Category: too much government

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national politics & policies too much government

Very Lame Duck

A Washington Post feature story on Kent Conrad refers to the retiring U.S. Senator as “the Democrats’ balanced-budget guy for more than a decade.”

Of course, no budget has been balanced for “more than a decade.” Being the Democrats’ “balanced-budget guy” is sorta like being the Taliban’s diversity outreach guy or AARP’s youth activities director or the bartender for the Temperance League.

I won’t dispute Sen. Conrad’s claim that he’s “done [his] level best,” but, in the time he’s been in Congress, the federal debt has climbed more than 700 percent, from $2.1 trillion in 1986 to $15.4 trillion today.

Nonetheless, Conrad continues to work his colleagues in the dark corridors of the capitol, and The Post reports his goal is to “draft far-reaching legislation to tame the debt and present it for a vote after Election Day, when lawmakers will be under intense pressure to reach an agreement to avert huge tax increases and deep spending cuts set to hit Jan. 1.”

But how will the desire to avoid tax increases and spending cuts “pressure” Congress to pass Conrad’s preferred package of tax increases and spending cuts? Especially in a lame duck session that sidesteps public pressure?

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan offers a different view: “We shouldn’t be insulating this from the American public, trying to cut back room deals on commissions or whatever. I think the process is moved forward if we put plans out for the public to see and defend our ideas.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Garbage Day

Sometimes, before you can progress, you must first take out the garbage.

This is certainly true of America’s vast library of laws and regulations.

The solution? Repeal.

Congress needs to go into a session devoted to repealing existing laws and regulations.

The reasons for such a grand garbage disposal were handily supplied, yesterday, by John Stossel, who argues in “Complex Societies Need Simple Laws,” that we must “end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.”

Stossel isn’t saying anything new or shocking. The great legal scholar Richard Epstein wrote a book devoted to just this argument, and the classical liberal thinker Herbert Spencer defined the point of view in 1850 — his classic Social Statics derived law from a principle that should remain static, allowing the rest of complex society to develop dynamically from that simple standpoint.

Free societies need understandable, universal laws. As Stossel puts it, “[n]o legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day.”

Oddly, Stossel doesn’t mention the word repeal.

It’s certainly not a word you hear much in the current Republican primary campaigns. Only one current contender for the GOP nomination seems committed to exercising veto power — the illustrious “Dr. No” — and he is not leading in the delegate count. A Dr. Veto as president could cajole Congress into mass repeals.

Which I bet could have mass appeal.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get this from our current president, or contenders Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, or the leaders of either party in Congress. These politicians know, really, only one thing: Adding to the mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The $820 Billion Oops

Getting good estimates is not easy. Anyone who’s hired a contractor knows to make sure the estimates are sound by insisting that bidders stick to their estimates.

This is not what happens in government, though. Projects almost always start out with a whopping figure for an estimate . . . and then as the project gears up the costs shoot higher and higher — it soon becomes clear that the high initial cost estimate was a low-ball figure after all.

My “favorite” recent example of this has been California’s high-speed rail project, which soared by the billions before even breaking ground.

But move over, transit. Here’s medicine — 2008’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” has just received an estimate upgrade. When passed, the legislation’s enthusiasts boasted a ten-year cost estimate of “only” $940 billion. Now, the Congressional Budget Office has revised the decade’s cost tally up to $1.76 trillion.

According to Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, the CBO says that weakness in the economy leads to more people “obtaining insurance through Medicaid than it estimated a year ago at a greater cost to the government . . . fewer people will be getting insurance through their employers or the health care law’s new subsidized insurance exchanges.”

I “daringly” predict that this estimate, too, will turn out to be woefully below the actual figure . . . unless something novel happens, like Americans rallying around a “throw the bums out” campaign to elect a Congress and a President that will surgically remove Obamacare from the body politic. Before it kills us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Blame Policy

Petroleum-based fuels are going up in price, so naturally people start looking for someone to blame. Call up the Usual Suspects:

  1. Speculators. These futures market folks never get credit for lowering the prices of gas, but they can always be counted on to serve as easy “bad guy” targets when prices go up. Same this time. You’ve heard the rumors, the rancor. (It’s nuts.)
  2. President Obama. You know, for not allowing drilling and pipelines and such. Go to a meeting of conservatives and you’ll hear someone yell out “Drill, baby, drill!” Now, I’m all for drilling, and it’s stupid to clamp down on future supplies of oil — indeed, investors in the futures market for oil see these political and bureaucratic restrictions on exploration and mining and refining, etc., and no doubt bid up the price of oil — but really, don’t blame just Obama, blame, also,
  3. Romney and Santorum and Gingrich. All these presidential candidates have engaged in hysterical, belligerent rhetoric about Iran, threatening warfare in the Persian Gulf region. War is bad for supply lines. Compromising supply lines means compromised supplies. Which means less oil. Which means rising prices.

So of course futures traders will bid up those prices — they would lose money if they didn’t — and in so doing they make the likely future conditions palpable to contemporary decision makers.

