Category: too much government

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national politics & policies too much government

Cold, Hard Reality

Yesterday President Obama declared that no one is arguing for government default. But isn’t it amazing to see so many politicians work so hard to ensure that un-argued-for goal?

There are two parts to a default. The first is running up debt; the second is not paying it back. Like it or not, advocate it or not, sovereign debt repudiation comes closer as American politicians lumber on with the first part.

Of course, there are folks who think the American people should simply repudiate their government’s debt. Over at the Mises Institute, Justin Ptak provides citations from more than one economist advocating just that.

Gary North states that the day is fast approaching when the phrase “full faith and credit of the United States government” will “provoke universal laughter. . . .” He insists that “the credit rating of the United States government will be marked down from AAA to AA. It will then be marked down to A.” What’s more, he says this is a good thing: “For every notch down that it falls, the national day of deliverance draws closer.”

Paranoid? Fringe? Hopeful? No matter how you categorize such talk, it’s not crazy to think about, since the probability of default grows as the debt increases.

A default could have a beneficial effect on America’s politicians: They would be unable to finance further deficits. Reality’s cold, hard fist — that is, un-amused investors — would rein them in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access too much government

Arizona “Clean Elections” Scheme Nixed

The United States Supreme Court decided, 5-4, against Arizona’s “clean elections” law. In two challenges to the law, Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett and McComish v. Bennett, the Court ruled for freedom and against a bizarrely unfair form of “fairness.”

The idea behind Arizona’s law was to make money somehow “not count” by “leveling the playing field.” Arizona did this by giving taxpayer money to “clean elections candidates” to equal the voluntary donations obtained by privately funded competitors.

Chief Justice Roberts says the scheme goes “goes too far.” I would say: Way too far.

Roberts nicely argues that though “‘Leveling the playing field’ can sound like a good thing . . . in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game.  It is a critically important form of speech.  The First Amendment embodies our choice as a Nation that, when it comes to such speech, the guiding principle is freedom — the ‘unfettered interchange of ideas’ — not whatever the State may view as fair.”

Now, I see why people don’t like the ugliness and “unfairness” inherent in “winner-takes-all” zero-sum contests like political campaigns. But the solution isn’t to hand public money to some favored candidates, effectively putting a finger on the scales. Instead, provide the public with greater choices, and let the people freely decide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Reform Challenge

Taxpayers fund about half of all medical industry transactions, and governments regulate that as well as a huge chunk of the rest. No wonder medicine is in chaos.

Economist Charles Sable asserts that he knows how to make health care better. Arnold Kling, on EconLog, reports Sable as saying that “health care providers need to be able to improve by learning from and correcting mistakes. He then proceeds to offer legislation to force that.”

But Kling offers an interesting challenge: “If you know a better way to run health care organizations, why don’t you start a health care organization?”

As opposed to dictating by law how others should manage theirs.

Kling, an economist who has run a business or two, thinks that when “a liberal/progressive proposal is supposed to do X,” the liberal “expert” should “start a private entity to do X.” He sees no reason why the medical industry would be immune to such challenge:

If health care providers are doing a bad job, what stops you from implementing a better model and taking over the market? Are consumers too stupid to know the difference between providers who make lots of unnecessary mistakes and providers who don’t? If they are so stupid as consumers, why do you expect them to be smart as voters?

In the real world, we could use people with ideas who really run with them — not stand back and tell some other folks how to run yet another bunch of folks’ lives and businesses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

ATF Misfire

A machine gun is like obscenity: We can’t define what it is, but everyone says they know it when they see it.

Well, that appears to be the case with the agency of the federal government formerly called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, anyway. According to a statement issued yesterday by the Gun Owners of America (GOA), “The Bureau has never published a manual detailing how they determine what is, or is not, a machine gun.”

If your main reason for existence is controlling weaponry like machine guns, shouldn’t the criteria for determining what a machine gun is be publicly known?

