Category: too much government

Categories
government transparency too much government

Nothing But Blue Skies

It was the thirteenth day of the century’s thirteenth year, yesterday, and the worst I got was a cold.

Meanwhile, the Russian government is trying to stop a triskaidekaphobic panic. Russian media folk have been making much of Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid that will come within spitting distance on a Friday the 13th in 2029, and which will return for a closer, more dangerous fly-by on another Friday the 13th, April 2036.

Russian media had dubbed Apophis the “space threat of the century.” But the Russian emergency experts — government officials, charged with calming things down — have countered paranoia with statements like, “In 2013, none of the known asteroids will pass by the Earth at a dangerous distance.”

Well, nice to know. But this year had never been a worry to scientists. The crucial years were 2029 and 2036. The folks at Goldstone say they have ruled out any impact in 2036, and scientists had already determined the earlier date non-hazardous.

Good. But, if you are like me, when government officials all agree that the sky is blue, you’ll call it “cerulean.”

But maybe it’s only about budgets, taxes, and special ops that governments lie.

Take Jerry Brown, California’s governor and a most interesting fellow. He insists that his state’s deficit problems are nearly over. Great! Well, he bases his cheery picture on future growth projections, and he’s just so optimistic that he’s advocating still more spending! Now.

I once defined pessimism as the lazy stepchild of vigilance. Brown’s optimism has no vigilance in it. I don’t believe him.

I hope the government-paid scientists charting Apophis’s transits are more rigorous and trustworthy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement too much government

None of Us Are Angels

An old thought: Were we all angels, we wouldn’t need government. Indeed, were we angels, it wouldn’t matter what kind of government we had.

But we’re not angels. We have limitations. Each one of us judges according to our own context-ridden conception of advantage and value, bound by our differing perspectives and situations. Despite our love for others, that love isn’t infinite and it doesn’t often trump our perceived self-interests, and it certainly isn’t angelically unlimited.

So we need something very much like government, and that government needs limits.

We need protection from criminals, but we also need protection from those who would protect us, who can — with “government power” — usurp their roles and become criminal themselves.

This is, I repeat, a very old thought.

Yet it seemed new when James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock advanced something very much like it with their book The Calculus of Consent, and in the many great contributions of their separate careers.

James M. Buchanan died this Wednesday. Before his contributions, economists typically assumed that public servants would swoop in like saving angels, setting the world aright according to the latest mathematical models, disinterestedly, without partisan passion or individual error.

Naive in the extreme.

Thanks to Buchanan, economists today occasionally go so far to confess that though markets often “fail,” merely appointing government to “fix” markets can put us in a bigger fix, since government failure is rampant. Government isn’t magic. It doesn’t change our natures for the better merely by being instituted, or by being called “government.” Power still corrupts, and economists now have to deal with that ugly but unavoidable fact.

By showing us that we’re no angels, Buchanan put himself on the side of the angels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The Great Evasion

From the earliest moments of the current, ongoing economic depression, our leaders signaled their fear by hastily concocting programs that postponed the reckoning that had to come.

Douglas French, writing about housing finance today, says a lot simply with his title: “Markets Stagnate Until They Clear.” Government policy has kept mortgages in a weird limbo, and market prices at unnatural highs. Our geniuses in power have even moved heaven and earth to reinflate the old housing boom.

Better to have let it crash and recover rather than keep it unworkably hobbling along.

But the clearing of markets scares politicians silly.

Right after the 2008 implosion, our leaders increased unemployment insurance and offered many new cushions for workers. Humanitarian? Or just another way to avoid new, lower wage rates to match the monetary collapse? I’m not sure about the latter, since the “wages” of not working proved so effective that many workers stayed unemployed voluntarily.

The cost? An extended, lengthy depression.

But that’s not all, of course. By putting more people onto the rolls of the federal government’s dependents list, the burden on taxpayers and on the debt system increases.

Meanwhile, politicians still cannot imagine a way to do what a few other countries, including Canada, have done: cut back on spending and balance budgets.

Our politicians will do anything to avoid that!

Some folks are calling the current period “The Great Recession.” I suggest a better term: “The Great Evasion.” And what’s being evaded is responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

A Symbolic Threat

“Medicare’s trustees estimate that the hospital insurance fund supported by the payroll tax will run out of cash by 2024,” informs a Washington Post editorial, “but this is mainly a symbolic threat: The government will draw on general revenues to keep Medicare going.”

