Category: folly

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First Amendment rights folly general freedom moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Legal Not to Lie About Your Milk

milk, Institute for Justice, regulations, Ocheesee Creamery, Department of Agriculture, too much government

Mary Lou Wesselhoeft doesn’t have to lie about the milk she’s selling. The Florida Department of Agriculture has lost in court. Mary Lou has won.

Ocheesee Creamery sells pasteurized milk without any additives. One of her products is skim milk. Ocheesee sells skim milk without vitamin additives, which is perfectly legal to do. But the Florida government claims that only skim milk with the additives counts as real “skim milk,” the kind you can call skim milk in speech to customers. (Kafka, did you write this horror story? Fess up!)

Give credit to the judge who asked: “Can the state, consistent with the First Amendment, take two words out of the English language and compel its citizens to use those words only as the government says?” The reply of the government’s lawyer? “Yes.”

Creepy.

Mary Lou’s victory is also a victory for all Americans who want to exercise their right to tell the truth about what they’re selling. And it’s a victory for the Institute for Justice, which took up the case on her behalf. At its website, IJ points out how easy it would be to annihilate freedom of speech by letting the government redefine words at will. We’re not free if our freedoms can be arbitrarily defined away by the people in power.

The Institute specializes in defending our rights against senseless government intrusions. Until such laws and regulations are repealed, it seems that the Institute will always have much to do — unfortunately. But, fortunately, it keeps on doing it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets local leaders moral hazard nannyism property rights responsibility too much government

Housing Horror

Oregon, housing, rent control, urban, planning, low income, land, property rights

Housing in Oregon’s north-central urban region is becoming more and more like San Francisco’s — out of the budgetary reach of huge swaths of average workers.

“The median rental household can’t comfortably afford a two-bedroom apartment in 28 of Oregon’s 36 counties,” Elliot Njus writes for The Oregonian. But it is worst in Portland and the three counties in the region: Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas. 

The findings come from a group called the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Njus quotes Alison McIntosh, of another group, the Neighborhood Partnerships, who not unreasonably concludes that “folks are really struggling to make ends meet.”

Well, yeah. This was predicted, long ago.

The state of Oregon began a comprehensive land-use planning system, decades ago, to prevent urban sprawl. At about the same time the Portland-region’s three major counties began a concentrated effort to . . . concentrate populations within the area. Confine them. Regulate them. Economists and other critics* from the very beginning predicted rising housing costs. And other problems.

Now, of course, the usual groups react in precisely the wrong ways: rent control. The State House in Salem recently passed legislation to uncork rent control. Thankfully for renters, the Senate nixed the idea. 

But we can be sure this proven housing killer (a disaster where tried) will resurface. Common sense (as well as reams of economic research) tells folks how bad an idea this would be, exacerbating the problem it aims to solve.

Alas, some folks look at government more as magic than as just another flawed, human institution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* One set of critics can be found at the Cascade Policy Institute, which describes Oregon’s land-use regulatory system as “the nation’s most restrictive” — adding that “every square inch of Oregon has been zoned by government planners, with the result that development of any type is prohibited on most private land.”

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Another Push for Censorship

Great Britain, Tory, Prime Minister, PM, censorship, terrorism, internet, web

It’s almost as if politicians are hell-bent on expanding government at the expense of our freedoms . . . and grandstanding to ‘look like they are doing something.’

The two proclivities are not unrelated.

Take Theresa May, Great Britain’s Tory Prime Minister. After yet another terrorist attack in her country, this time on the London Bridge, she re-iterated her party’s intent to censor the Internet.

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said on Sunday. But this “safe space,” she went on, “is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-based services, provide.”

Now, blaming ISPs and social platforms is a crude form of business scapegoating—something I would expect from her opponent in the upcoming elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the much-loathed (but inching ahead in the polls) top banana of Labour.

As a conservative, May should understand markets and the limitations of government interventionism a bit better than a near–communist. She might recall that previous attempts to regulate the means of communication almost never to work, and, in those few cases when they do, never stay scaled to the original target issue.

They expand. To cover more than just terrorism, as in this case.

