Category: folly

Categories
folly national politics & policies

Digital Divide 2.0

Remember the worrying over “the digital divide”?

During the “concern’s” heyday, I was more than a tad skeptical, as were many others. There’s only so much hand-wringing that a balanced, working person can stand.Newton Message Pad, by Apple

Now we learn that all the yammering “inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.” I’m not aware of any government programs to accomplish this, but then I don’t follow the handouts economy as closely as I could. But I do know that some charities got involved, putting computers into rural libraries and computer centers, for instance. (The Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation did a lot of this, years ago. Funny, though: I notice they didn’t supply any Macintosh computers.) And recylcing centers and garage sales made used computers — often hampered only by slightly out-of-date tech — available for pennies on the dollar.

If you want a computer in America, you can find one.

The New York Times tells us about an “unintended side effect” of all this computing power in the hands of the poor. The miserable masses, yearning to breathe free, are misusing the technology!

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This is called a “growing time-wasting gap.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum neatly mocked this: “Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure?”

Maybe it’s time to stop taking politicians — and the “experts” who plead with politicians (to gain access to tax monies) — seriously.

Seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling folly

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Schools

Sticks and stones break bones, but words hurt more subtly. Old-school advice was that, growing up, one had to grin and bear it, let a few of our psychological wounds scab over, and get on with life.

But that is not “new school” wisdom. Nowadays, moved by a perhaps overweening sense of kindness (or politicized fear) educators tend to prohibit certain words, the better to protect some folks from taking offense.

The New York Post reports that, in a “bizarre case of political correctness run wild,” the people in charge of public schools have

banned references to “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” “Halloween” and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests.

That’s because they fear such topics “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.”

Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays aren’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism.

Even “dancing’’ is taboo, because some sects object. But the city did make an exception for ballet.

The “educrats” say such exclusions are nothing new, and I believe them. They’re inevitable when you have a government-run school system that “services” a wide diversity of “clients.” The only real solution is to stop having the government run the schools. If you must support education with tax money, give vouchers to poor people. That would let a diversity of tutors and schools compete for parents’ and students’ attention . . . perhaps sometimes by catering to fears of dinosaurs, Halloween and dancing.

Odd, though, in one sense: If you really want not to “evoke unpleasant emotions in the students,” you could stop making them take tests. For most kids, tests are the most unsettling, truly horrifying aspect of schooling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly links too much government

Townhall: Dim Bulbs in Congress

My Townhall column this weekend is “Another Forced-Innovation Fiasco,” which shows that another congressional cost-cutting measure has gone up in smoke. Here are some relevant links to that article:

Oh, and folks: Common Sense publishes every weekday, and, if you sign up for it at right, you can get it in your email box. Why not?
Categories
Accountability folly national politics & policies

Getting It Wrong at the Fed

The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank, and its managers are political appointees. But transparency — an essential feature of the republican form of government — is something that doesn’t quite describe the information we (and our representatives) get about that institution.

“Opacity” is probably the best word to describe former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s speeches to Congress — deciphering his testimony was often more difficult than a line-by-line interpretation of a Sorbonne phenomenologist.

And full transcripts of the Open Market Committee reports go public only after a long lag. Only last week did 2006’s Federal Reserve insider badinage escape the confines of secrecy, and boy, what a pathetic situation was revealed.

Remember, in 2006 the mortgage boom was reaching its peak, and its excesses were obvious. Federal Reserve insiders made jokes about it, yet “gave little credence to the possibility that the faltering housing market would weigh on the broader economy,” as Binyamin Appelbaum noted in the Wall Street Journal. Geithner went so far as to say that the market’s “fundamentals” looked good, and that outgoing chairman Greenspan’s “greatness . . . was not fully appreciated,” which Appelbaum cautions is “an opinion now held by a much smaller number of people.”

This weekend at Townhall.com, I wrote that Rep. Ron Paul was surely right to focus on the Federal Reserve all these years. He bucked the tide and proved himself prescient, just as the folks within the Fed, engaging in groupthink and chummy insider-to-insider praise, proved themselves quite clueless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly video

How to increase your debt limit

The debt limit is in the news again, so this satire, from a few months back, remains timely:

Categories
folly free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies

A $13 Billion Reward

The Federal Reserve, our central bank, hit the news big last week.

Beginning in August 2007 and continuing for the next two and a half years, the Fed lent the world’s biggest banks something like $7.77 trillion dollars at the barely perceptible interest rate of 0.01 percent. With that money, the banks bought Treasury bonds (federal debt) and made $13 billion in profit.

I reported on this multi-trillion-dollar loan figure in December 2008, a few weeks after the biggest day ever of Fed bailout fever. For some reason this information didn’t become widespread or understood until this December, when Judge Andrew Napolitano and Jon Stewart made a big deal of it on their respective TV shows, after Bloomberg reported the profits banks made off all that bailout money.

What does this figure represent? To me, it represents the outrageous amount of magic money a sick and corrupt fiat-dollar/bailout-based system of moral hazard requires when it implodes.

