Category: too much government

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

Listicle!

In education circles, “lifelong learning” is a mantra, a piety, a cliché. For the rest of us, it’s how we maintain sanity.

Take words. It’s worth learning a few new ones now and then. After all, with new words can come new insights. Mostly, it’s just fun.Listicle

Yesterday, I learned a new word: Listicle.

This gem courtesy of Jesse Walker with Reason. He blogged about a Cracked “listicle” entitled “The 6 Most Popular Crime Fighting Tactics (That Don’t Work).” If you are on the Internet (and, since you are reading this, you almost certainly are) you’ve seen plenty of “listicles.” These are articles constructed in the form of a list. They are very popular, often linked on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter. Walker defends his recommendation: “Don’t sneer. Many listicles are excellent. I’ll take the average listicle over the average op-ed any day.”

I’d never heard the word before, but I am certainly aware of the art form. The listicle in question was concocted by Robert Evans, and he makes some great points:

  • Drug Dogs Are Inaccurate . . . and Racist
  • Car Chases Are More Dangerous Than Criminals
  • Drug-Free Zones Keep Dealers Close to Schools
  • Red Light Cameras Are Killing People
  • “Dry County” Laws Increase Drunk Driving
  • Capital Punishment Does Nothing to Reduce Violent Crime

Walker excerpts the “dry county” prohibition story, which is well-reasoned. I’m against capital punishment, but not moved by Evans’s take on it. Still, a tip of the hat to his red-light intersection revelation . . . which I won’t quote, because, like the most popular listicles, this one contains a plethora of words that, were I quoting, would contain a superabundance of aster**ks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Estonia’s Success

When I was coming of age, the economic ideology of Keynesianism was going bust. Keynesians couldn’t explain the stagflation of the 1970s. Monetarists triumphed and the Austrian School experienced a resurgence.

Now, monetarist disputes are hard to follow, and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is not exactly a piece of cake. But Austrian economists’ preferred policies possess a kind of common sense: The thing to do is prevent false booms. Once you hit bust, it’s too late: we are going to experience the pain of readjustment, “recalculation,” as we find new prices and levels. I riffed on this theme last weekend, in my column “Dead Hobo in Trunk.”

Keynesians, now back in the limelight, have it easier, promising “less pain.” They offer drugs to make us feel better: Borrow, go further into debt, and spend, spend, spend!

So you can see why today’s Keynesians would hate Austrian wisdom. Not inflating the money supply, not engaging in deficit spending? Risible! And “austerity”? Keynesian shill Paul Krugman never tires of pillorying that program.

Which brings us to Estonia.

The little post-Soviet Baltic state was one of the few countries to actually restrain spending after the 2008 bust, freezing pensions and cutting public employee salaries by 10 percent. Krugman infamously blogged about it, noting that the country’s current recovery hasn’t yet reached the height of the pre-bust boom. He thinks this tells against “austerity.”

But to Estonian economists, the height of the boom was a false prosperity that couldn’t last. They’re glad their country’s rid of it, and note that their current recovery is above the pre-2005 levels.

In other words, Estonians not only understand their country and their situation better than does Paul Krugman, they understand economics better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Bipartisan Blame for Auto Wreckage

President Obama often takes credit for President Bush’s worst policies while also averring that the economy hasn’t resurged yet because of his predecessor’s bad policies. I’m happy to blame both of them for the bad policies and bad results.

While campaigning in Ohio recently, Obama said we should pick him in November because he didn’t “let Detroit go bankrupt.”Auto Wreck

Financial writer Steve Conover points out that the car-czar idea started with Bush in the frantic last months of his administration. Also that the choice for dealing with troubled auto firms “in 2008-2009 was not bankruptcy versus no bankruptcy [but] between precedent-driven bankruptcy and White House-driven bankruptcy — rule-of-law versus rule-of-czar.”

Not every car company was going bankrupt back then and being “rescued” by the elephantine intercession of the federal government. GM and Chrysler were the special beneficiaries of that galumphing guidance. As were the auto unions at whose behest the usual bankruptcy procedures were bypassed.

Better-managed firms like Ford and Honda had circumvented the abyss. The reward for their hard work and foresight? Government-subsidized competition. Conover’s most basic point is that the only resource that can (and should) “save” any company from failing in the marketplace is “a sufficient number of buying customers.” The auto industry would have continued minus GM and Chrysler. People who wanted to buy cars would simply have bought cars elsewhere — from companies better able to supply their demand. And auto jobs would have moved accordingly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

The Stamps of Disapproval

President Obama is catching flak from pro-capitalist quarters for explaining to businessmen proud of building a business that “you didn’t build that.”Free Food!

