Category: Accountability

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Accountability government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders moral hazard term limits too much government

Regnat Tyrannis

Regnat Populus, The People Rule, Arkansas, corruption, petition, initiative, House Joint Resolution 1003, SB 689, Governor Asa Hutchinson

Arkansas’s motto is Regnat Populus — “The People Rule.” Unfortunately, the people’s so-called representatives are demanding that this motto be made more fitting: Regnat Tyrannis.

I jest. The Natural State’s legislators aren’t nearly so honest. Just devious.

A few years back, the fine people of Arkansas (where I grew up) had arguably the nation’s most accessible-to-the-people petition process. With it, they enacted issues that legislators despise: term limits, for instance.

But in 2013, legislators passed several bills upping the difficulty and cost of the citizen initiative process.

They’re back.

Yesterday, Senate Bill 698 was passed and now goes to the governor.

Today, the Senate votes on House Joint Resolution 1003, a constitutional amendment for the 2018 ballot. It increases the petition requirement and raises the vote threshold to 60 percent to pass an initiative amendment.*

SB 698 is straightforwardly sinister. When groups gather the voter signatures to place a measure on the ballot, the Secretary of State is required to publish the wording in the legal notice section of newspapers throughout the state. Despite low readership. This bill would make the petitioners pay.

According to a report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state spent nearly $2 million publishing the language of these measures in 2016. The old requirement should be repealed, but the new one would be disastrous: Only citizens with deep, deep pockets could pursue ballot initiatives.

A veto is needed from Governor Asa Hutchinson — call him at (501) 682-2345.

As for HJR 1003, Arkansans can find their state senator here. Call early.

My adopted state’s motto is also Latin: Sic Semper Tyrannis.** The good people of Arkansas are welcome to it, until theirs is once again operative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* At least, voters can defeat this measure at the ballot box.

** The precise English translation of Virginia’s motto is “Thus always with tyrants.” The common translation is “Death to all tyrants.”

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Accountability crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights

Good and Bad News

Civil Asset Forfeiture, crime, drugs, marijuana, stealing, theft, police abuse

On the issue of “civil asset forfeiture” — police seizing property from folks merely on suspicion, without a criminal conviction — there is good news.

In Idaho, House Bill 202a just passed both legislative chambers overwhelmingly. “Among other changes, HB 202a would no longer allow civil forfeiture of the vehicle of a person who merely possessed a controlled substance,” explained a Spokesman Review report, “without using the vehicle in connection with trafficking offenses or obtaining it with drug-trafficking proceeds. . . .” It also puts off the table “property that’s merely in proximity to illegal drugs” and the mere possession of cash.*

Legislation is moving forward in Arizona, too. House Bill 2477 passed to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week — which unanimously cleared it despite what the Arizona Republic called “strong opposition from . . . primarily people representing law-enforcement and prosecutors’ groups that benefit from the funds.”

The bill heightens the standard of proof required for making seizures stick from “preponderance of the evidence” to “clear and convincing evidence.” HB 2477 also increases reporting requirements, and creates a process police must follow to spend seized funds.

Unfortunately, there is also bad news.

Even with the new Idaho law and the enaction of the Arizona legislation, police in both states will continue to take people’s stuff without a criminal conviction. The level of abuse would be diminished, but not ended.

Citizens in both states can and should use the ballot initiative process to end this injustice. In total.

We must restore the bedrock principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Other provisions include a court determination on “whether a property seizure is proportionate to the crime alleged,” absolving “innocent owners from having to pay the state’s costs associated with an attempted seizure,” and some required record-keeping.

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Accountability government transparency ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Legislating in the Real World

Steve Bannon, Trump, Freedom Caucus, big government, Ryancare, Trumpcare, Obamacare

Rolling back Big Government is not easy, especially when you are not that into it.

Robert Draper, profiling Steve Bannon in the New York Times, gives us a view into the mind of Trump’s right-hand man, who appears to think GOP insiders are obsessed with principles. “[I]t’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.”

At best, this only fits the Freedom Caucus members, who killed RyanCare. But who is avoiding reality, here?

“Bannon clearly is not as familiar with the mindset of congressional Republicans as he imagines,” counters Jeff Deist, head of the “Austrian” Mises Institute. “They are primarily concerned with how the whole ‘repeal and replace’ debacle plays back home.”

