Category: too much government

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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.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Fly Him to the Moon

Some astronomers think of the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet,” our moon being so big and all. Undoubtedly, the Moon has been important for life on this planet, what with the amazing working of tidal effects — it may have even scooped up asteroids and other inter-planetary detritus, protecting our biosphere.

So “liking” the Moon, or wanting to know more about it, is not lunacy. (That “lunacy” derives from “Luna,” our natural satellite’s Latin name, is irrelevant. Really.) But sticking to the Bush-era “Constellation program,” a hopelessly expensive shoot-man-to-the-Moon-again project, long after it proved an idiotic waste of money, is lunatic. One of the great things about dropping the program has been witnessing Barack Obama talk up private enterprise in space. It’s always gratifying to hear the president speak something other than warmed-over socialism.

Enter Sen. Richard Shelby, of Alabama. He calls Obama’s plan to rely increasingly on private enterprise to send stuff into space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”

So, is this Republican stalwart thereby a strict free-marketeer, a laissez-faire “no subsidy” man?

No. His “Shelby provision” tacked onto an emergency military spending bill, last year, kept Constellation funding (but not the project itself) going to the tune of $1.4 million. Per day.

And it turns out that one of NASA’s main Constellation contractors hails from his home state, and contributes mightily to Shelby’s campaign coffers.

Worse than lunacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

A Cool $90,000

Is American life now best described by the plot of a Nathanael West novel?

Maybe. In West’s A Cool Million, the young hero meets calamity after calamity, often at the hands of America’s authorities. I stopped after a prison official had all the hero’s teeth ripped out to “prevent infection.”

Most American punitive “overkill” is not as gruesomely funny. If you ask John Dollarhite, it’s not funny at all.

Dollarhite, who runs a computer store in Nixa, Missouri, inherited his son’s rabbit-breeding business, which Dollarhite describes as being on the order of a lemonade stand. When his son reached 18, Dollarhite took over Dollarvalue Rabbitry, and sold over 600 little furry creatures in the space of a year and a half.

He closed the business after the USDA got involved.

You see, the USDA licenses the selling of animals in this country. And neither Dollarhite nor his son were licensed to breed and sell rodents. Dollarhite says he wasn’t aware of such a requirement.

So, of course, the USDA came down. Hard. Like a starved puma on a vole.

The USDA demands he pay over $90,000 in penalties. Dollarhite says the government might as well demand a cool million — or, as he put it, a “$1000 or $100 million. I don’t have it.”

The blogosphere is up in arms about this, and rightly so.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking this isn’t American justice. More like that Nathanael West novel I never finished.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Backbreaking Spending

Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett, went into back surgery last week. The Pennsylvanians who voted him into office may be hoping he’s getting a backbone installed. But no such luck: Doctors call his treatment “routine.”

Too bad, for Corbett needs something to help him stick to his campaign promise of  “saying no” to spending.

Since taking office Corbett has  radically increased the salaries of his executive staff as well as stuck the state with another big sports stadium project.

Just what a cash-strapped state needs!

There’s a huge philosophical problem with forcing some folks (say, opera buffs) to pay for the entertainments of other folks (say, my fellow sports fans). It’s just not right. (It’s wrong the other way ’round, too.)

It’s also silly economics. And increasingly unpopular. People are “stadium fatigued,” according to Chris Friend in The Philly Post. Worse yet, the particular minor league stadium Corbett just pushed will accrue benefits chiefly to the New York Yankees, not the Philadelphia Phillies (or even the Pittsburgh Pirates). It’s a bizarre project, when you think about the cui bono of it.

Finally, when you think of who pays, the stadium’s $20 million price tag marks only a fraction of the cost, since the bond for that figure will balloon over time, with interest due.

Paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers.

I love sports. I look forward to the day when the industry is as self-sufficient as it ought to be, and people like Corbett have the spines to stay out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Freedom Is a Brown Bag

American society still features a fair degree of freedom and respect for the individual. We’d all be pretty shocked were a public-school bureaucrat to dredge up Plato’s old notion of forcibly removing babies from the care of their parents and letting the state raise them communally.

We’re not that far gone. Nobody advocates the utter communization of the care and feeding of the young.

Instead, we confront more incremental yet ever-bolder assaults on parental responsibility and rights in favor of such Grand Liberal Ideas as Puritanical State-Subsidized Nutrition. Thus, the educrats at a Chicago public school, Little Village Academy, prohibit kids from bringing lunch from home.

Yep. Not only are students prohibited from toting squirt guns and pictures of paper knives, at LVA they’re now also prohibited from importing such dangerous products as Coca Cola and Twinkies. It’s all about “healthier choices,” blathers a Chicago Public School spokeswoman, who stresses that it’s up to individual schools whether to adopt such bans. After all, what could be “healthier” than training families to be dependent on the state for homogenized sustenance?

Not surprisingly, some Little Village kids dislike the cafeteria food. Sometimes they throw it in the garbage. “We should bring out own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!” they shout when asked about the policy.

They should do more than chant. They should flout the ban en masse.

