Category: folly

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Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Cannabis and Kings

Jack boot, photomontage, collage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

The over-riding reason to end the War on Drugs is to re-establish the rule of law in this country.

From Nixon and Reagan to the present time, America has vastly increased the population of prison inmates, many of them for drug offenses. The “land of the free” shouldn’t boast a larger population (per capita and total) of unfree persons than any other nation on the planet.

Further, in the mania to apprehend contraband drug users, producers, and traffickers, we’ve pretty much lost Bill of Rights protections on our lives and our property.

We’ve armed nearly every conceivable division of government against us, turning local, state and federal police “services” into police state apparatuses that hound and steal from portions of our population — which turns them from citizens into fearful, resentful, servile subjects. Meanwhile, the use of civil asset forfeiture and other policing for profit schemes corrupt our police forces in a serious and fundamental and “King Georgish” way.

Sam and John Adams, Toms Jefferson and Paine — they’d all be aghast at what we have become.

But what of the growing tide to legalize/decriminalize marijuana? Reading a report by Steven Greenhut in Reason, it becomes apparent that not every step moves us towards a rule of law. Some steps in “regulating and taxing” cannabis may be more about using crony capitalism to choose winners and losers.

Let’s use some common sense from lessons learned with alcohol — er, with regulating alcohol, that is. Keep marijuana away from the kids and keep the over-regulation of marijuana away from adults.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jack boot, photomontage, collage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

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Accountability Common Sense folly general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Republican-Required Referendum

Politicians in a jar

Last November, Nevada Republicans scored a “stunning” political sweep. The party’s incumbent governor rolled up a 40-point win, while the GOP gained majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — the first time Republicans have controlled all three since before the Great Depression.

At the same time, voters crushed a ballot measure to create a 2-percent gross receipts tax on businesses taking in over $1 million, by a whopping 78–22 percent. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and GOP legislators opposed the tax.

My tax-fighting friend Chuck Muth, president of Citizen Outreach, must be happy as a clam, living the easy life.

No?

Mere months after that vote, the solidly Republican state legislature passed — you guessed it — a gross receipts tax. And with it, for good measure, all stuffed into Senate Bill 483, the Republican majority also made permanent a whole slew of taxes passed as temporary measures back in 2009.

The total tax increase — ahem, to celebrate the Republican trouncing of Democrats — turned out to be the largest in Nevada history: $1.1 billion.

I wish this story of betrayal were shocking, not par for the course. But as we all know, the lack of surprise signals the depth of the problem.

Thankfully, Silver State citizens have what Ralph Nader calls the “ace in the hole”: statewide initiative and referendum.

Two referendum measures have been filed. One would repeal the gross receipts tax. The other, filed by Muth’s “We Decide Coalition,” places the entire billion-dollar-plus tax hike onto the ballot.

“It’s time for these elected elites to stop using Nevadans as ATM machines,” Muth recently wrote.

Yes, time for Nevadans to crank up the machinery of democracy . . . starting with 55,000 signatures on petitions for each measure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Politicians in a jar

 

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Iconoclasm Spasms

Jefferson Davis

As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems . . . a tad . . . trivial.

First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.

He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.

And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861-1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.

Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”

I’m not convinced it did a thing.

And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.

Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jefferson Davis

 

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Gross Domestic Prevarication

Eternal Koch, meme, Paul Jacob, Koch Brothers, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

A sign of these sorry times for professional journalism: Time magazine runs a dishonest smear against Charles Koch, completely twisting the billionaire’s remarks at a recent meeting of major donors in Orange County, California.

“Charles Koch Says US Can Bomb Its Way to $100,000 Salaries,” screamed the headline. The sub-heading added, “Building bombs and using them is one way to growth, the billionaire suggests to allies.”

What did Mr. Koch actually tell the assembled crowd of major donors?

“I think we can have growth rates in excess of 4 percent. When I’m talking about growth rates,” explained Koch, “I’m not talking about that GDP, which counts poison gas the same as it counts penicillin. What a monstrous measure this is. If we make more bombs, the GDP goes up — particularly if we explode them.”

In other words, while Time’s headline portrayed Koch as a warmonger, the billionaire businessman wasn’t suggesting this country “Bomb Its Way” anywhere. Certainly not “to growth.” In fact, Koch was making the opposite point: true economic growth can’t come from producing or using “poison gas” or other munitions.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had found this article’s headline to be a flat-out concocted falsehood; Time soon changed the headline.