Like Deist, I see the spectacular fizzle of RyanCare as evidence of the increasing irrelevance of Republican compromising. “The GOP is the party of trillion dollar military budgets,” Deist insists, noting that it “won’t even kill an openly cronyist program like the Export-Import Bank.”

If keeping Big Government secure is all Republicans can do, what use are they?

“All around us are the almost unimaginable benefits of markets, cooperation, and technology,” Deist explains, “yet somehow we’re naïve if we don’t want to funnel human activity through government cattle chutes.”

Bannon will not secure solid GOP support if he keeps pushing the usual establishment compromises while pretending they are either realistic or revolutionary. Freedom Caucus Republicans seem bent on doing something Republicans usually avoid: change “the real world” for the better by practically limiting government.

Not just in theory.

Bannon seems to have other goals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies term limits U.S. Constitution

A Trout in the Milk

Senate Judiciary Committee , Supreme Court, hearings, term limits, Neil Gorsuch

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. Talk about a silly rite. Senators repeatedly fired questions about specific legal views that no High Court nominee ever answers.

Why not? Because to answer would be to pre-judge possible future cases.

That didn’t prevent displays of faux-outrage from committee Democrats, though. “You have been very much able to avoid any specificity,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) criticized, “like no one I have ever seen before.”

In Washington, isn’t that a compliment?

Into this kabuki theater, Republicans added their own inanity. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) inquired of Gorsuch, “What’s the largest trout you’ve ever caught?”

So that is how to determine whether to confirm someone for a lifetime position.

But even a lifetime doesn’t beat Congress. Elected every two years in the House or six years in the Senate, congresspersons often rack up longer tenure than do justices appointed for life.

The longest serving justice in our history was William O. Douglas, who spent nearly 37 years on the High Court. But if Douglas had spent that epoch in Congress, he wouldn’t place first, but 80th.

In fact, three Judiciary Committee members — Senators Patrick Leahy, Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch — have already served longer than any High Court justice in American history.

Interestingly, of the 20 longest serving justices, half served before 1900. Conversely, all of the 20 longest continuously serving members of Congress served after 1900.

Careerism in Congress beats lifetime tenure.

It’s time for term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom government transparency moral hazard national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Public Record

body camera, police, abuse, civil rights, obstruction, brutality

Police departments nationwide have begun to outfit their on-duty officers with body cameras. These small recording devices make great sense, so we can better judge police encounters.

And it turns out that not only do police behave better when wearing body cameras, so do the citizens with whom they interact.*

Yet, cameras aren’t magic. They do not work when turned off. And video recorded by police offers little value when tampered with or deleted.

On Monday, the Washington Post ran an in-depth feature about the 2014 fatal shooting of 19-year-old Mary Hawkes by Albuquerque, New Mexico, police, who pursued her for allegedly stealing a truck.

The Post explained that her case “has become a cautionary tale about the potential of new technology to obscure rather than illuminate, especially in situations when police control what is recorded and shown to the public,” raising concern “about whether a nationwide rollout of body cameras is fulfilling promises of greater accountability.”

Six police officers huddled in close proximity to the deadly incident — all wearing body cameras. The officer who shot Ms. Hawkes, however, had his turned off. Footage from three others “showed signs of alterations and a deletion.”

A federal investigation is underway.**

It is now obvious that cameras alone won’t suffice. Rules must require that the cameras be turned on — with consequences for non-compliance. The public needs access to the footage, too.

The Police Cameras for Ferguson initiative*** on the ballot April 4th does exactly that. We need similar legislation in Albuquerque and everywhere else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See Barak Ariel, William A. Farrar, Alex Sutherland, “The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology (September 2015, Volume 31, Issue 3), pp 509–535; reportage on this study can be found here.

** The probe has already revealed that a former Albuquerque police employee has declared, in an affidavit, “it was routine for officials to delete, alter or refuse to release footage because of ‘political calculations.’”

*** Your support is still desperately needed to educate voters in Ferguson, Missouri, about the Police Camera ballot measure. Please help today.

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Accountability free trade & free markets moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility subsidy too much government

Trump Proposes a Budget

Trump, budget, spending, big government, entitlements, welfare, cuts, pig

Will Donald Trump, infamously successful businessman, actually do something about the federal government’s out-of-control deficits and mounting debt?