They can’t all be arrested for smuggling in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Io’s Vulcanism

Io is one of Jupiter’s four moons that Galileo Galilei discovered. Of those four, it is the nearest to the huge gas giant it revolves around, and it is the most violently and continuously volcanic.

Scientists now think they know why it’s so volcanic.

The tidal influence of Jupiter pulls at it constantly, and its internal solid matter — rock — gets squeezed and churned into magma. That magma layer may be quite large. So, no wonder lava keeps bubbling up and shooting out in the form of volcanic activity.

I bring this up not to extend the scope of Common Sense to astronomy and its subdivisions. Instead, I want to make an analogy.

The bigger government gets, and the closer it reaches into our lives, the more we are squeezed and churned — and so of course we get hotter.

And we will erupt . . . in the form of political activity.

Indeed, the Tea Party movement, and the underlying sentiments of distrust and disgust — as well as the rise of tax-and-spending-limiting initiative campaigns — can be understood as a natural result of letting government get too big. Jupiter-size. And we are too close to it for comfort.

Mavens who want a less volatile political culture might consider Io’s case, and see some good reason to shrink our “Jupiter.” There’s no easy way of moving us all out, into a more extended orbit from politics and bloated government. So shrinking our governing gas giant is key.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Pseudonymous Concerned Pseudo-Citizen

Is it wrong to admire a scoundrel, er, “W. Howard”?

In Everett, Washington, traffic enforcement cameras — so-called “red-light cameras” — have stirred up a lot of people, many airing their ideas or just venting on HeraldNet, the local paper’s website. Among the most persistent contributors to the comments/letters section has been “W. Howard.”

Readers got suspicious. Once he said he was from Lynnwood; in another post he implied he lived in Everett. But no matter what town he was from, he was always for the cameras, which he claimed would prevent pedestrian deaths and save the children.

He thus bucked the stream in the growing controversy over the cameras, which seem so big-brotherish, so totalitarian. Even when one is caught red, er, lighted.

But, hey, learn your lesson. That’s what “W. Howard” said, anyway. Get over your paranoia.

The “paranoid” turned out to be right about W.H., though. The newspaper traced his posts to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., far from the Evergreen State in Scottsdale, Arizona — which just happened to make and sell the cameras under question — all the way back to Bill Kroske, vice president of business development.

That makes Kroske a Saul Alinsky of marketing.

But a scoundrel nonetheless, mimicking a Music Man-style pretense of being “part of the community” just to stir up business.

Thankfully, the scoundrel was revealed as such by a free press and in public debate. The First Amendment rides to the rescue!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Lawlessness, American-Style

When President Obama granted to himself the power to execute American citizens without due process, it wasn’t just Judge Napolitano who became alarmed. Now, citizen activists are honestly nervous, some now thinking that the government is targeting them with assassination.

Sounds paranoid. But, as is often said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Any one instance of paranoia may or may not be warranted, but the fact remains that the government is out to get some people without due process.

We can’t shrug that off with a “Ho, hum.”

Let’s also not ho-hum the FDA raiding a business, guns drawn, for selling raw milk, or a defendant facing “jail time of up to 65 years for helping people play cards over the Internet.”

That last quotation comes from Gene Healy, who chalks up our government’s over-lawed lawlessness to the subject of his recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, explaining that “[y]ou’re not a real president until you fight a metaphorical ‘war’ on a social problem. So, to LBJ’s ‘War on Poverty’ and Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs,’ add Obama’s ‘War on Fun.’”

But the problem, it seems to me, is not merely a “war on fun.” It’s a revamped war on citizens by disregarding limits on government required by the rule of law.

For example, to keep government going without a raised debt ceiling, Timothy Geithner took funds from federal employee pensions.

Crime, if you and I do it.

“Clever statesmanship” if Geithner does it.

Lawlessness, American-style.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

RomneyScare

As a candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney has a number of things going for him. He’s rich, handsome, and has a funny first name.

Perhaps more importantly, he’s neither Donald Trump nor Newt Gingrich.

But still, he does have a niggly problem: His experience. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a medical care reform law that provided the blueprint for the Democrats’ national version, now known (un)popularly as “ObamaCare.”

One of the best reasons to vote “Republican” next year would be to oust the politician who gave us such a bad bill. But, on matters of “health care,” Romney comes off as nothing less than the generic knock-off of Obama.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a critique of Romney’s Massachusetts fix, highlighting its “technocratic” (decidedly not “market-based”) nature, individual mandate, and consequent necessary government mandate to subsidize the uninsurable. Plus, of course, its spectacular lack of cost containment.

The one thing in the reform’s favor is that the ranks of those covered by medical insurance has grown.

But that the state’s pre-reform, utility-like regulation of the insurance industry had priced so many out of the market? That somehow doesn’t get addressed — most certainly not by the program’s defenders or by Romney himself. Or many others. Pity.

Mitt gave a major speech last night, defending his “RomneyCare,” saying that his position “is not going to satisfy everybody.”

How can it satisfy anyone but big-government partisans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.