Category: too much government

Categories
general freedom too much government

A Civilized Context

I think of people as basically good. Most folks treat me well enough. I can navigate my neighborhood at night; I can go to an ATM unmolested in most cities I visit; often, I get smiles — and it isn’t because of my extraordinary good looks (alone).

But evil is all around us. Some folks harbor deep resentments, and worse. Garett Jones, writing at EconLog, notes that “a lot of people are actually just awful. . . .

In a series of studies of male college students in the 1980’s, Malamuth found that about 35% of these students in the U.S. and Canada said they’d consider committing a rape if they knew they wouldn’t get caught; 20% would seriously consider it. . . . And these studies are just detecting those students who are willing to state their proclivities in a survey; the true number is surely higher.

We are, all of us, constantly surrounded by such people.

Jones draws a startling moral: “I suspect that if people were more aware of the awfulness of their neighbors, support for the welfare state would decline.”

He may be right, but contemplating crime is different than committing it. The move from wish to action often depends on “context.”

Studies have shown this. Clean up your neighborhood, replace broken windows: crime goes down.

Some social engineers argue that the welfare state is more than mere window-dressing, it’s a swap: The dole buys off potential criminals.

I suspect the opposite is true: It funds criminals, supporting their bad habits, and serves as a trap for everyone else, preventing the vast majority from climbing out of the velvet cage.

We should work for better contexts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets too much government

That Was Fast

Ah, Minnesota. The home of “nice” Big Government. And in keeping with that, last week the state produced a grand example of mindlessly intrusive regulation. That’s the “Big Government” part. The “nice” part is how quickly the government conceded it was wrong.

I read about it first at Reason’s Hit & Run, where Katherine Mangu-Ward proclaimed “Minnesota Bans Free Online College Courses from Coursera. I Give Up.” She briefly related the burgeoning online industry of offering college course lectures free to the public (minus the accreditation), and how one of them was singled out for prohibition from the state’s Office of Higher Education: “Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.”

Ms. Mangu-Ward’s conclusion was simple:

Idiots.

A day later, however, the story had radically changed. Minnesota’s bureaucrats had rethought their position, as related by this particular bureau’s bigwig, Larry Pogemiller: “Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free.”

Obviously.

Pogemiller went on to promise that, when the legislature “convenes in January, my intent is to work with the Governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances.”

The regulators of Minnesota’s higher education proved that they could learn a new lesson. How well? We’ll see, as online schooling continues to gain its foothold — and accreditation, too.

Gerard Piel famously wrote of the “acceleration of history.” With the Internet, we see the feedback time from bad policy to removal of said policy cut down to a mere day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights too much government

Out of Control

Economist George Reisman, author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, supports strict gun control. So do I.

Not gun control directed against the weapons of peaceful gun owners. Gun control directed against armory-facilitated violations of our rights by government and criminals.

In his essay “Gun Control: Controlling the Government’s Guns,” Reisman assures readers that he too believes in gun control. “However, I do so in the light of the knowledge that by far the largest number and the most powerful guns and other weapons are in the possession of the government.”

By its nature, everything the government does, good or bad, relies for its effectiveness on the threat of deadly force — otherwise people would be free to ignore its laws and rulings. Therefore, a meaningful program of gun control “must above all focus on strictly controlling and regulating the activities of the government.”

When government uses its powers against actual criminals — those who kill, rape, steal — this serves as a “control on the use of force, including the use of guns,” insofar as it deters such criminal acts of coercion.

The Constitution is a form of gun control directed against the government. To control the government’s use of force, such protections must be enforced and illegitimate uses of government power must be curtailed. Guns owned by a peaceful citizen are also a form of gun control — they can deter or counter wrongful acts of force by both private criminals and public officials.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Avoid the Big Gov Trap

We do not face just one problem, but our many problems tend to come down to one thing: trying to do too much through government.

Last weekend, at Townhall, I noted that the most wildly popular economic policy doctrine of the last hundred years, Keynesianism, has not — its proponents say — been properly given a chance during the two biggest financial contractions of our time, the Great Depression and the recent mortgage-backed securities implosion. In both cases, more money was needed for proper “stimulus.”