Economist Pierre Lemieux, writing in the Financial Post, finds some reason for hope in President Trump’s “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again”:

The proposal to eliminate funding for agencies like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities is welcome. Artists should be able to stand on their own two feet with the support of private sponsors and organizations, of which there are many in America. Lovers of concerts should finance their own passion.

Though Lemieux gives good reason to want to cut “official arts and humanities” subsidies even sans their budgetary implications, imagine the backlash from Democrats, the media and the whole collegiate sector!

Actually, the backlash has already begun.

Can united government under the GOP cut even these most obviously least necessary aspects of government subsidy?

I’m not holding any pockets of air in my two lungs.

“Many monstrous bureaucracies would be reined in,” Lemieux goes on, listing proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (-31 percent), Department of Labor (-21 percent), and other departments of the so-called “discretionary” budget. But this is all small potatoes. “Really cutting federal expenditures would require reducing the welfare state — which Trump has no intention of doing.”

And the fortunes Trump wishes to throw at the military? No knack for parsimony there.

Though we can expect a little exceptional hack-and-slashery from Trump, Lemieux remains skeptical of any overall major effect.

Get used to ballooning debt.

Like you haven’t already.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability free trade & free markets national politics & policies property rights too much government

Three, Three, Three Mints in One!

monopoly, Microsoft, Google, Chrome, competition, cooperation

Microsoft just announced an innovation that might give folks who fear business behavior — or are extremely skeptical of the positive public outcome of markets — pause.

The Bellevue, Washington, company is adding Google calendar connectivity for its Macintosh users of Outlook 2016.

[Pause.]

You see, monopolies give us the willies. We do not trust them. Yet, despite our fears and suspicions, big business activity in a free market does not lead inevitably to One Corporation Ruling Them All. Or chaos.

Why believe that? This Microsoft Outlook story.

Most folks’ worries about monopoly come down to fear of out-of-control competition. In many industries, for the industry to work, there must be general cooperation among competitors. (Think of telephones and electricity distribution, etc.) The reason many people* want to regulate “natural monopolies” is that it seems only natural that businesses would balk at working together on shared standards — they would balk at any form of cooperation . . . they’re competitors, dagnabbit!

But evidence of competitors cooperating for consumer good is all around us. The classic case? Railroads, when the rail gauges in America were standardized to 4′ 9″ — without government edict.

The current case? This, where one of the three biggest computer outfits in the world offers customers on a competitive platform (Apple) easy syncing with a company that competes directly with it as well as its platform competitor (Google).

Why do this?

The better to serve their customers. As much as Microsoft might want to shun their competitors’ products, its customers do not share that view.

And that is enough.

Welcome to free-market capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.**

 

* It is worth noting that economists have a different concern regarding natural monopolies. Something about “cost curves.” Meanwhile, the opposite fear — of cooperation among businesses when cooperation would be generally harmful (price fixing) — has been an issue dealt with by economists since Adam Smith.

** Full disclosure: this came to my attention courtesy of a story on Apple’s News app.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

DumpCare

healthcare, Trumpcare, Obamacare, medicine, costs, regulations, Medicaid, single payer

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan insists that his “TrumpCare” plan to replace ObamaCare will decrease medical insurance rates. Others argue that his American Health Care Act will increase those rates. Likewise, he expects it to reduce strain on federal budgets; others deny this outright. The “coverage” issue is just as contentious.

TrumpCare is a mess because it is isn’t “DumpCare.” What’s needed is not yet another regulation-plus-subsidy system. We need repeal and then . . . more repeals.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has never really been on board with this. He has promised that no one would lose “coverage,” assuming that “coverage” is “health care.”

It is not. State charity programs like Medicaid (upon which ObamaCare relied way too much) are merely ways to pay for services. Dumping a gimcrack payment system is not the same as decreasing medical services. “DumpCare” wouldn’t dump care, only insane government.

For example, we know that health care outcomes for poor folks without Medicaid turn out to be better than poor folks with Medicaid.* Increasing the number of people on formalized subsidy programs is no panacea.

Besides, ObamaCare severely under-delivered on “coverage.”