What’s more, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group makes the case that such a move would likely “push these vile networks into even darker corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe” — scuttling the alleged purpose of the Conservative Party’s longed-for censorship.

May knows this. But she is a politician. She has power, and she wants to keep it.

It’s almost as if power corrupts or something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism responsibility

Quanta of Nonsense

academics, universities, college, paper, The Skeptic, western civilization, racism, sexism, prank, joke

Last month, two academics wrote a hoax paper. Their preferred journal didn’t accept it, but did suggest an alternative publication. They sent the paper to the recommended outlet, and it was published.

The paper? “The conceptual penis as a social construct.” The Skeptic provided an overview; Professor Gad Saad chortled over its sheer genius. Though a brilliant parody, as a send-up of postmodern academic insanity it fell a tad flat: it was merely published online, and probably not peer-reviewed.

But before you could say “Western civilization is in the toilet and circling the drain,” an equally idiotic paper came to light, published in The Minnesota Review, and apparently offered in earnest by an academic working in “women’s and gender studies.” Entitled “Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities,” the abstract (worth reading in full*) does not mention truth, predictive power, or evidence to advance knowledge of physics. Instead, it pushes the “combining” of “intersectionality and quantum physics” to “provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people,” etcetera. Basically, the problem of physics is not that it is hard, but that it is “oppressive.”

Meanwhile, historian Tom Woods** discovered a University of Hawaii math teacher who admits to not finding math interesting. She blogged her confession about wanting white cis-male mathematicians to quit their jobs “or at least take a demotion” and — if in a “position of power” — resign.

None of this is about the advancement of learning. What we see here is

  1. a new racism — from non-whites directed against white people — and
  2. a new sexism — from women and others who are not heterosexual males directed against, you guessed it, heterosexual males

. . . all packaged in cryptic, pretentious, prolix nonsense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I found it quoted on the Powerline blog: “In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics. Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability.”

** In his daily email for Tuesday this week.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly local leaders media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

The Early Vote Worm

Greg Gianforte, Montana, U.S. House of Representatives, Congress, elections, voting, democracy, media

Last week was consequential for Greg Gianforte. Awfully.

The Republican businessman won the special election for Montana’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He also body-slammed a reporter. He now faces misdemeanor assault charges.

For which Gianforte apologized publicly . . . as he was declaring victory. Welcome to modern American politics.

Democrats claimed victory, nonetheless — with media cover to boot. “Republicans’ 7-point win in last night’s Montana election is great news for Democrats,” the progressive Vox headlined their report.

At Townhall.com on Sunday, I explained why that claim misses both the forest and the trees. Yes, Trump won Montana by 20 percentage points against Hillary Clinton’s mere 35.4 percent back in November, while Gianforte won last week by only 7 points. But Trump was lucky to be opposed by a very unpopular Hillary.

Moreover, at that same election wherein Trump trounced Secretary Clinton, Gianforte lost the governor’s race to a Democrat. Indeed, Gianforte performed 11 points better last week than back in November — winning, instead of losing.

How does that show Republican support slipping?

The message from the Montana special election is that early voting periods are far too long. Montana’s early voting began nearly four weeks before Election Day. The assault by Gianforte, with criminal charges, hardly mattered, because roughly two-thirds of Montanans had already voted when it occurred.*

Rather than a nearly month-long process, whereby a candidate can bank a majority of the vote before the campaign is over, let’s make Election Day a three or five-day period. Make it easy to vote, but let’s all vote together, with the same information.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* This means not only that Gianforte may have “gotten away” with his violent outburst, but that those voters did not have time to adequately appraise Gianforte on information they would have possessed and been able to act upon, with a shorter voting period.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility too much government

Minimum Shock

minimum wage, closure, restaurant, business, prohibition, wages, pay, Berkeley, San Francisco

“Three restaurants vacated the Bay this week, with Berkeley’s Bistro Liaison getting the most attention,” the San Francisco edition of Eater informs us. “It’s a bittersweet exit for the owners, who plan to start new careers.”

The week in question was in February. But this was not an isolated event. Sixty-four Bay-area restaurants and fast food joints closed their doors this last winter.