Ironic, perhaps, since Keynesianism has been used as an excuse to run deficits and increase debt for scores of years.

Yes, even a doctrine designed to play into the hands of politicians gets abused by politicians.

The lesson: Excuses to grow government are not revolutionary insights, they’re traps.

Yesterday I talked about how the “Laffer Curve” point where raising the tax rate actually reduces revenue is lower for capital gains than for general income. But one consequence of a revenue-maximizing capital gains rate is that there would then be rich investors who wind up paying a smaller percentage of their incomes in taxes than do common laborers.

Tax fairness is an issue that should not be ceded to those caught in the clichés of the age. Think of tax fairness, instead, as a rationale for a limit. Not as an excuse to raise tax rates punitively, hatefully, foolishly (like the current president wants).

Bring all tax rates down to the level of the tax with the lowest revenue-maximizing rate. Don’t raise capital gains taxes, lower the income tax. 

Taxes would then be fair. And government would have to be reduced to accommodate the fairness, and thus more limited.

Less of a trap.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
responsibility too much government

Dream Weavers

“It’s time to retire the American Dream,” writes The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson, “. . . to drop it from our national conversation.”

Not so fast. The ability to stand on one’s own two feet, to make a living and a life for oneself and one’s family, to be financially and otherwise independent — that dream is still absolutely relevant.

And should be achievable beginning from any station in adulthood.

Samuelson is correct, though, to worry that the dream is becoming “an informal entitlement.” The “pathways to the Dream” constructed by government “often led to dead ends.”

“True, homeownership is a laudable goal; it stabilizes neighborhoods, for example,” he writes. “But the promotion went overboard. Lax lending standards lured people into buying homes they could not afford, contributing to the 2007-09 financial crisis.”

Samuelson also thinks that “it made sense to subsidize loans allowing more students to go to college” because a college degree “meant better jobs,” but recognizes that the cost of college shot higher and many students ended up “with heavy debts and no degree.”

So you see where the problem really lies. As Henry David Thoreau wrote a century and a half ago, “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”

The American Dream isn’t to have government fulfill all our dreams. It has a more modest role.

Making our dreams come true is our job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Togetherness

“We’re all in this together,” folks say. I’ve even said it. But are we?

Yesterday, I discussed Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments on the “47 percent” he believes are hell-bent on supporting President Obama . . . and an apparently different 47 percent not paying federal income taxes. Romney expressed a not unreasonable fear that government bailouts and handouts and entitlements will cause dependency, and there will come a breaking point where those working and producing will be unable to shoulder that burden.

But Mr. Romney shouldn’t go along with the bifurcation of the American public facilitated by the structure of the federal income tax and the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Most people of all incomes are paying a lot more in taxes than they should have to, even when they do not pay federal income taxes.

Moreover, while no doubt some folks wallow in dependency through welfare or crony insider deals, the vast majority of Americans desire to stand on their own two feet. Part of the 47 percent not paying income taxes are people on Social Security, as noted in an online comment by John C. Bisely:

To lump Social Security in with the other parasites is very disturbing to me. I didn’t ask for SS, it was a government run insurance for my retirement that made sense, actually. The politicians used it as a cash cow and stole billions to buy votes — plus the fact, I gave them real dollars at the time I paid into it and they give me, inflated fiat!!!

Mr. Bisely, like most Americans, is not a parasite. He’s earned his way in this world. He deserves a less parasitic government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers too much government

Bite the Hand

I’m not sure there’s much percentage in talking about percentages.

Divvying folks into groups, and then relying on people to “stay” within their group — behaving according to one’s specifications — seems . . . kind of creepy.

Last year’s “Occupy” movement, with its relentless pitching of the “99 percent,” demonstrated that creepy/icky factor pretty well.

But Mitt Romney had to horn in on the action. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. These wards of the state, he went on to say, believe that

  • they are victims
  • government has a responsibility to care for them
  • they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it

Furthermore, “these are people who pay no income tax,” Romney stated. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Well, not all folks who are somehow “dependent on government” — a group ranging from Social Security retirees and the non-working poor to federal employees and agribusinesses and Solyndras feeding at the federal trough — necessarily want to increase their own ranks. Not a few are savvy enough to notice that the system that feeds them would, if larded up with more recipients, be made less capable of feeding them.