But the reason for the bureau itself is a bit iffy. Known (un)popularly as the “ATF,” it’s been in operation (in one form or another) since 1886. Ronald Reagan infamously dubbed it a rogue agency. Since then, the ATF has slogged through multiple scandals, and a major umbrella department change, moving from Treasury to Justice. And that iffiness has been exacerbated by recent investigations by the House Oversight Committee.

Indeed, in part based on the results of those investigations, the GOA now advocates getting rid of the agency— you can read the details in yesterday’s communiqué.

The group has a point. Recent ATF activity includes another of its weird attempts at entrapment, which ended up supplying a huge amount of guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

Another federal agency doing the opposite of its mission?

Not unheard of. Call it a typical misfire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Disarm Power-Trippy Bureau-Thugs

“This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society,” says Quin Hillyer at the Center for Individual Freedom site.

By “this . . . sort of thing” Hillyer means pre-dawn raids in which “thuggish bureaucrats . . . burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan payments.”

I’ve already commented on this vicious and stupid Department-of-Education-sponsored raid. I return to the story to echo Hillyer’s suggestions for reform.

He observes that such baseless assaults on innocent citizens are “an increasing problem. . . . [A] horrific number of similar stories [show] that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.” More and more commonly, agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have no business having armed agents, nevertheless do.

Hillyer suggests that the SWAT-like raid teams and the people who order them should both be subject to imprisonment for these flagrant abuses of power. He also wants Congress to stop criminalizing mere clerical errors and to “de-arm federal agents.” The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, concurs, saying he’d “like to see some Tea Party members of Congress pass bills to disarm all non-law-enforcement agencies.”

Yes. Let the congressmen openly debate and vote whether rampant, arbitrary, armed raids of innocent citizens should or should not continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Explaining the Next Bust

Is the long-cycle “higher education boom” now beginning to go bust?

Like financial bubbles fed by subsidy and the Federal Reserve’s limbo-low interest rates, American colleges and universities are plagued with too much government attention —particularly by policy that says “everybody should go to college.”

But common sense tells us that not everybody profits by going to college, that sending ill-prepared, unqualified and even uninterested young non-scholars to college, largely so they can “earn higher incomes” is absurd. Pushing the vast majority of American humanity through the university mill cannot ineluctably yield increasing returns. With diminishing returns, increasing government attention can only feed a dangerously unsustainable bubble.

And once it bursts, Americans will demand explanations.

Look to the theory of “signaling,” which posits that a (or the) chief use for schooling is not learning but a demonstration: Getting a college degree shows (“signals”) employers that the persevering student possesses virtues useful in “the real world.”

We’ve come to rely on those crude signals, but as economist Bryan Caplan argues, businesses could adapt to a very different information market: “Ending government subsidies for education wouldn’t create a new working-class generation; it would lead businesses to massively expand the employment of interns to take advantage of the large pool of talented, young people who can’t afford tuition.”

Gee, learning one’s trade for free sounds better than going into debt to “signal” employers that one would likely be able to produce for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism too much government

The Propaganda Diet

When the federal government gave up its goofy “food pyramid,” I thought it might be a sign that the USDA had given up. We’re not so lucky. The USDA just announced its new diet propaganda campaign, trading in the pyramid for a pie chart.

But, as noticed on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, there’s no pie.

Actually, the graphic’s in the shape of a plate, with four categories broken down in pie-chart fashion: Fruits, grains, vegetables, and proteins. In a separate element to the side, a “cup” labeled “dairy” serves as a fifth food group.

The “eat your vegetables” mantra we’ve been hearing all our lives is now reinforced by the command to make half our “plate” (the graphic is available at ChooseMyPlate.gov) fresh fruits and vegetables, take half our grains as whole grains, avoid salt, and switch our milk to skim or 1 percent. Oh, and avoid sugary drinks; drink water instead. And eat less overall.

Good advice, I suppose, but at this point if the government tells me that the unclouded sky is blue, I’d check to verify, first.

And regarding our diets, “check to verify” is probably a good idea. We can hardly trust even the so-called experts without applying our own critical intelligence. Our eating habits are ours. And much of what the government’s said in the past has been nonsense.

