Category: general freedom

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

A Million Jobs, Gone

You’re fired! Now get a real job.

Does this sound mean? 

It’s just what Cuba’s biggest employer plans to say between now and March — fire half a million workers and tell them to find other jobs, or (better yet) go to work for themselves.

After March, another half million will be given pink slips.

Or so say the Castro Bros., who are, in effect, the chief employers in Cuba. 

Just like a despot, you might say. But hey: The country is broke, and the initial hiring of everybody by the government (which Fidel ran for scores of years, and his brother, Raul, now runs) was, itself, despotic. Thankfully, as more and more outlets of the “Cuban Communist Corp.” go under, the Cuban commissars say they will ease up on the regulations that now prohibit small, entrepreneurial businesses.

Of the many comments I’ve read about this, I was amused most by Tom Knapp’s. After drily noting that it is the Castros who will build down government, not Republicans in the U.S., he explained how the commies had kept their transportation going all these years: By maintaing old American cars from the ’40s and ’50s. Now that trade restrictions will likely be eased, those well-​kept-​up vintage cars could help “finance an explosion of economic prosperity just by tapping the U.S. classic car collectors’ market.”

Hope so.

And I hope the newly fired will transition to a slightly freer economy without too much trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom

Wonders Never Cease

James May is one of the stars of a BBC television show called Top Gear. He’s the long-​haired fellow who argues about cars with the show’s short chap and the host, a big, loud gentleman. May often serves as both the scholar and the avatar of common sense. And then, occasionally, his enthusiasm veers off into a pleasant madness.

Ah, television.

On TopGear​.com he offers a fine essay on the joys of how things just work. He needed a new brake caliper for his aging auto, ordered it, and put it right in. “Nothing remarkable about that.” And yet, he has the wit to see that “nothing remarkable” is not quite right. Actually, he goes on, “it’s a matter for extreme wonderment.”

Precision isn’t easy. And yet precision is what we have, to amazing degrees, in the cars we rely upon.

In the manner of Adam Smith — who, in 1776’s Wealth of Nations, celebrated the complexity of building something as simple as a pin — May opines, “That something as complex as a car can be owned by ordinary people is, I think, one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It can be attributed to improved standards of living,” he concludes, and is “bloody marvelous.”

Yes. We may take things like cars for granted, but they aren’t “a given.” Their very existence depends on worldwide markets and a great degree of freedom. 

Which we must also not take for granted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies

Oppressors Triumphant

Richard Falkenrath is tired of all this civil rights nonsense.

Falkenrath is a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and now works for a consulting firm run by former Homeland Security honcho Michael Chertoff. In an op-​ed for the New York Times, Falkenrath explains why a recent ban of the Blackberry by the United Arab Emirates was greeted “with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy” by “law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers” here in America.

The UAE banned the gizmo because its officials could not easily snoop on BlackBerry users. Falkenrath says the ban was justified because the BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, had “refused to modify its information architecture in a way that would enable authorities to intercept the communications of select subscribers.” Which “select subscribers”? Any subscribers the UAE government selected, of course. (RIM later cut a deal with UAE officials to restore service.)

Alas, because of legal obstacles in the U.S., “there remain a number of telecommunication methods that federal agencies cannot readily penetrate.” Falkenrath disparages the “liberal sensibilities” of those who wish to keep private communications private until a proper warrant is issued.

There’s a word for a government that can easily sidestep the rights of everyone in the name of national security: Dictatorship. Would Americans really be more “secure” if, like the United Arab Emirates, we lacked freedom of speech, freedom of association, democracy, and so forth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Full Flush of Equality

Years and years ago, it was often said against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment that it would prohibit separate toilets. Under the ERA, men and women would have to use the same public restrooms.

Properly interpreted, nothing of the kind should have happened. The text of the ERA stated that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” One does not have a right to a toilet, really, so it shouldn’t have affected restroom construction.

But leaping to absurdity is, alas, a propensity of government. In Minnesota, today, the state’s Department of Human Rights has declared that the offering of a “ladies’ night” by taverns and bars, etc, is illegal, discriminating (as it does) on the basis of sex.

Economist Robert Murphy has carefully explained why price discrimination is not bad — why it is common and why it benefits us. By setting up “ladies’ nights,” certain businesses attract female customers and (shock of all shocks) male customers, too … men actually eager to pay extra, if only to be around women.

I don’t see much point in explaining the philosophical basis for not getting carried away over the “sexual/​gender discrimination” involved in this. But it may be good that the ERA fizzled in 1982. It would have been twisted by bureaucrats in state after state, and we’d all endure uncomfortable encounters in public toilets throughout the land.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture

Facebook’s Secret Shame

Facebook has had some bad press lately.

The popular social networking site got in trouble in recent months for the ever-​more-​cavalier way it treats users’ privacy. People complain that their data has been unilaterally exposed in ways they never expected when they first signed up for the service, and that privacy settings have devolved into a confusing, hard-​to-​tweak labyrinth.

Facebook seems to be adjusting its privacy practices in response to the bad publicity. But there’s another lamentable Facebook practice that has, unfortunately, received less sustained attention: Its willingness to shut down a user’s Facebook page solely because somebody else is offended by the viewpoint expressed on that page.

The “somebody else,” in the case I’m referring to, is the government of Pakistan, which banned Facebook because of a page encouraging people to display images of the prophet Muhammad in protest of threats of violence against the show South Park, which had made fun of making threats against people who display images of Muhammad.

“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” gloated Najibullah Malik, who represents Pakistan’s Orwellian “information technology ministry.”

It’s dangerous to cave in to demands for censorship. The folks at Facebook were faced with the loss of a large market, but they should have let the anti-​censorship page remain published and let Facebook users in Pakistan pressure their government to lift the ban.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Prophet of Loss

What if Karl Marx was …  half right?

Marx’s theory of history elaborated that, with each bust of the boom-​and-​bust cycle, the rich would nab ever more property — capital — until impoverished workers united to take all that capital for “themselves” (as a collective) and run it for the common good.

That’s dialectical materialism. It didn’t predict what happened even in Communist countries. But something vaguely Marxian is going on now.

Today, when there’s a bust, government bails out the failed rich guys — even buying companies.

Further, governments keep hiring more people to “stimulate” the economy. Government workers increase as a percentage of the workforce, with higher-​than-​average wages and benefits.

This used to be called “creeping socialism.” Politicians move us closer to total government — measure by measure, tax by tax, law by law. No revolution necessary.

Except … well, as politicians put more of our eggs into the collectivist basket, each down-​swoop of the business cycle makes the whole system less stable — and (with increasing taxes and debt) more burdensome to sustain.

It could all lead to revolt — a taxpayer revolt.

Taxpayers, who’ve had to put up with a lot of nonsense over the years, aren’t even a tad bit interested in the foolishness of communism — or a corporate, fascist super-state.

That’s where Marx and his followers had it all wrong. Only the build-​up of instability seems Marxian. Americans’ response is to seek limits on government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.