I think we can all justifiably roll our eyes, now, when some rah-rah boy for big government tells us how absolutely necessary it is to have a central bank. The old gold standard never fell apart this badly. The gold requirement itself placed a huge check on out-of-control banking.

But a $13 billion reward for the biggest financial mess in world history? That’s the very opposite of a check or balance on risk-taking, greed, or downright stupidity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly

Taxing Christmas and Common Sense

Joke writers received an early Christmas present this week when the Obama Administration announced plans to levy a tax on Christmas. Actually, the tax was not on Christmas, precisely, but on Christmas trees.

And not on all Christmas trees, just on real, “cut” Christmas trees as opposed to the artificial variety. Seems people prefer artificial trees. Sales of “fresh” trees have fallen significantly in recent years, while artificial tree sales nearly doubled from 2003 to 2007.

So, the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a 15-cent-per-tree tax on “producers and importers” of 500 trees or more. The money would go into an advertising campaign to promote freshly-cut real trees over artificial ones.

But is it even a tax?

“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees,” declared White House spokesman Matt Lehrich. “What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign . . .”

But Jim Harper of the Cato Institute asked and answered the essential question: “Do Christmas tree farmers go to jail if they refuse to pay? Yes. It’s a tax.”

Once joke writers and commentators and real people (as opposed to the artificial variety) got wind of it, the tax/non-tax was scuttled with an announcement that “USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”

Don’t bother. As Robert Childress of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association posits, “I feel that marketing for my products is my responsibility . . .”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly

Pension Reforms Un-Ravel?

Jerry Brown has done some good work as California’s governor. When he promised to take on the common practice of pension double-dipping, he spotted a problem and appeared to be on the right track.

But if you want to hire well-connected, experienced and (therefore, or presumably, competent) civil servants to help you in your crusade to save your state, what do you do?

Why, you hire retired civil servants. They each get their salaries — plus their pensions.

There may be something faulty in the above rationale. But that’s what happened.

Shane Goldmacher and Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times showed just how big this problem is, in a current exposé. They lead with the facts in the case of Ann Ravel, who “gets a paycheck from her salary as chairwoman of California’s ethics watchdog agency and a second, bigger check from her public pension as a retiree.” She makes a good living, since the two sources of income “total more than $305,000 a year.”

This is not a good policy. Marcia Fritz, president of California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, says such double dipping “violates the whole premise of having a retirement program.”

I see her point.

Still, it wouldn’t be an issue if pensioners received retirement payments not in amounts promised by politicians and guaranteed by taxpayers, but instead coming from actual investments — defined contributions, not defined benefits — in something like each one’s individual 401(k).

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly media and media people

A Brief Against Weiner

Congressman Anthony Weiner: Insert joke here.

Perhaps because I pronounced his name as “whiner” rather than “wiener,” I didn’t titter as much as the rest of America did upon the Twitter release of his notorious underpants photo.

Weiner stonewalled for as long as he could. Was the photo in question of his own dear, downstairs corporality? He couldn’t “say with certitude.”

Yesterday’s overdue confession that he’d fouled up a direct message on Twitter, sending it publicly, instead — and then lied about it — confirmed nearly everybody’s suspicions. (Everyone it seems except too many slanted lame-stream media folks, who instead attacked the now magnificently vindicated Andrew Breitbart.) Weiner admits to having sent inappropriate messages and photos to attractive, younger women.

But, alas, Weiner’s mea culpa was accompanied by his insistence that he would not resign.

For lying about his accounts being “hacked” — and thus cry-wolfishly raising national security issues — and for proving himself an utter idiot at a simple messaging system, he should. That is, he should resign for falsely reporting a crime (and it is a crime to hack someone else’s online accounts), and for utter, bumbling incompetence.

Demonstrating humiliating incompetence at Twitter should remain a prerogative of private citizens, not politicians.

And it’s not as if he couldn’t land on his, er, feet. He could join one of the newer news comment shows, become Eliot Spitzer’s new partner on, perhaps, Weiner/Spitzer.

It has a ring to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets

Expensive Cheap Energy

What is “green” energy?

There are two types. First, there’s photosynthesis.

Green plants sustain themselves through photosynthesis, creating energy for their own growth from the light of the sun. We harvest that energy pretty efficiently, with a reaper after most of the hard work has already been done. The sun is a great partner in this cost-effective form of “green” energy, as are carbon dioxide, water, soil minerals and harvesting equipment.

Then you’ve got your feel-good, ideologically motivated “green” energy, which needn’t be cost-effective at all! No matter how expensive creating this energy might actually be, the only thing that counts is whether participants in the process can declare that they are “saving the environment.” What difference, then, does it make whether far more money, and energy, is lost than gained thereby?

Such seems to be the notion behind the University of North Texas’s decision to install 36 “elliptical” exercise machines to turn the school into what the manufacturer, ReRev, calls “the largest human power plant in the world.”

The machines reportedly cost the school $20,000 and presumably required energy to build, pack, ship. But the machines also convert energy exerted during exercise to electricity at the rate of one kilowatt-hour every two days. A kilowatt-hour costs on average about ten cents in the North Texas area. So the cycling produces less than a penny of energy per hour.

But hey, at least it’s a workout.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.