So, what exactly does this “symbolic threat” symbolize?

It shows that Medicare — like Social Security — was set up and run in an unsustainable, even fraudulent, way. Politicians promised benefits without collecting the taxes to pay for those benefits. This left “today’s voters” getting unpaid for bennies and future voters being handed a hefty bill.

The only question is: how hefty? That depends on how quickly the imbalance gets addressed.

Already, Medicare represents 15 percent of total federal government spending, last year costing taxpayers $555 billion. Worse yet, the cost is expected to double in the next decade — in large part, because the number of seniors on the program is expected to explode, from 50 million today to 78 million by 2030.

“No structural solution is,” the editorial bemoans, “for the moment, politically possible.” Instead, the Post endorses a number of small cuts — all making seniors pay more and/or get less — that add up to slightly over $40 billion a year. That drop in the bucket would, in a decade, account for less than 4 percent of Medicare’s projected yearly cost.

Frankly, the unavoidable first step in any honest fix of Medicare’s big, structural problems, is for those in Congress and the White House to fully admit the rotten fraud they have perpetrated against us for their personal political gain.

Acknowledging their deception would be more than symbolic.

You can’t change your ways until you first repent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

We’re All Bond Fans Now

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is so well liked that there’s even Oscar buzz about it. But it’s not just moviegoers who feel like they’ve entered a new era.

In the new flick, M, played by Judi Dench, argues before a parliamentary board that, because “the enemy” can be just about anybody these days, now’s really the time for some good old-fashioned espionage, James Bond-style. You know, with casual murders committed by men given a “license to kill.”

But things have changed. The old Bond skirmished with Russkies while fighting rich criminals who dreamed of destroying or ruling the world. Today’s Bond fights an ex-agent who wants to hurt the higher-ups in the spy biz who had hurt him.

In reality, it’s the U.S. President — Felix Leiter’s boss — who has the license to kill, exercising it by overseeing multiple drone programs, the practice of rendition, and a developing program called a “disposition matrix,” which aims to target people who are up-and-comers in the America-hating (and thus) terrorist game.

Many critics have noted that the recent Bond films starring the brilliant Daniel Craig have become more personal and less gadgety. Maybe that’s the way real-life spying plays in Britain (I doubt it) but from the American perspective, the current reality of drone strikes overseas, unregulated-by-law rendition tribunals, and database management geared to determining terrorist psychology is positively science-fictional.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

This is not a Brave New World or a 1984, I realize. But it still frightens.

Indeed, for people in the targeted regions it must be pure horror. America’s ruling classes have upped the game. And we can expect to reap a . . . skyfall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
links too much government

Townhall: Want Milk?

This weekend’s contribution to Townhall.com by Yours Truly concerns another one of those automated congressional time bombs. You know, like the “fiscal cliff” but less cliffy and more bomby. Head on over, and then back here, for a few links:

  • Thomas Jefferson’s pithy contribution to the socialist calculation debate, here.
  • The Washington Post’s “dairy cliff” article, here.
  • What Jia Lynn Yang said, here.

 

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Cold as Ice

Well, it’s a few days after the much-ballyhooed End of the World, wherein the magnetic poles were (according to some less-than-astute prognosticators) supposed to flip — North would go negative, and South, positive — causing volcanoes, tidal waves, and all sorts of havoc.

But Christmas Eve has arrived on schedule, the Mayan calendar goes back to being as irrelevant as Isaac Asimov’s idea of a quarterly calendar that would “abolish the months,” and we can return to thinking about the upcoming magnetic pole flip in a scientific way, sans Apocalypse.

Indeed, on Christmas Eve, the only talk about poles is about Santa’s storied connection with the North.

But hey: don’t think Arctic, think Antarctic. The big story, today, is that Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee monarch of America’s “Mother Country” (sorry, Mother), is getting a plot of land on the Frozen Continent named after her.

Yes, to celebrate her 60 years on the throne, she attended a cabinet meeting, and received 60 place mats, one for each year of “service.”

“Can’t have too many place mats,” somebody said. Or must’ve.

Then she was chauffeured over to the Foreign Office where she received the “fitting tribute” of a big triangle of forbidding land south of the Ronne Ice Shelf, which will be called Queen Elizabeth Land. I’m assuming it’s a tribute to her warmth of personality.

