Category: folly

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Accountability folly general freedom government transparency moral hazard too much government

Buying Quality of Life

Indiana, pork, Mike Pence, Regional Cities initiative, Common Sense, illustration

People who spend other people’s money in Indiana are applauding their amazing ability to write big checks and hand them out.

The Regional Cities initiative — enacted by the Republican legislature and heralded by the Republican governor — just awarded grants of $42 million of taxpayer dough to three of seven county consortia in the Hoosier State.

“This is big. This is a big deal in Indiana,” Gov. Mike Pence told reporters, “and I believe it’s part of a third century strategy for growth that will pay dividends for generations.”

Really? Government redistribution will fuel “growth” … and “pay dividends”?

The more-​spending “strategy” is “geared toward quality of life projects ranging from economic development and job creation, to improved recreational and arts opportunities,” according to WNDU-​TV in South Bend, adding that, “The Regional Cities Initiative is aimed at the younger generation and giving those people more reasons to love — than leave the state.”

Love it or leave it, eh?

“The public has been told that we have some sort of $42-​million jackpot to spend on wonderful things,” explains Fort Wayne City Councilman Jason Arp in his Indiana Policy Review. “What hasn’t been made clear is that with the award comes [an] obligation not only to match that $42 million with taxpayer and private money but a separate eight-​year commitment to a portfolio of $1.4 billion in projects.…”

In other words, it’s a classic government-​spends-​our-​money-​better-​than-​we-​can program.

The Regional Development Authority will, in the end, “have discouraged actual entrepreneurship, innovation and free enterprise,” Arp explains. In their place? A “sort of unaccountable directorate.”

Growing ever bigger to better spend our hard-​earned dough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers responsibility tax policy too much government

Berating Bernie?

Bernie Sanders, Glass Steagall, ratings, agency, Common Sense, illustration, Paul Jacob, James Gill

Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls. He may even beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus and primary contests for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A cause for celebration! Witnessing a huge hunk of Americans accept Mrs. Clinton, the consummate and corrupt insider, is too disheartening.

Bernie Sanders, for all his faults, is at least not an insider like Hillary.

And even when he’s obviously wrong, he’s a breath of fresh atmosphere. Take his recent call for turning the credit ratings institutions into non-​profits, or into government-​run bureaus. It’s good to hear someone on the left blame something other than the partial repeal of Glass-​Steagall as the cause of the Crash of 2008, and (thus?) of the current “Great Recession.” Glass-​Steagall was utterly irrelevant to the institutions that were hit hardest in 2008’s collapse; it has, nevertheless, served as leftists’ idée fixe for years now. Embarrassing.

The ratings agencies, on the other hand, did play a part in the crash.

Still, remember: their prominence and importance (and very existence) in financial sectors rests entirely upon one provision of FDR’s New Deal.

More importantly, Bernie’s favored solution — government bureaus — is no solution at all. Europe’s ratings system failed in 2008, too, as Mark A. Calabria has noted, and “it was the international financial regulators, not the rating agencies, who decided that Greek debt was ‘risk-​free.’”

Earth to Bernie: government regulatory failure is normal.

Calabria agrees that we need to have a political conversation about the ratings agencies, but insists it be “based on facts,” not ideology.

I’m all for the facts, but ideologies are inevitable. And ideologies promoting Big Government inevitably fail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Bernie’s Bogus “Medicare for All”

Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders, healthcare, analysis, bogus, Common Sense, illustration

Bernie Sanders promises universal health care, but, up until the other day, just waved his hands in the air, without specifics. Now he has a plan.

Sort of.

Ezra Klein, writing at Vox, says Sanders’s “Medicare for All” is not a plan at all. It’s a “gesture towards a future plan.”

But that doesn’t mean that the thing isn’t “well sold.”

After praising the Obamacare/​Affordable Health Care Act for giving “health insurance” to more than 17 million people, the preamble of Sanders’s proposal made its most predictable statement: “Twenty-​nine million Americans today still do not have health insurance and millions more are underinsured and cannot afford the high copayments and deductibles charged by private health insurance companies that put profits before people.”

Forget that deductibles are integral to the very idea of insurance. Forget that profits are absolutely necessary for the success of an industry. Forget that profits come from serving people.

Remember, instead, the leftist clichés.

Sanders’s plan, such as it is, is a lie — or, in Klein’s phrasing, “has nothing to do with Medicare.” Sanders aims to get rid of deductibles and copays, on which Medicare depends. It’s what makes Medicare distinct from, say, socialized medicine.