As for me, I’d like to cut down on government itself. This campaign seems the place to start.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Hewitt-Romney Rationalization

Those who insist that RomneyCare isn’t as bad as ObamaCare need a reality check.

Both impose new price controls; both impose new taxpayer-funded subsidies; both force people to buy health insurance; both massively expand government interference in our lives.

Former Governor Mitt Romney seemed to acknowledge the similarities when he suggested, shortly after Obamacare had passed, that he’d “be happy to take credit” for the president’s accomplishment. Now, though, with the glaring parallels so politically inconvenient, he pretends that parsecs of distance separate the two plans.

RomneyCare apologist Hugh Hewitt says that RomneyCare’s mandate forcing people to buy health insurance offends only “a handful of libertarian purists.” (Which I’d submit is far better than being a pure socialist or even a half-and-half socialist.) According to Hewitt, if we have no great objection to, say, smog-emission mandates, what’s the big deal about being compelled to buy a product?! Anyway, he adds, states have the right to impose such mandates, whereas the federal government is constitutionally barred from doing so.

Regardless of how we assess particular attempts to combat pollution, pollution at least conceivably violates the rights of others. Your not buying something does not violate anybody else’s rights; being compelled to buy something does violate somebody’s rights — yours.

Sure, RomneyCare affects “only” 6.5 million people, whereas ObamaCare affects some 300 million. But expanding governmental interference in the medical industry and into the lives of everyone is, either way, destructive and immoral.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people too much government

Show Me the Way to the Next Hookah Bar

I could never emulate the economist Irving Fisher — and not just his use of index numbers. He was a perfervid purist. He didn’t just defend “the success” of Prohibition, he looked forward to the day when coffee, tea and bleached flour would be outlawed, too.

Hey, I love my coffee. You’ll have to pry my cup from my cold, dead fingers.

Of course, many forms of purism are obviously hygienic. But take purity beyond persuasion, into force, that’s not safe for anybody. And fraud? Weasel-wordy purists aren’t against lying for the cause, either.

Take the hookah.

Hookahs are to tobacco-smoking what bongs are to marijuana-smoking: A water-filtration-based, easy-to-share drug delivery system. In “Putting a Crimp on the Hookah,” the New York Times quotes one hookah smoker as saying he’s unconcerned about the health effects, since he only smokes it about once a month. The author then states “But in fact, hookahs are far from safe.” As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine points out, both can be true. Tobacco smoking isn’t exactly healthy. But occasional imbibing of water-filtered smoke is almost certainly better for you than regular cigarette use.

The New York Times focuses on the next leg of the “ever-shifting war on tobacco,” the prohibition of “hookah bars.” Though there’s some talk of protecting second-hand smoke victims, it’s pretty obvious that this war is really about squelching a “vice” by force.

Which is itself worse than vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Eleven Fiftieths

Eleven states have “bottle bills,” legislation requiring vendors to collect a deposit on each container they sell of soda pop, iced tea, energy drinks, etc. It basically mimics the old, voluntary system of recycling, where bottling companies would pay people to return glass bottles, for reuse.

When I was a kid, cheaper materials (aluminum, plastic) made the old system uneconomical. So environmentalists pushed through legislation in Oregon, and then elsewhere, to create government-mandated recycling systems.

Oregon’s legislature just passed a “sweeping revision” of the bill, upping the deposit amount from five cents to ten and expanding the program. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute testified at a legislative hearing against the revision. According to Charles, bottle deposit recycling conflicts with curbside recycling, which Charles argues is far more efficient — or at least easier to use than lugging containers back to return centers, which are usually sticky, smelly, and. . . .

Well, Charles didn’t talk about the stink. One of my Washington State informers did.

You see, Washington not only lacks a bottle bill, such efforts fail with larger percentages each time one hits the state’s ballot. But the beverage containers sold in Washington have the same deposit/return guarantees as in Oregon. So some Washingtonians transport their in-state purchases — sans five-cent deposit — across the border for unearned returns.

You might think that fighting such cheating would be of more concern to Oregon lawmakers than making it even more lucrative to out-of-state profiteers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.