Category: too much government

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crime and punishment folly too much government

Downshifting Before the Cliff

climate, global warming, energy, government

A scenario: You and millions of others are willy-nilly running toward a cliff.

You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.

But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.

“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”

Fiction? No.

The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to . . . pretend . . . to prepare.

It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035. 

Not 2030 as previously stated.

Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.

Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.

Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.

British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights too much government

Publish and Not Perish

small publisher, Institute for Justice, books

James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle didn’t know that they risked destruction by publishing and selling previously out-of-print books.

Their low-overhead, low-profit-margin Richmond company, Valancourt Books, founded in 2005, prints long unavailable volumes one at a time, as customers request them. To operate, the publishers must first carefully retype the books, often formerly available only in rare editions or even microfiches.

It’s two guys working out of their home doing everything. They profit only by keeping costs low.

By 2018, the Valancourt catalog listed over 400 books. That’s when the federal government came down upon the company like a ton of bricks. Invoking a 1790 copyright law, the U.S. Copyright Office demanded that Valancourt send it one copy each of hundreds of different books. Otherwise, they’d be fined up to $250 per book and further fines for “willfully or repeatedly” failing to comply.

The publishers’ choice was either spend thousands of dollars and lots of time printing and shipping the books — or be penalized out of existence. Instead of giving up, they turned to the Institute for Justice and went to court.

IJ argued that government “cannot simply force you to turn over personal property on pain of ruinous fines, and they cannot punish you for publishing a book without letting them know.”

Now, years later, IJ and Valancourt have won their case. 

It’s a win for all small publishers who might otherwise have been ruined by the whims of bureaucrats at the Copyright Office. That it had to be litigated, however, is more evidence that freedom requires constant vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Slow Murder Is Still Murder

weather, climate change, government, power

Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly. 

“I’m not saying now’s the time to double down” on fossil fuels, pleads Lanny Nickel, chief operating officer of Southwest Power Pool, which helps provide electricity to 14 states. “I’m just saying now’s the time to slow down on the removal of [those] assets from our footprint.”

The assets Nickel means are oil, gas, coal.

Like others in the business of keeping the lights on, Nickel knows that if and when the percentage of fossil fuels in the utility industry “footprint” is coercively reduced to point oh one percent or whatever, wind and sunshine will not be taking up the slack. 

We’ll suffer, instead, from lots more brownouts and blackouts.

Nickel understands this. 

But begging regulators and politicians to go slower won’t discourage them. They’ll just gloat about how they’re making the utility executives sweat.

We should in fact be doubling down on fossil fuels, because these are the only always-reliable sources of electricity. 

Should solar and other sources of electricity become cheaper and more reliable, people won’t have to be compelled to increasingly turn to them. The transition would happen naturally, in the normal course of progress. 

And the notion that government will be able to fine-tune global weather if only we are forcibly deprived of our means of coping with the ups and downs of the weather is a willful delusion.

Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly, sure. But more importantly, the government should not be destroying them — and us — in the name of the religion of Climate Change at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Way We Censor Now

Joe Biden, social media, China, censorship

In China, the government now sells software to social media companies so they have the best real-time idea of what the government currently does not want people to say. 

The companies then perform such obliging actions as removing posts and banning users.

The software serves as a self-defense system — of the social media companies. You see, if the companies fail to sufficiently prevent government-outlawed speech on their websites, they will be punished. Maybe ruinously. By the Chinese government.

So who is doing the censoring here? 

Obviously, the government.

In the U.S., the intimidatory relationship between government and social media firms is not quite so advanced or nearly so clear. But as we keep learning from documents extracted by litigation and subpoenas, for years now our federal government has been telling firms to censor things, and the firms have complied.

The latest example is that Facebook, which has always said that its content-moderation policies are “independent,” obeyed White House demands to censor posts about the likelihood that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese lab, not in nature.

In a July 2021 email, Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive, asked whether anyone could “remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man-made.”

To which a VP in charge of content policy replied: “We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

No matter how White House press secretaries or others try to dress it up, “private” censorship conducted in obedience to governmental requests is governmental censorship.

And is eerily close to the Chinese practice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly ideological culture too much government

Apocalypse California

Gavin Newsom, California, reparations, racism

The Democratic Party is a victim of its own success. Nowhere can we see that more clearly than in California.