Yet, even the re-written headline was sort of a slap: “Charles Koch Mocks Common Measure of Prosperity.” Only after reading the sub-head — “Calls ‘monstrous’ the notion that GDP values bombs as much as medicine” — was it clear that Koch was making a very common sense point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eternal Koch

 

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies

Cruz “Loses”

Koch Brothers, Ted Cruz, political, politics, collage, photomontage, conspiracy, secrets, LA Times, Campaign Finance

When Sen. Ted Cruz gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, last week, he ruffled a few feathers. Calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar in front of everybody is just not done. “Elder party statesmen have not been amused,” the Los Angeles Times reports:

On Sunday, 81-year-old Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the GOP’s most senior senator, opened the chamber’s session with a reminder to colleagues of the ground rules.

“Squabbling and acrimony may be tolerated on the campaign trail,” said Hatch, who urged senators colleagues toward comity and decorum, and to keep their egos in check.

Cruz defended himself. “It is entirely consistent with decorum . . . to speak the truth.”

The “squabble” was over the Export-Import Bank, mainly. Cruz blurted out how McConnell had betrayed his own party members in the Senate by cutting a backroom deal for the crony-capitalist moral hazard that is the Ex-Im.

Regardless (or because of?) Cruz’s truth-telling, the Senate rebuffed Cruz and “voted to advance the Export-Import bank and deny the presidential hopeful a vote on his amendment.”

Crony capitalism continues.

But note an odd aside in the LA Times’s account. The paper went out of its way to identify Ex-Im as “opposed by the powerful Koch brothers but supported by a bipartisan coalition of business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

The Kochs were brought up . . . for what reason?

So vilified by the left, these days, the Kochs are a red herring . . . which the Times threw into the issue like an Erisian apple, nudging Democratic readers not to sympathize with Cruz.

We can’t have his anti-crony-capitalist stance attract Democratic readers, now, can we?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Import-Export Boogymen

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Fifteen or Fifty or Zero?

Finding the Right Balance

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell just stumbled into a truth. Raising minimum wages could be disastrous. Depending on the rate.

While “Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and a host of other well-intentioned liberals want to hike the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour,” she calls the proposal “badly misguided.”

And yet she says that the current federal wage floor, at “just $7.25 an hour . . . is absurdly low.”

Why, this Friday, she notes, marks six years since the last minimum wage hike!

Rampell recognizes that raising the minimum wage to $50/hour would cause unemployment, massively. She also realizes that, in many low-wage states, the mere $15 rate would do the same. But raising “the federal minimum wage to $10.10”? Might work! “This is a trade-off . . .”

Yes. Stop right there. Trade-offs, indeed.

She wants us to think about getting the rates right.

Employers and job-seekers do that already, in the marketplace. If businesses don’t pay enough, the workers will move on to employers who will. Force businesses to hire workers for more than their productivity? Unemployment results.

A minimum wage rate helps some and hurts others. Rampell admits that, appearing to “accept” 500,000 people losing their jobs as collateral damage to boost wages for others.

Her proposed fine-tuning of rates supposes that politicians have greater knowledge about the “proper” price of labor than employers and job-seekers. Moreover, she ignores the inevitable political game, whereby politicians take credit for rewarding some, while hiding the costs imposed on others.

Finding the “right minimum wage” rate is mainly about hiding the victims . . . so voters won’t notice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Finding the Right Balance

 

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Accountability folly national politics & policies responsibility

Failing in the Future Biz

future, predicting the future, political, politics, collage, photomontage, illustration, prophecy, fortune teller, mistake

If you can’t sell us the future, you’re doing it wrong. We all want to get there in one piece.

Right now, a horde of Republican presidential candidates and a small cohort of Democrats vie to present themselves as visionaries, leaders.

Yet, what they all have in common is that they ignore the most serious issue facing us. Bigger than borders and terror and ISIS and gay marriage and all that, is the financial stability of the United States. Our future is in peril because of the continual Washington stalemate of never-ending deficit spending and continual debt growth — total debt being around $100 trillion.

The reason for this enormity? Politicians like to promise things, lots of things, very expensive things like wars and entitlements, to win our votes. But these same promiscuous over-promisers have more than a little difficulty agreeing on the taxes that would pay for all those “things.”