That is a lot of closures.

Why?

Every eatery has a different story, but the entry December 17* provides a big clue: minimum wage hikes.

Citizens should hardly be surprised. They got what they asked for. The minimum wage went up to $13.00 per hour last July, and will go up another two bucks next year. And this was the result of a citizen initiative. “On November 4, 2014, San Francisco voters passed Proposition J, raising the minimum wage to $15.00 by 2018,” the City Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement tells us.

And the thing about minimum wage laws is that they do not — either by magic or by law — directly raise any wages. They, by law and quite directly, prohibit wage contracts below the minimum established.

Businesses then react, struggling to accommodate the newly imposed costs. Sometimes they keep all their employees and economize on other inputs, but often they must re-arrange hours and workers and whole production schemes.

If hemmed in elsewhere, they just go out of business.

Just as one should expect, according to the law of supply and demand.**

Citizens might wish to reconsider. That is, initiate a measure to repeal a previously successful initiative . . . that gave us this unsuccessful policy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The entry reads thusly: “OAKLAND — alaMar Kitchen and Bar as you know it is shuttering on December 17, but will reopen in the new year with a fast casual format. The owner points to minimum wage raises and the cost of doing business in the Bay Area as the reasons cited for the closure/change.”

** It is often said that businesses just “raise prices” and “pass along the costs” to consumers in general, but, for reasons of supply and demand, they cannot do this without decreasing sales and thus revenue.

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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Weiner’s Place in History

Anthony Weiner, sexting, twitter, folly, sex, scandal, Clinton, election, Huma Abedin

As if to finalize the Great Derailment of 2016, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner pleaded guilty in federal court to felony sexting: transferring obscene materials to a 15-year-old girl.

Prosecutors are asking he serve 21 to 27 months in federal prison, register as a sex offender and continue mental health therapy.

Also Friday, Huma Abedin, Weiner’s long-suffering wife, quietly filed an “Anonymous v. Anonymous” petition for divorce.

Though, apparently, not anonymously enough.

Personal train-wreck? Sure. But as I wrote yesterday at Townhall, because it so deeply affected last year’s presidential contest, the wreck is also very public.

Back in 2011, Anthony Weiner made Andrew Breitbart a hero, propelling Breitbart.com into the limelight. Weiner had tweeted a picture of his underwear-clad crotch to a woman . . . who was not his wife. Though quickly deleted from his Twitter account, a screenshot was shared with Breitbart, who ran with the story.

Weiner claimed a hack, challenging Breitbart’s credibility. This spurred Andrew Breitbart to commandeer a news conference called by Weiner — with more evidence to share. Soon, Rep. Weiner admitted his bad behavior and officially resigned his congressional seat.

Fast-forward to 2016, with wife Huma Abedin busy helping Hillary Clinton run for president. Weiner again becomes the subject of a sexting scandal — this time with an underage North Carolina girl. The FBI investigates, seizes Weiner’s laptop and discovers emails on it from Hillary Clinton to his wife, Huma. Then-FBI Director James Comey reopened his investigation of Hillary’s emails just ten days before Election Day.

Upshot? Trump is the 45th U.S. President, with Breitbart.com Editor Steve Bannon as key advisor.

Thanks to Weiner.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo of “Anthony Weiner cut-out by the port-a-potties” by Katjusa Cisar on Flickr

 

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Accountability folly general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies

An Inconvenient Empire

realpolitik, human rights, dictators, chess, empire, John McCain, Rex Tillerson, Glenn Greenwald, Trump

“Don’t look to the United States for hope. Our values make us sympathetic to your plight, and, when it’s convenient, we might officially express that sympathy. But we make policy to serve our interests, which are not related to our values. So, if you happen to be in the way of our forging relationships with your oppressors that could serve our security and economic interests . . . You’re on your own.”

That’s Senator John McCain’s New York Times op-ed mockery of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who recently told State Department employees that conditioning our foreign policy “on someone adopting our values . . . creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”

In his op-ed, entitled “Why We Must Support Human Rights,” McCain recounted the hope it gave him to know America would not abandon him as a prisoner of war during Vietnam. But, of course, Tillerson wasn’t suggesting the U.S. abandon POWs.  