Democrats have succeeded by pushing “victimhood,” gaining power by focusing on special groups, declaring them oppressed and offering compensation — though still never comes the day of full escape from the burden of this oppression.

Many stories of oppression are true.But no sized sliver of truth can guarantee that compensation attempts will redound to the liberation of the aggrieved.

California’s Democrats will face this soon.

Over slavery! And racism.

Never a slave state, California has been flirting, officially, with reparations. Several cities have “explored” the idea. An official “Reparations Task Force,” established by state law, has recommended a formal apology for slavery (in other states, over a hundred-and-fifty years ago). It’s also talking about giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to Black Californians, descendants of slaves or not. 

The task force is scheduled to make explicit and detailed recommendations —  on July 1.

Which puts Democrats on the spot.

Powerful Democrats such as Governor Gavin Newsom. Considered a rising presidential aspirant should the current 82-year-old decide not to run again, Newsom signed the law to officially look at reparations . . . but then seemed less than fond of the price-tag. More than twice the yearly state budget!

Now the governor is keeping his mouth shut awaiting the final report.

And, as George Skelton at the L.A. Times asks, then what? Well, that is when “the governor and lawmakers will need to emerge from cover, face the public and devise a better response.”

But up until July they can still pretend.

Then, Democrats will have to face the reparations issue squarely — and in the context of the complete failure of their state, the blame for which they cannot place upon Republicans, much less long-dead racist slave-owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom judiciary too much government

Hollowed-Out America

covid, freedom, hysteria

While Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s comments in Arizona v. Mayorkas are worth studying in full — the case is about immigration — his thoughts on the late pandemic panic stand out.

“Since March 2020,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes,” and the judge goes through a long list of decrees, including:

  • Closing churches but not casinos
  • Threatening violators with both civil penalties and criminal sanctions
  • Surveilling church parking lots, recording license plates, and issuing warnings against attending even outdoor services.

And he adds that the federal government got in on the tyrannies.

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces,” he notes. “They can lead to a clamor for action — almost any action — as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.” Gorsuch acknowledges this is not exactly a revelation: “Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

There is a deeper problem, though, for the “concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government.”

All the way through the pandemic, and even now, we have been barraged by messages about “misinformation and disinformation” about the disease and the treatments (proactive and reactive) against it. And the people in power — bureaucrats as well as politicians — were called “experts” while actual experts (along with earnest amateurs) were hounded, their ideas suppressed. 

Now we know that much of what was then held as good information was in error, even lies. 

Very unsound governance: Gorsuch characterizes it “a shell of a democracy.” 

“Hollow.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Survival Requirements

climate change, global warming, energy, EPA

Suppose you have a roof. Now you punch holes in the roof. The next time it rains, do the holes help or hurt? You’ve still got a roof, right? Mostly?

Actually, it’s bad to have holes in your roof. And the more holes you have, the worse it gets.

I elaborate this object lesson not primarily for you and your common-sensical friends, but to those determined to make it ever-harder for us to provide ourselves with food, clothing, and shelter by progressively crippling our means of doing so.

Example? The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to kill uninterrupted generation of power in the United States.

New rules the EPA has proposed would require plants powered by coal or gas to eliminate almost all of their carbon emissions by 2040. The plants would have to shut down or switch to less reliable sources of electricity like the sun (unhelpful when it’s cloudy or post-sunset), wind (unhelpful when there’s no wind), and wishful thinking (never helpful).

Fossil-fueled power plants provide some 60 percent of production of electricity in the country. Jim Matheson, head of National Rural Electric Cooperative Associations, warns that the EPA rules would put the reliability of the power grid at risk.

Yes. Rolling blackouts currently the norm in a few states especially plagued by anti-energy policies would become the norm throughout the country.

Like us, proponents of such policies may already know that deliberately creating shortages of energy is bad. 

Unlike us, though, they may think that others, and not themselves, will bear the brunt of the downpour.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Flush The White House

water pipes, ecology, Joe Biden, dishwasher, toilets

The people who gave America the double- and triple-flush toilet have set their sights on our automatic dishwashers.