Another sign of federal contempt for the work-for-a-living ethic has received less attention, but is just as revealing. It takes the form of Spanish-language radio “novelas,” produced in 2008, touting food stamps. The USDA recently yanked the novelas from its website after word spread about the brazenness of their something-for-nothing philosophy. (DailyCaller.com, which called attention to the campaign, has links to English translations.)

The episodes suggest that it’s almost impossible to eat healthy meals without relying on food stamps — or, these days, an electronic food-subsidy card — and that even if one’s husband is employed, a dutiful wife and mother would be remiss to refrain from getting government subsidies also.

One episode features two friends pontificating about a third, delinquent Diana. It’s a snap that Diana should take advantage of SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). But she keeps saying stupid things about how she doesn’t “need help from anyone.” Diana is “always making up excuses not to apply for SNAP,” laments Claudia.

Oh Diana! Stop making excuses!

It’s quite a suspenseful series, because we are supposed to be on the edge of our seats wondering whether the torpidly recalcitrant Diana will ever learn to be just as dependent on government handouts as all the healthily-eating people. Of course, in the end, Diana has learned her lesson.

Or un-learned one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Against Debt

The federal debt is no mystery. It is fed by deficits. “Because the federal government has long been spending more than it takes in tax revenues, we now face a $16 trillion debt, an amount that has grown by $5 trillion in the last four years alone.”

That’s Richard Lorenc and Jonathan Bydlak writing in The Daily Caller. And they are not merely describing a bad situation. They are proposing a solution.

They formed a Coalition to Reduce Spending, and are encouraging citizens and politicians to sign their “Reject the Debt” pledge. The vow has some takers, most notably Ted Cruz, running in a close U.S. Senate race in Texas, with a runoff at the end of the month. Like all who take the pledge, he promises

  • not to vote to raise the debt ceiling;
  • not to borrow more money to pay for spending;
  • to support balanced budgets; and
  • consider all spending fair game for reduction.

Other candidates — from Minnesota and North Carolina as well as Texas — have signed on, and more likely will, as the campaign hits the news, gains fame . . . and “notoriety.”

Perhaps unlike the folks I talked about yesterday, supporters of this coalition and its pledge aim at the heart of the problem. So go on: sign the pledge. And press your favorite candidate until he or she does so as well.

After all, there’s a lot at stake.

The idea that politicians can just run up a tab indefinitely, and “feel no pain,” is absurd.

The pain is coming. The only question is: Do we act in advance to forestall some of it, or just let it hit us like a full ton brick-load?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Cliff Notes

When the bus you’re in is set to drive off the cliff, what do you do?

Let off the accelerator, stamp on the brakes, steer clear. If the cliff cuts through the road ahead, stop. And turn around.

Unfortunately, though the U.S. is heading directly toward a “fiscal cliff,” half the folks in Washington want to speed up, while the other half think just a little deceleration will do it.Beware Dangerous Cliffs

Enter the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and its new newly launched project, the Campaign to Fix the Debt. According to this non-partisan outfit, “temporary patches” and “one-year extensions” will not work, not while the federal government amasses “trillion dollar annual deficits” and “borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends.”

Economist Arnold Kling hazards that an honest debate about deficits and debt is not possible, and that a “bipartisan solution to the deficit has passed its sell-by date.” Further,

the “fiscal cliff” noise will drown out everything else after the election. My definition of “fiscal cliff” is running out of suckers willing to lend to our government at low interest rates. (We are closer to this cliff than you may think — look at how much of the debt the Fed has to buy.) But in Washington-speak, the “fiscal cliff” refers to the thought that the budget deficit might be reduced suddenly next year. Horrors!

My own fear is that this group is, in reality, just a bunch of politicians who will wind up pushing the old, tired mix of tax increases and spending cuts, with the “cuts” swallowed up in the CBO’s baseline annual spending increases.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment, when we look at a new group tackling this problem with greater gusto.

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national politics & policies too much government

Wanting Too Much

An old joke runs something like this:

    “We lose a dollar on every widget sold.”
    “So how do you stay in business?”
    “We make up for it in volume.”

The lesson? Mere numerical productivity is not key to the success of any human enterprise. Adding value is key. Quality counts. And profit.

Tell that to Ezra Klein. He measures Congress by how many laws it makes. The current Congress has made very few laws compared to previous ones — Klein has a very nifty graph of this, see at right — so Klein blasts Congress: “there’s no session of Congress with such a poor record of productivity.”