Why the difficulty? Because Americans already pay plenty in taxes and very few of us non-Omaha-based non-billionaires care to fork over even more of our hard-earned pay to a wasteful leviathan.

Any respectable vision of the future must acknowledge the current predicament, and provide a way out — before it’s too late, like it may very well already be . . . for Greece.

Wanting something for nothing isn’t Greek to any of us, unfortunately. That’s why we need leaders with the honesty and courage to present a vision more real than government providing ever more goodies on credit ad infinitum.

Credit just doesn’t add up, infinitely. The more you rack up debt, the more finite your future.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Future Fail

 

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom individual achievement national politics & policies

Work Longer?

Work more

Set aside all the snake oil that sleazy, slippery-tonged solons have sought to sell us, now comes the Bush behind Door #3 to tell the teeming masses of tailing media what we need to do . . . if Americans want to grow economically as a country, and succeed individually.

We need to work more.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was just casually tossing about that four-letter word in a recent meeting with the editorial board of the Union Leader in Manchester, N.H.:

My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is four percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.

Work more? Harder? Longer?

How dare Jeb suggest that our future success, together or individually, should be dependent on us . . . of all people?

Democrats immediately pounced. A statement from the Democratic National Committee called Bush’s remark “easily one of the most out-of-touch comments we’ve heard so far this cycle.”

“Americans are working pretty hard already & don’t need to work longer hours,” tweeted John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, “they need to get paid more.”

We all “need” a lot of things. The point is we are all better off when we go out and earn what we need.

Well, that’s my point, anyway.

And, perhaps, Jeb Bush’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Work more

 

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies too much government

A British Puzzle

White labor and minimum wages

Most folks think minimum wage laws are there to help the poor in particular and everybody in general. But economist Scott Sumner, exploring “Britain’s new minimum wage: Is there a hidden agenda?” finds Britain’s new Tory double whammy of decreasing welfare payments while hiking mandatory minimum wage something of a mystery:

Why would a Conservative government sharply increase the minimum wage, in a budget that in many other respects favored small government? The minimum wage is currently 6.50 pounds/hour, and 9 pounds/hour is almost $14/hour in US terms. Also recall that average incomes in the UK are lower than in the US.

He finds a possible reason: to dissuade immigration. Migrants usually have low skills, in part because of language difficulties, so they cannot command high wages — market wages, of course, being defined by worker productivity.

Could the new minimum wage be there to influence migration without doing so directly?

Sumner goes on to discuss the racist origins of the minimum wage in America, Australia, and South Africa. The purpose was pretty clearly to hurt poor workers. Minimum wage laws were established to protect white workers from cheap competition by darker skinned folk.

Sumner’s postscript is interesting: “The [American] Democratic surge of interest in the minimum wage occurred soon after the GOP surge of interest in immigration restriction. Let’s see if the GOP jumps on the minimum wage bandwagon.”

Of course, for every advocate of a class-based, favoritist policy who argues deceptively, there are dozens who are merely mistaken.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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White labor and minimum wages

 

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Shocking Consequences

Greece Surprised, Greek, spending, crisis, debt, EU, collage, photomontage, Paul Jacob, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/, political, politics

Five years into (the latest phase of) the Greek debt crisis, a former bureaucrat who was unable to withdraw her money from an ATM when the government declared a bank holiday had this to say: “How can something like this happen without prior warning?”

It’s always a surprise — to some people — when blatant causes lead to blatant effects.

In the case of Greece, or any socialistic welfare state, it’s a surprise when the money finally runs out. So accustomed to binge behavior, enthusiasts for “what’s thine’s mine” and “spend now/pay later” politics are nonplused when there’s nobody left to temporarily rescue them from the worst wealth-destroying effects of all the productivity-destroying causes.

The woman’s question has a short-term answer and a long-term answer.

The first is: what did you expect? The point of suspending access to bank accounts without warning is to stop holders draining banks of the last of the euro cash, supply of which the Greek government cannot expand unilaterally. Warning would have made the suspension pointless.

The second answer is: what did you expect? That is, haven’t you been paying attention for the last several decades?

By the time you read these words, Greece and the European governments may have come up with another patchwork deal for a loan with another series of deadlines. Or maybe Greece will have left the EU or at least the euro and returned to a (now massively inflated) drachma. Greek account-holders may or may not get another rickety, temporary reprieve.

But what can’t go on forever, won’t.

So it won’t.

Count on it, ma’am.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Greece Surprised!