Frankly, I’d prefer the place mats. But then, having a stretch of land you will never visit named after you is its own kind of place mat. Just goes to show you that giving gifts is not easy. What do you give the Person who has everything?

That is, everything but relevance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Death by a Thousand Non-Cuts

As I write this, the United States of America is $16,275,179,205,442 in debt. By the time you read this, we’ll have piled up millions more.

Much debt is of recent vintage. When George W. Bush became president in 2000, the national red ink totaled $5.7 trillion. In eight years, Dubya nearly doubled it to $10.6 trillion. Since his 2008 election, President Obama has far outpaced Bush, sinking us another $5.3 trillion in debt in just half Bush’s time.

And, by continuing to run yearly deficits of over $1 trillion, we’re digging the hole deeper at top speed.

For all the hysteria over draconian cuts, forced at the so-called fiscal cliff, those somewhat slippery savings would at best amount to about 10 percent of our yearly deficit, leaving us spending 9/10ths of a trillion dollars we don’t have.

In the “other cuts” department, the Obama Administration had been supporting paltry reductions to federal Medicaid spending of $17.6 billion over ten years (that’s less than $2 billion a year), but just flipped its position. Why? State governors are deciding if they can afford to take part in Obamacare’s massive Medicaid expansion to cover those earning up to 133 percent of the poverty line.

Not content to spend recklessly alone, the Feds picks up the entire tab of new Medicare recipients’ first three years. After that, Washington pays 90 percent and the states pay 10.

States are wondering how they’ll come up with that additional 10 percent — seven governors have already declined to join in the spending program. No one in Washington has given a second thought to paying the 90 percent.

They figure they can always raise taxes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Paying for Agreement

How do you get a body of professionals to go along with your program?

Pay them.

It’s an old idea: He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The pipers are economists. The paymaster is not you, but the Federal Reserve. There’s a suprising amount of agreement amongst even disagreeing economists that the Federal Reserve is, on the whole, “a good thing,” a necessary thing, even an institution whose existence and rationale must not be questioned.

Shocking, but less so when you apply what is called “Public Choice” analysis to economists themselves. Assume that economists are self-interested. Assume that they like to get paid. Opinions turn out to be somewhat elastic, even given some very hard facts. The results?

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Nicely, a few economists bring this up, every now and then. Garett Jones on EconTalk did, reviving a letter monetary economist Milton Friedman wrote to researcher David M. Levy in the early 1990s. Friedman summarized the situation concisely, saying that the Fed

hires directly roughly half of all economists specializing in the field of money, and indirectly provides funds for a large fraction of the remainder. I have no doubt that is a major reason why the Federal Reserve, despite such a poor record of performance, has such a high public standing.

This also helps explain why there was a major shift away from laissez faire amongst economists. In the 20th century, the “worldly philosophers” developed a new labor market; they found that they could make a great deal of money working for government. And they don’t get paid for telling the government not to do what it wants to do, or to fire most economists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

Unfree Financial Speech

Can you get in trouble with the law — or at least a government agency’s unlimited regulatory power — for peacefully telling the truth?

You can, despite the protections articulated in the First Amendment and the greater respect sometimes accorded to freedom of speech than to other constitutionally protected rights.

It is possible because when they assault speech, government officials claim to be opposed not to the right to speak freely but to something else. They say they’re combating lung cancer, the influence of money on politics, or the unequal distribution of information to investors.

This summer, Reed Hastings of Netflix committed the sin of boasting on Facebook that monthly viewing of Nexvids “exceeded one billion hours for the first time ever in June.” Sounds innocent enough.

Come December, though, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has threatened to bring civil charges against Netflix for allegedly violating “public disclosure rules.” SEC Regulation FD requires public companies to make “full and fair disclosure” of “material” information that is not already public.

The SEC still thinks that 244,000 Facebook subscribers don’t fully and fairly constitute the public, but the communication cannot by any reasonable, modern construal be a case of offering “insider information.” How much more “outside” from the back rooms of a corporation can you get than Facebook?

The absurdity, here, lies in the SEC’s rules and its interpretations of those rules — and in the blind, confused, bankrupt way bureaucracies, which don’t go bust as the companies they oversee can, enforce their rules.

That is why Bernie Madoff slipped through the SEC’s fingers for years, while Netflix finds itself in hot water for a Facebook posting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.