But it’s not gross-weight productivity that counts. As economist David Henderson perceptively noted, what matters is whether the laws are good or not.

The more laws we’re encumbered with, the less their quality. Or as Cicero once put it: “The more laws, the less justice.”

Laws carry the weight of force, and force is the opposite of freedom, so the more the laws, the less the freedom. Further, it’s almost impossible to manage the huge bulk of the legal code, leading to bureaucratic drudgery both in and out of government, and mismanagement of resources everywhere. At best, we wind up with only piecemeal enforcement, which is itself a temptation for a common sort of tyranny, the prosecution of folks someone in power doesn’t like.

Note that graph. Each session adds to existing law. And unlike spending feeding debt, which is at least somewhat offset by revenues, these laws tend not to be the repeal of old laws. Graph the accumulation of laws, and it goes only one direction.

The wrong direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Programs for Peace

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, New Jersey, calls himself a “social media enthusiast,” and recently engaged Reddit.com’s public, for whom he clarified his stance on drug prohibition:Cory Booker

The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence. We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential. I see the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars being poured into the criminal justice system here in New Jersey and it represents big overgrown government at its worst.

Yes. Recreational drug prohibition has been and continues to be a horrifying example of “big overgrown government at its worst.”

My only qualm comes with the good mayor’s next sentence:

We should be investing dollars in programs and strategies that work not just to lower crime but work to empower lives.

The biggest reduction in crime would come from ceasing to criminalize peaceful behavior; the biggest relief from the drug war’s horrific consequences would be the war’s cessation itself. People “empower” their own lives, through peaceful work and family life. Are more programs really necessary? Wouldn’t individual freedom and personal responsibility be enough?

We don’t need “big overgrown government at its best.” We need streamlined, accountable government . . . that protects all peaceful folk. That would be far better. “Bestest.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

EPA Won’t Stop Polluting

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the country’s most dangerous polluters, striving to blanket our economic life in a suffocating ideological miasma.

The EPA’s poisonous ruling that carbon dioxide — “a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas” — constitutes a “threat” to public health and the environment has been endorsed by the Obama administration and now the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC. If it is never rescinded, economic growth will suffer. Representative democracy will also suffer, given how Congress has been bypassed here.EPA, polluting

Just FYI, we’d be dead ducks without carbon dioxide. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant must flabbergast all plants, which blithely use carbon dioxide as a critical component in photosynthesis, thereby making all carbon-based animal and human life possible. (Damn you, plants!)

Unproven assumptions regarding the extent to which industrial activity adds to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — even the extent to which the planet has warmed and will warm further, or to what extent any variation in average global temperature is even a special problem, let alone a catastrophic one — lie at the hemorrhaging heart of EPA’s hubris.

EPA officials suppose that they can smartly operate a globe-wide climate machine by increasing the expense or reducing the supplies of the fossil fuels that we use to warm our homes, drive our cars, operate our assembly lines. No, bureaucrats can’t centrally plan the earth’s atmosphere. But they sure can make it harder for people to survive and prosper.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Resistance Still Possible

According to a majority on the Supreme Court, Obamacare’s penalty for not buying medical insurance is constitutional because it’s a “tax,” not a “penalty.” Hmmm. All taxes may penalize, and penalties sure can be “taxing,” but this similarity doesn’t give us license to swap one for the other.

Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly flip-flopped about whether the Obamacare mandate is unconstitutional — perhaps in fear of left-leaning politicians and pundits. (“We’re not going to like you if you hinder our tyrannical medical regime by applying constitutional principles!”)John Roberts, flip/flop

The chief’s formal opinion states that under the Constitution the wisdom of legislation is a “judgment . . . reserved to the people.” Whoa. Hasn’t Marbury been decided? Doesn’t the courts’ power of judicial review help ensure that constitutional restraints on government power continue to restrain?

Well, just because the Roberts Court refuses to do its job doesn’t mean we must twiddle our thumbs in response. We can fight for an anti-Obamacare majority in Congress and the White House in November.

We can also urge our state governments to decline to cooperate with Obamacare right now. As wretched as it is, the court’s ruling at least overrules the new law’s attempt to force states to massively expand Medicaid. Almost immediately after the ruling, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had refused to cooperate with other aspects of the law, announced that Florida will not expand Medicaid eligibility. A dozen or so other governors have made similar commitments.

What about your governor? Do you need to make a phone call?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.