That’s their economic function. Don’t blame the messenger.

So, if you think the U.S. should bomb Iran to prevent that country from bombing the U.S. in a few years (after which the U.S. could easily make the populous nation, full of innocents, a sea of irradiated glass), don’t gripe.

One consequence will be (must be) rising prices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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incumbents national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Emperor Obama

People change.

George W. Bush won the presidency pledging a dose of “humility” in our foreign policy and forswearing the temptation to rebuild failed foreign states. But after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . followed by even more deadly and difficult nation-building efforts.

Presidential powers expanded.

Along came Barack Obama, the peace candidate. His advantage in winning the 2008 Democratic Party nomination was his unequivocal opposition to the Iraq War. Meanwhile, then-Senator, now Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had voted to give Bush congressional approval to launch that war.

During the campaign, Obama recognized constitutional limits on the commander-in-chief: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

But as president, Mr. Obama launched air strikes against Libya without congressional authorization. In fact, he refused to even report to Congress as required by law.

And then last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “Do you think that you can act, without Congress, and initiate a no-fly zone in Syria, without congressional approval?”

“Our goal would be to seek international permission,” Panetta replied, and then added, “and we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this.”

A republic? America goes to war on the order of one man: Emperor Obama.

But empires change. Past empires rarely asked foreign permission for their military adventures.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly links too much government

Townhall: Dim Bulbs in Congress

My Townhall column this weekend is “Another Forced-Innovation Fiasco,” which shows that another congressional cost-cutting measure has gone up in smoke. Here are some relevant links to that article:

Oh, and folks: Common Sense publishes every weekday, and, if you sign up for it at right, you can get it in your email box. Why not?
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initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Stopping Crony Capitalism

Voters in Wichita, Kansas, went to the polls, Tuesday, to smash a measure that would have forked over $2.25 million in tax rebates to a downtown hotel project. Those supporting the giveaway spent $300,000 to promote the deal, while opponents ponied up a scant $30,000 against it. The vote nevertheless strongly weighed against the big money, 62 to 38 percent.

The Wichita City Council had enacted this “economic development” deal with the hotel developers, and that would have been the end of it . . . but for some pesky Wichita taxpayers.

Kansans may lack a statewide initiative and referendum, but there is a local process, so citizens possessed a tool for effective resistance. They formed Tax Fairness for All Wichitans and, working with the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, they hit the streets to gather over 2,700 signatures to require Tuesday’s vote.Bob Weeks interviewed, YouTube

After the victory, Bob Weeks, the group’s chair, reminded fellow activists that the battle is far from over:

The Ambassador Hotel is receiving assistance from eight taxpayer-funded government programs with costs of $15.4 million up-front and several hundred thousand annually. None of these were affected by the election. Wichita city hall and its allies are ready, willing, and able to use these incentive programs in the future for other hotels and businesses.

Weeks summed up the election results this way: “The best way to create jobs is to get government out of the way. . . . That is what the voters said tonight.”

On behalf of the new Liberty Initiative Fund, I’m honored to have given two cents worth of advice to their effort. They changed public policy, saved tax dollars and threw a big monkey wrench into the machinery of crony capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Moving to China?

Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-ed for the New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”

As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”

“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-destructive wars.”

Mr. Li points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”

But wait a second . . . Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. The people didn’t vote for this level of taxes, spending, war or massive debt – our elite political leaders did that. Too much control by the people? Hardly. Too little.

Note that the national government most affected by initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also has the world’s highest per capita income.

But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests . . .” After all, “political rights . . . should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”

Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in a Chinese prison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency too much government

Big Anonymous Is Listening

A newspaper report brought a smile to my face and a strange sense of . . . relief, reassurance. A group of hackers known as Anonymous has apparently cracked into and tape-recorded a conference call held between the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard.Anonymous Twitter Account

The call was to discuss the international investigation of the Anonymous hackers.

“The #FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal [communications] for some time now. #OpInfiltration,” read a taunting tweet about the audio file.

An FBI agent, insisting on speaking anonymously, said, “It’s not really that sophisticated.” The anonymous government agent explained that the Anonymous group had somehow intercepted an email with the call’s information. The agent offered that the FBI is “always looking at ways to make our communications more secure.”

Apparently, Anonymous has quite the work ethic. Shortly following the penetration of FBI/Scotland Yard security (so to speak), down went websites for the Greek Ministry of Justice, the Boston Police Department, and the lawyers representing a U.S. Marine implicated in the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Now, I don’t generally support hacking into government computers or taking down people’s websites. I’m more laissez-faire. But, actions by Anonymous to force government transparency are helpful, may even sport a certain revolutionary justice.

Is Anonymous on my side? More so, I bet, than this scary national security state that now thinks it can assassinate or incarcerate an American citizen without charge or any legitimate judicial process on the orders of one man: the president.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government video

Video: Why Obama Ditched Deficit Reduction

The biggest issue of our time, swept under the rug: