Category: general freedom

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

Greater Eloquence

Last week, two major speeches caught our attention.

Barack Obama wagged his finger at the Supreme Court and orated in front of Congress. He said the state of the union is sound.

Apple’s Steve Jobs gave the other big speech, presenting the new iPad, a portable device that accesses the Web, allows users niftily to buy and read e-books, and much more.

Which speech will usher in real change?

Both have their critics. Many people no longer trust Obama, whether he’s pushing more government or a freeze. And many folks second-guess Apple’s newest project, despite Jobs’s spectacular success record.

For my part, I don’t buy Obama’s agenda. But I probably won’t buy an iPad, either. I tend to regard even the best new tech breakthroughs as just more vacuum cleaners. They really do suck . . . one’s time, anyway.

But to succeed, Apple doesn’t need my excitement. Just enough from others.

Early in each of Apple’s revolutions, it was hard to prophesy success, with certainty.

The neat thing about a possible neo-Gutenberg Age of tablets, e-books and virtual libraries is that I will still be able to read a normal book. One the other hand, if Obama gets his way, his policies will, willy nilly, crowd out better ones.

Still, it’s heartening to realize that to most of us the eloquence of a revolutionary thing means more, now, than the eloquence of any politician.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

How Not to Help Haiti

Haiti has suffered horrific devastation. It didn’t have to.

There was no way to prevent the 7.0 earthquake itself. But estimates of as many as 200,000 dead? That didn’t have to happen.

Economist Donald Boudreaux recalls that in 1989, an equally powerful quake hit the San Francisco Bay area. It caused lots of trouble but killed fewer than 70 people. But Haiti is a much poorer country than the U.S., with weaker buildings and roads, for starters.

Why so poor?

Haiti is not a free society. It’s had one corrupt tyrant after another, recently emerged from the terrorizing rule of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was sent packing in 2004.

Many pundits are saying that the way to strengthen Haitian society over the long haul is torrents of foreign aid. Economist Jeffrey Sachs wants Washington to spend billions on a five-year development plan, which he says it should fund by taxing Wall Street bonuses.

Charity and rescue efforts are wonderful. Government-to-government foreign aid, not so much. Haiti has remained desperately poor despite the massive flow of foreign aid, which, over the years, has mainly subsidized corruption. What Haiti needs is stability. The ability to attract investment. Less propping up of corrupt politicians. Less foreign aid, more freedom.

But a free society is something Haitians will have to build themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government U.S. Constitution

Know Your Rights

For years, politicians and activists have declared that we have a right to medical care. Not a right to freely contract for medical services, mind you, but a fundamental right to medical care.

This assertion serves as the moral force behind those pushing for nationalized, universal health care legislation. But can medical care really be a basic right?

Well, it’s nowhere to be found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Should it be?

Again, no.

Rights cannot involve requiring others to provide a product or service to us. We can’t simply demand, with talk of rights, the expertise and labor of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. Why? Because they possess the same rights we possess, in particular, the right not to be enslaved.

Watching the 2,000-page health care bill plod through the congressional sausage factory, the fraudulent nature of this “right to medical care” claim becomes painfully obvious. We’re not getting a new right from the deal. Instead, politicians are slapping us with a new mandate, forcing us to fork over our hard-earned money to health insurance companies.

If our right to freedom of speech worked this way, the First Amendment would mandate that we buy a local newspaper and sign up for cable TV or XM Radio. The Second Amendment would force us to own a gun and pay dues to the NRA.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom too much government

Googling and Snuggling No More?

After years of abetting Chinese censorship, Google may finally take a stand. The world leader in Internet search may no longer be willing to help impose the Red regime’s repressive measures. The last straw? A cyber attack on Google that originated in China and targeted email accounts of Chinese dissidents. Other companies were also attacked.

In recent decades, China has loosened controls on its economy. But it is loath to permit any significant scraps of civil liberty as well, like the right to speak out freely in criticism of the government.

China lets the Internet function within its borders. But it also erects firewalls, filters and other restrictions to block or limit access to various corners of cyberspace. For years, Google has cravenly played along, preventing phrases like “Tiananmen Square massacre” from being searched on the Chinese version of its search engine.

Google officers have long squirmed over their hypocritical willingness to “do evil.” Now a Google lawyer says the company is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results. . . .” They’re taking a few weeks to mull their next move. But they say they’ll leave China altogether if its government won’t agree to let Google’s search engine function freely.

China’s rulers won’t agree; so I hope Google does what it says it will do. Some things one should just not collaborate with. Tyranny is at the top of the list.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

The War on Terror Lumbers On

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up himself and 277 other people on Flight 253 to Detroit Christmas Day. Fellow passengers subdued and disarmed him.

Lessons? Start with the obvious: There are still terrorists in other countries who want to hurt us.

Some will say that we must beef up security. But consider: America’s security state, which has been in alleged high gear (or some bright color) since 2001, has already been beefed up. And yet, once again, this security broke down.

It could be that preventing violence is just not that easy to do. If you have determined enemies who spring up in unexpected quarters, it’s really hard for government to stop them.

Herbert Spencer, a 19th century sociologist, explained it this way: “The law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.”

We cannot expect government to always foresee dangers. We cannot even rely on government to transmit warnings of a specific terrorist from one department to another, and do something about it.

I’m not saying we should expect nothing of government. Just don’t expect too much.

All hope is not lost, however. We have each other. From the heroism of

Flight 93 on 9.11 to this Christmas Day incident, passengers have shown they’re not powerless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

China’s Not-so-Great Wall

The Chinese government has been tightening its cyber-noose. Its officials fear  the ideas that can proliferate so easily on the Internet. So they’re making it ever harder for citizens to use the Net — even to visit nonpolitical websites.