McCain highlighted dissidents throughout the world, urging the U.S. to speak out for them, to provide “hope . . . a powerful defense against oppression.”

No fan of President Trump*, the senator is playing up the praise Trump has awkwardly offered despots, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Chinese leaders behind the Tiananmen Square massacre and recently North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Still, recent successes in freeing Americans and others from the grasp of tyrants in Egypt, Iran and China suggest some degree of caring by Tillerson, Trump and Co.

The inconvenient truth? American foreign policy has long pursued certain political and economic interests at the expense of extolling human rights. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept: “The list of U.S.-supported tyrants is too long to count. . . .”

Hypocrisy alone won’t change that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Very early in the presidential campaign, Trump needled the senator and reacted to McCain being called a war hero, by echoing a four-lettered Chris Rock routine: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, okay. I hate to tell you.”

In 1967, McCain was shot down over Hanoi, North Vietnam, on his 23rd bombing mission of the war. He broke both arms and one leg and nearly drowned after parachuting into a lake. Denied medical treatment by the North Vietnamese, McCain spent the next five and a half years as a POW, some of it at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison, where he was tortured.

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Accountability folly moral hazard national politics & policies

Hotel Afghanistan

Afghanistan, soldiers, treaty, war, politics, peace

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Is Afghanistan becoming the Hotel California?

Back in 2014, Obama declared victory — well, he called it “over.” We even informed our enemies ahead of time that we were leaving, to show good manners.

But as wars are known to do, it keeps not stopping. That is, bullets whiz by and bombs explode . . . and our American military hasn’t left. 

Obama feared that if we pulled out completely from the longest war in our history, the Afghan government would soon collapse and the Taliban would rush back to power. Last year the Taliban controlled more of the country than at anytime since 2001, when we first . . . “won.”

Now President Trump, the purported isolationist, stares at a report from military commanders on what to do. Their answer, according to the Washington Post, is to send “at least 3,000” more soldiers to Afghanistan, in addition to the 8,500 currently stationed there. And to allow US troops to engage in greater combat.

“The plan would also increase spending on Afghanistan’s troubled government,” the Post reported. But more money won’t un-corrupt the system.

Afghanistan expert Andrew Wilder with the U.S. Institute of Peace predicts that, “the U.S. is going to send more troops, but it’s not to achieve a forever military victory. Rather, it’s to try to bring about a negotiated end to this conflict.”

Will American soldiers be laying down their lives merely to better the odds for negotiating an improbable “good deal” with the Taliban?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly general freedom moral hazard porkbarrel politics property rights responsibility tax policy too much government

No Rich No More

Connecticut, taxes, revenue, budget, tax and spend, wealth, common sense

Connecticut has a budget problem. There’s not enough money to spend.

WTNH-TV in New Haven paraphrased the situation along with the response of Connecticut’s very progressive governor: “Income tax revenue collapses; Malloy says taxing the rich doesn’t work.”

The news story explains, “Connecticut’s state budget woes are compounding with collections from the state income tax collapsing, despite two high-end tax hikes in the past six years.”

Hmmm. Despite the tax increases? Or . . . “because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents,” as the report continued, “and wealthy residents are leaving . . .”

A Yankee Institute report notes that “the exodus of wealth from the state as top earners and businesses relocate to more tax-friendly states” is a major problem. Institute President Carol Platt Liebau calls it a “terrible cycle of tax increases followed by deficits followed by even more tax increases.”

Yet, state legislative Democrats are back pushing more tax hikes on “the rich.” Senate legislation would jack up the tax rate — retroactively — on those with income of $500,000 or more. House legislation would slap a 19 percent surcharge on some hedge fund earnings. In response, the head of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association testified that his “industry is populated by exactly that type of person that will move based on tax policy.”*

A song by Ten Years After comes to mind:  

Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

Doesn’t sound like a good idea even in song.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It’s worth noting that Gov. Malloy is now “against raising taxes again to fill the deficits and is instead focusing on spending cuts . . .”

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