Well, that’s not quite right. It was Congress that gave us the regulations that turned our toilets into a nightmare of clogging and extra time with plungers and flush levers. I wrote about this nightmare for years, advising readers to “Flush Congress.”

Now it isn’t Congress directly, but “the White House” — and the Department of Energy in particular, according to a story in The Epoch Times. “The Administration is using all the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” states Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

She’s talking about new efficiency standards for power and water usage which the DOE insists will “cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers.”

But anyone who has endured the toilets that came out in the 1990s knows that these putatively well-intentioned schemes burst the pipes, so to speak, making a mess and a mockery of any concept of efficiency. The Biden is enthusiastically pushing the piety that intentions matter most in regulation — the If We Mandate It, It Shall Be philosophy. Yet,The Epoch Times contrasts the current administration with the previous: “Trump criticized the push to raise efficiency standards, arguing that they made some appliances work less effectively and so were counterproductive” . . . and then mentions the multiple flushes of toilets that I cannot help but remember.

Trump’s surely right; The Biden’s surely wrong. And the ultimate result will be to raise the costs of appliances, thus hitting the poor hardest. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Public TV Vetoed

Public TV, television, state media, propaganda

One shouldn’t need the latest ratcheting-up of the culture wars to oppose what we call, in America, “public radio and TV.” Taxpayer-subsidized broadcast media is a bad idea. Period. Full stop.

Defund NPR. Defund PBS. No more state-run or -subsidized media.

And, thankfully, that point was made by Governor Kevin Stitt when he vetoed the Oklahoma legislature’s renewed funding for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority. 

“OETA, to us, is an outdated system,” he told Fox News. “You know, the big, big question is why are we spending taxpayer dollars to prop up or compete with the private sector and run television stations?”

But he didn’t stop there. “And then when you go through all of the programing that’s happening and the indoctrination and over-sexualization of our children, it’s just really problematic, and it doesn’t line up with Oklahoma values.”

What this implies is that wasting taxpayer money on “public supported” media was fine with Republicans like Stitt. Until a really flagrant violation of their sensibilities.

Sure, the current gender and “critical race theory” nonsense that taxpayer-subsidized media pushes is beyond the pale.

But so is the smug establishment progressivism of “public media” culture more generally.

The whole point of taxes and government spending is to promote the general welfare, or so the standard theory runs. But there’s nothing “general” about the extreme sectarianism of “public radio and TV,” with less well-to-do taxpayers subsidizing the far wealthier public media audience.

It would have been far more inspiring had Governor Stitt dared oppose factional subsidies prior to the latest culture war strife. Indeed, maybe we wouldn’t be now enduring CRT and transgenderism and other aspects of cultural Marxism had conservatives actually stuck to republican principles long ago. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets media and media people political economy too much government

Incredulity Doesn’t Cut It

dumpster fire, regulations, privatization

One of the objections people often make to the idea of private enterprise as a solution to government inefficiency is The Argument from Incredulity.

It’s not an argument at all, actually, just a harrumph and a guffaw: we cannot have free-market police, or fire suppression, or . . . garbage collection!

But of course all those things are successfully managed in the private sector.

No media outfit has a longer history of pointing this out than Reason magazine. So when the editors of Reason brought us Joe Lancaster’s “Government Waste Monopoly Pits Private Dumpster Business Against Garbage Bureaucrats,” yesterday, I hope they took a moment to revel in a little nostalgia. For this is the kind of story that made Reason what it is today, one of the best sources for retail political economy.

The tale tells of Steven Hedrick, an Arkansas man who put together a business renting out dumpsters — like you often see on construction sites, but smaller — which he would haul away after customers filled them. He built the business without ever going into debt, and then . . . came the government. 

“[I]n April 2022, the City Council in Holiday Island passed Ordinance 2022-004, which required all residents and businesses within the city to contract with the county sanitation authority, Carroll County Solid Waste (CCSW), for trash pickup and disposal services,” Reason informs us. “Anyone using private companies would have to switch, and anyone who did not have contracted trash service would have to sign up.”

And Hedrick’s little business must be . . . dumped.

What this is, at base? Sheer bigotry: preferring monopoly government to competitive private services.

For those of us who’ve been reading Reason for decades, it sports a familiar smell.

Just not a good odor, for the drive to monopolize everything stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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