Insurance covers individually unforeseeable but actuarially manageable risks. Socialized medicine gets rid of the idea of “payment for service” on every level — and thus the very idea of insurance — and turns the whole thing over into a tax-​and-​spend program, i.e., what Sanders really wants.

That won’t be cheap, as Megan McArdle demonstrated some time back during the Vermont “single payer” kerfuffle.

The only option for increasing value while lowering prices? Go the opposite direction from socialism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Shameless: The Next Generation

Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton, President, Bernie Sanders, Health Care, mud, Common Sense, attack

On Tuesday, former (and perhaps soon to be again) First Daughter Chelsea Clinton attacked Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her mother’s chief rival in the presidential primaries.

“Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea charged, telling an Iowa audience that he “would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

The Sanders campaign quickly fired back that the young Clinton was “wrong” and disingenuously ignoring the fact that Sanders would bestow government-​paid healthcare coverage on every American. For free! (Unless you happen to pay taxes, that is. Then, it’d be very expensive.)

“It wasn’t an honest attack,” declared Democratic strategist David Axelrod on CNN.

But on ABC, Hillary defended her daughter, doubling-​down by arguing, “that’s exactly what he’s proposed. To take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together.”

Strange, in 2008, when Hillary was promoting a single-​payer system and Barack Obama took issue, Mrs. Clinton decried “tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” asking, “Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal healthcare?”

“This is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged,” the 2008 Hillary declared. “So shame on you, Barack Obama!”

Now it’s Hillary Clinton who knows no shame.

“More striking perhaps,” lamented Mark Halperin, a senior political analyst for MSNBC and Bloomberg News, “was a lack of interest that most of the news world had to [Chelsea’s] remarks.”

Maybe when Clintons “dismantle” the truth, it just isn’t news anymore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Nazi by Association

Koch brothers, Nazi, New York Times, shame, Common Sense, illustration

Do haters of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire philanthropists, know no bounds of decency?

Monday’s New York Times squib, “Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says,” is a grand case in point. The article is basically pre-​release gossip about a book that hasn’t been published yet: Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, a New Yorker writer. The author focuses on the Kochs and other rich folks who, the article says, served as “the hidden and self-​interested hands behind the rise and growth of the modern conservative movement.”

As usual with “progressive” minds, she just assumes that all the billionaires and foundations who have supported her causes over the years cannot also (or: better) be described as “self-​interested.”

Her main charge, that the Koch brothers’ father had helped build “the third largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine,” is nothing more than guilt by association. As Dave Robertson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Koch Industries, notes in his official response, the plant in question was built before Hitler had proven himself a tyrant. It’s ridiculous to insinuate that the business deal demonstrates that a family of limited government proponents were somehow in favor of the big government tyrant, Adolf Hitler.

Calumny!

But once made, we may return volley.

Partisans often accuse their enemies of their own worst faults. I’m sure Ms. Mayer is not a Nazi, as such, but her economic ideas are a lot closer to the actual policies of the National Socialist Party than are the Kochs’.

Hence her need to smear first.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Doom in Oil Boom?

Oil, cheap, energy, climate change, global warming, prices, illustration, Common Sense

Tragedy has hit the environmental movement: The price of oil is going down.

And may go down further.

While environmentalists quiver, science writer Ronald Bailey chortles. “Resource depletionists” — the prophets of “peak oil” — should, he says, hide their heads in shame! They’ve been so very, very wrong in the prophecy biz.

As oil descends towards $20 per barrel, we should ask ourselves: where’s the tragedy? Well, it will postpone the switch to non-​fossil fuels. The need is far from obvious, and the incentive is to use energy in its cheapest, most efficient forms.

But if increased CO2 in the atmosphere is destabilizing the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystem, cheaper oil (and thus more burning of it) might lead to the much-​ballyhooed tragedy for all.

Still, that’s a big “if” — the more we learn about the climate, the more doubtful the identified CO2 causation and attendant doom.

Besides, global warming catastrophism’s implicit message — the “need” for global political control over everybody and everything to “manage” climate changes — seems awfully convenient for those who just love intrusive government … on “principle.”

It echoes the Keynesian technocratic conceit in economics — that experts should manage the economy by fiscal methods (increasing debt) and monetary intervention (central bank interest rate manipulation and bad asset purchase). It’s pretty obvious that they shouldn’t, because they’ve demonstrated they can’t.

As prices for oil defy “peak oil” prophets’ predictions, it becomes obvious: the world works differently than dreamed up by the prophets of doom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Oil, cheap, energy, climate change, global warming, prices, illustration, Common Sense