Multiple-choice question: The new restrictions mean that Web surfers will have a harder time a) viewing pornography; b) watching streaming TV shows; c) starting an Internet-based business or personal web site; d) criticizing the Chinese government; or e) all of the above?

The answer is “all of the above.”

This year, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many other sites. The latest round of restrictions has resulted in the shutdown of some 700 homegrown sites. Chinese dictocrats talk about combating pornography or piracy to justify restrictions that have a much wider scope. But they also freely admit their eagerness to block the flow of ideas they call “bad,” which is to say, inconvenient to themselves. China’s public security minister complains that the Internet “has become an important avenue” for “anti-China” forces.

Beijing can’t stamp out the Internet altogether. But it can certainly keep cooking up new ways to boil it down to an easier-to-control (or comprehend) size.

Chinese citizens who are determined to keep resisting the tyrants need more and better technology to circumvent the firewalls, and to protect their own anonymity and privacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom

A Deadly Law

Suppose I donated bone marrow to help save someone’s life . . . and you, to encourage people like me to step forward, offered college scholarships for such donations.

Most folks would applaud us. But not the federal government. It would charge us with a felony and send us to prison for up to five years.

The fear that people might sell their non-renewable organs — such as kidneys — for money, led Congress to pass The National Organ Transplant Act in 1984. The act also makes it illegal to compensate someone for donating bone marrow — which is renewable.

Thousands of Americans have rare and potentially fatal blood diseases requiring bone marrow transplants, often from a stranger. Every year thousands die because they can’t find donors.

The folks at MoreMarrowDonors.org want to recruit more donors through scholarships and financial incentives. Makes sense. But by law they can’t.

Doreen Flynn has three daughters with a blood disease. To fight their deadly disease, she is stepping forward to fight this deadly law that blocks their treatment.

Flynn and MoreMarrowDonors.org, represented by the Institute for Justice, have sued the U.S. Attorney General to overturn the ban on compensating bone marrow donors. The case is Flynn v. Holder.

Attorney Jeff Rowes put it plainly: “The bottom line is that throwing people in prison for trying to save lives isn’t just wrong; it’s unconstitutional.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Wait a Minaret!

In a national referendum, the Swiss just voted to ban the construction of any new minarets in the country.

Minarets are the onion-shaped crowned spires of Islamic mosques, from which Muslims are called to prayer five times each day.

At MarginalRevolution.com, economist Tyler Cowen’s first thought on the Swiss vote was, “Sooner or later an open referendum process will get even a very smart, well-educated country into trouble.”

Cowen doesn’t elaborate on what he means by “open.” But he does raise an important distinction between freedom and democracy.

I’m a huge fan of voter initiative and referendum, but a bigger fan of freedom of religion. Freedom for the individual must come first — no dictator has a right to deny it.

Nor does a revolutionary tribunal.

Neither does the Congress or a state legislature or city council. Or even a solid majority of voters in a referendum.

But Cowen misses something, too. The problem in Switzerland isn’t really their initiative and referendum. Legislators make mistakes, too . . . as do, of course, authoritarian regimes. We generally have far less to fear from government under such voter control.

In fact, though I deplore this vote, the ability of Swiss citizens to directly check the power of their government has helped make it one of the best places in the world to live. That is, one of the freest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Personal Liberty Allowance

In a time of expanding surveillance and shrinking liberty, the citizens of Great Britain are now threatened with yet another massive assault on their rights and dignity.

A certain Lord Smith of Finsbury wants the government to lord it over Her Majesty’s subjects even more obnoxiously by slapping them with a “personal carbon allowance.”

This carbon allowance would be enforced by giving everybody a personal ID number. Britons would have to supply the number whenever they buy anything, from gas to airline tickets, affecting their carbon output. Presumably, vendors would check a customer’s newest proposed purchase against some database. Only so many logs you could toss on the fire and then you’re out of luck, unless you buy more carbon credits.

The proposal is vicious in itself. But the potential for “abuse” of such an abusive protocol is also massive. In an age of rampant credit card fraud and identity theft, how hard would it be for a sales clerk in the proposed regime who has used up his own quota to “borrow” somebody else’s carbon-permission ID number?

If the British government wields this latest Orwellian bludgeon and the citizens don’t rebel, they’ll accept anything. We Americans may shake our heads in disbelief, but we’re hardly immune to such eco-totalitarian trends.

It can happen here. After all, Lord Smith’s proposal merely takes the obsession over carbon emissions to its logical — and absurd — conclusion.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom

Tough Medicine, Tough Luck

Don’t get sick in Union, Missouri. Not if you need Sudafed in a hurry.

Union is the second city in the nation to require a prescription for sales of medicine containing pseudoephedrine. This is an active ingredient in Sudafed, a drug that good-hearted and responsible people might take to relieve nasal congestion.

However, pseudoephedrine can also be used to make methamphetamine, a very popular and very strong (and very illegal) psychoactive drug.

The reasoning seems to be that if something used in a good thing can also be used in a bad thing, you can’t trust people to use the good thing without erecting blocks to said usage.

If applied consistently, such a regulatory principle would mean you’d have to get a prescription for 80 percent of the stuff in your home. Did you know that if you gargle with detergent, it can be injurious to your health? No wonder you need a doctor’s prescription.

Over at the Show-Me Institute’s blog, Sarah Brodsky notes that when sufferers have no good alternative to Sudafed, they must call in sick, “find time to go to the doctor’s office . . . or go to work unmedicated.” She adds that unmedicated allergy sufferers aren’t exactly at their best.

But hey. The important thing is politicians pretending to do good by making it harder for us to do good for ourselves. Right?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.