As for the logic of “not biting the hand that feeds you,” the advice of the late Thomas Szasz is pertinent: “maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”

After all, many of the people who may qualify, technically, as being “dependent on government” would rather not be. And might like the option of being less encumbered by government “help.”

Mitt, I wouldn’t write them off yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

716 Billion Lies

As the campaign for the presidency heats up, we’re going to hear the words “taxes” and “deficit” and “spending” repeated ad nauseam. And this number: $716,000,000,000.

That’s the amount of future Medicare spending that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress (exclusively, without a single Republican vote) cut, slashed, ripped, hacked out of the hands of elderly Americans over the next ten years.

And I thought Democrats loved Medicare, believed in it, wanted to keep it like it is against the bitter schemes of GOP Scrooges!

Now, as Republicans attack the Democrats’ attack on Medicare, Dems have counter-attacked by charging that in his plan GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan cuts Medicare this exact same $716 billion. Ryan explains that his approach simply took the status quo as the baseline, and, sadly, tragically, that includes Obamacare’s nearly trillion dollar malpractice in gutting Medicare funds.

With older citizens constituting a huge voting block, this fall’s election may hinge on this $716 billion being taken from Medicare. Funny thing is, the number is a mirage. Meaningless. Not real. Medicare will not be cut $716 billion. Not really. Instead, it will grow in leaps and bounds over the next decade.

Nothing in Obamacare stops Congress from spending that $716 billion and more in coming years. In fact, they already plan for Medicare spending to grow by far more.

That’s the problem more broadly with the cuts Democrats offer in exchange for higher taxes. The cuts are illusory because the spending continues to grow. Therefore, any tax increases to plug deficit spending would be pouring water into a bucket full of holes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

I Know Savings

I don’t personally know Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who won the Tour de France seven times, including after beating cancer.

I don’t know if Armstrong tricked folks for all those years he was competing, finding some ingenious way to pass more than 500 drug tests even while doping, as witnesses tell the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

I don’t know what to make of the USADA’s doping charges, but, as for the agency’s motivations, a federal judge wrote that, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.”

And I don’t know whether Armstrong chose to drop his challenge to the USADA charges against him because after years of fighting the agency, as he wrote, “enough is enough,” or, as USADA contends, there was ample “evidence” that “Armstrong used . . . and administered doping products.”

But there is something I know. I know where we can cut some federal spending.

On the Opposing Views blog, Tim Dockery points out that USADA “receives almost 70 percent of its funding from the federal grants” and “is a government program masquerading as a non-profit organization. This non-profit status allows it to investigate and prosecute athletes without affording them the constitutional and due process protections required of other federal agencies.”

Why is the federal government paying to police sport? In a way that undermines our standard of justice? When we’re already 16 trillion in debt and butting in costs money?

Yes, “enough is enough.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights too much government

Pitchfork Rebellion

What if they threw a rebellion and everybody came?

Anything you do these days can get you in trouble with regulators, from serving water without the proper liquor license to (I kid you not) throwing a birthday party without the proper happiness-making license.

But being harassed for doing peaceful things with your own property isn’t about whether you’ve obtained the many licenses “required” to do them. It’s about whether you’ve caught the attention of some vindictive and cortex-deficient bureaucrat.

When Martha Boneta hosted a birthday party for a friend’s daughter on her Virginia farm, she forgot to get a birthday-party-for-little-girls permit; the county noticed; the county threatened fines. Zoning Adminstrator Kimberly Johnson went further, though, ordering Boneta to stop selling produce grown on her land.

Boneta finds it “rather odd” she’s being singled out, when so many Virginia farmers do likewise. Actually, she’d obtained a permit to sell produce, but since then the county’s regulations have grown more complicated. (Bureaucrats can grow things too!)

Supportive local farmers conducted a “pitchfork protest” outside the Board of Zoning Appeals. Alas, Boneta lost her appeal, but will pursue the case with the farmers’ help and that of the Institute for Justice. The travesty has also caught the attention of a local Tea Party group. Indeed, several of the “pitchfork farmers” are also members of the Tea Party chapter in Northern Virginia.

I didn’t obtain a permit to wish them all Good Luck, but I wish it anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.