New programs, nevertheless, are traps, regardless of demerit: once you provide a benefit, folks come to rely on it and demand more — objecting when it’s taken away. Which is why few programs are ever repealed, despite failing to meet original expectations.

So far, the “small government party” hasn’t found the courage to actually limit government. Do Republicans really believe what they say, that fewer regulations and subsidies will lead to lower costs and better service?

It seems Republicans won’t take their own prescription.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid “natural experiment” provides reasons to question the merits of the program. As the initial, randomized, controlled study found, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services. . . .”

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Accountability crime and punishment folly ideological culture moral hazard nannyism responsibility

Walk on the Wilders Side?

Muslims, Islam, Sharia law, Netherlands, Dutch, Theo Van Gogh, terrorism, immigration, Europe

The Dutch were among the first to witness Islamic extremist violence against free speech. The November 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent — a man whose first name, Mohammed, almost no one thinks is merely coincidental — stirred the nation.

And the world.

Van Gogh made a short film, with Somalian émigré Ayaan Hirsi Ali, about the unjust treatment of women in Islamic countries. The film criticizes Islam as well as the Muslim majority countries, and was considered an affront by many Muslims.

After van Gogh’s death, Ms. Ali fled to the United States.

This event is only the most famous of many similar conflicts between free-speech Dutch values and regulated-speech Islamist ones. The fact that the country has anti-blasphemy and anti-insult laws on the books, and these have been directed against a popular politician, has exacerbated the growing antagonism.

That very politician is today’s big news. According to The Atlantic, the “center-right People’s Party (VVD) for Freedom and Democracy is projected to win 24 seats in [today’s] election, slightly ahead of Geert Wilders’s far-right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), which is expected to gain 22.”**

The Dutch center-left, like similar ruling groups in Britain, Germany, France and Sweden, often seems weak and timid before the rising illiberalism of Islamist terrorism and Sharia law.* Many suspect that the recent decision to block Turkish ministers from speaking at rallies in Holland, before Turkey’s referendum next month, is designed to counter this narrative.

Meanwhile, though Wilders is generally liberal (not “far right”) on most cultural issues, his “de-Islamization” program seeks to close mosques and outlaw the Quran***.

One extreme to another.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* This is not just a bugaboo. In 2006 the Minister of Justice floated the possibility of incorporating Sharia law into the constitution.

** The projection is within the margin of error, and with mass immigrant Turkish protests taking place over the weekend, the chance of a Trump-like upset is more than possible.

*** Geert Wilders compares the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency Popular responsibility

Five for Ferguson

Ferguson, Michael Brown, body camera, police, lapel camera, rights, accountability, abuse

Michael Brown is dead. No video can bring him back.

As the world remembers, Brown was the unarmed 18-year-old black man killed in a violent 2014 altercation with Officer Darren Wilson, who is white — making Ferguson, Missouri, famous.

Or rather, infamous.

With little information, folks quickly picked sides. Some claimed Brown was gunned down in cold blood with his hands up, yelling, “Don’t shoot.” After seeing footage from a convenience store surveillance camera, which showed Brown seeming to strong-arm an employee and steal cigarillos* mere minutes before the fatal police encounter, others placed the blame on Brown.

Subsequent rioting left dozens injured, seventeen businesses torched and millions in property damage. Meanwhile, President Obama’s Department of Justice found Officer Wilson’s actions justified.

However, had Wilson been equipped with a lapel camera, that footage would have enhanced finding justice. Moreover, the knowledge that the public could see the truth of what happened might have prevented the riots and recriminations.

More information is better.

That’s why the best news of all is this: on April 4, three weeks from today, the people of Ferguson will vote on The Public Video Recording Accountability Amendment to Ferguson’s City Charter. The charter amendment mandates that officers wear lapel cameras while on duty and sets sensible rules for allowing maximum public access.

The campaign needs your help to alert Ferguson voters about the election by mailing information on the ballot measure. For instance, studies demonstrate that not only do police behave better when wearing cameras, but so do the citizens with whom they interact.

Would you give five dollars for Ferguson?

Please help bring a better day for justice and transparency.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Over the weekend, more video surfaced from the convenience store as part of a documentary entitled, “Stranger Fruit,” which suggested Michael Brown had made a drug deal at the store, and not stolen anything. A St. Louis County prosecutor disputed the filmmaker’s interpretation, and released more footage.

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