulations, especially courtesy of one regulation in particular: rent control. Get rid of rent control and the city income tax? Watch housing grow.

And growth, Yglesias rightly points out, is what’s really in Texas’s favor. Texan low-impact government policies favor growth, while “the residents and politicians” of blue-state/beach-front states, though “liberal,” have, in fact, “become exceptionally small-c conservative and change averse.” Because they do too much, allegedly to “help.” But mostly to gentrify.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.