Category: general freedom

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Accountability folly general freedom too much government

How Dare You Say We Waste Our Time?

Businessmen tend to be extremely concerned about efficiency, even to the point of talking incessantly about things like “performance metrics.”

Bureaucrats? Not so much.

Indeed, the merest suggestion that a program isn’t cutting the mustard can bring on protests of outrage. John Payne, writing on The Lesson Applied, caught my attention to one such instance. Quoting from the Associated Press, he reveals the passion and “logic” of former “drug czar” John Walters:

“To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven’t made any difference is ridiculous,” Walters said. “It destroys everything we’ve done. It’s saying all the people involved in law enforcement, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time.”

Payne’s no-​nonsense response? “Yes, that is exactly what critics of the drug war are saying.”

Why did Walters take such umbrage? Could it be to intimidate us into not thinking about the evidence that drug-​war critics present? Or questioning the logic of the whole program?

And the logic is a tad shaky: Allegedly to prevent some people from ruining their lives, we ruin those lives and many, many others. 

Hundreds of thousands of people in prison. Billions in property confiscated without due process. Innocents shot in no-​knock raids — including dogs, little girls … and the police themselves from innocent Americans defending themselves from seemingly anonymous attackers in the night. 

Drug abuse can be very bad. I know. But Constitution-​abuse can be worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies

Riot Cops to a Tea

Here’s a federal budget cut: Air Force One and all other presidential travel services. The prez doesn’t need to travel. Keep the Executive Entourage in Washington, DC.

This struck home to me when I saw video of police in full riot gear, called up specifically to keep Tea Party people from gathering to greet the president at an event in Quincy, Illinois.

The cops marched around and repelled the Tea Party folk, moving them back, away from the president and his admirers. 

President Obama’s Secret Service and crowd control experts are carrying on the tradition of George W. Bush. I haven’t heard Orwellian talk of “free speech zones,” but that doesn’t mean that free speech or the mere waving about of signs is encouraged by the president.

Presidential outings and speeches are tightly controlled. They are now mere political events, designed to shore up the president’s party.

So there’s no reason, in the age of mass media, for American taxpayers to continue to pay for them. The president can speak in front of the camera, on radio and the Internet, and he can speak on the White House steps. But spending one more cent on presidential roamings to rally partisan troops just isn’t very American. Not if all sides aren’t allowed to participate.

What was unacceptable under Bush remains unacceptable under Obama. But I doubt if we’ll hear many on the left protest this marginalization of dissent.

Wrong crowd, I guess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall Tenth Amendment federalism

Wayward States?

While Washington, DC, steps in to take over responsibility for determining just how much and what kind of medical insurance we should buy, the states march, instead, towards personal responsibility, defending a right to self-medication. 

More than a dozen states have enacted medical marijuana laws, in defiance of Congress and Executive Branch nannies. 

Now, California’s initiative to legalize recreational use of marijuana, or cannabis, has garnered enough signatures to qualify for November’s ballot. Oregon has a measure in the works, too, as do other, less bellwether-​worthy states. You can follow the story as it develops on Ballotpedia​.org.

California, the state most addicted to politicians (having the highest citizen-​to-​representative ratio in the union) also has one of the union’s most severely messed-​up budgets. Barring cuts, the state needs money. Legalizing and taxing Americans’ favorite weed might help out, some advocates think. No wonder the initiative is popularly known as the “Tax Cannabis Act.” 

We’ve heard this story before. The Great Depression allowed the repeal of the 18th Amendment. The Progressive Era’s crowning achievement in social control, the prohibition of alcohol, was seen by the world as weird, and by those who admired the original Constitution of the United States as rubbing against the grain of American liberty.

But it wasn’t freedom advocates who ended Prohibition. It was the separate states seeking revenue from selling booze.

Ah, politics. Nasty when going wrong. Messy when going right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Prisoners of Conscience

The crusade against political dissent under Venezuelan socialism rages on. The latest victim of President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is former presidential candidate Oswaldo Ålvarez Paz. In March, Paz contended that Venezuelan officials had ties with drug traffickers and terrorists. For articulating this conclusion he is charged with “conspiracy” and “spreading false information.”

The president of the Human Rights Foundation, Thor Halvorssen, notes: “Ålvarez Paz said Venezuela was ruled by a ‘totalitarian regime.’ The Chávez government disagreed so strongly with this that they proved him right by arresting him and keeping him imprisoned.”

Guillermo Zuloaga, who owns the independent television network Globovisión, on which Paz uttered his opinion, was also arrested recently for saying things “offensive” to Chávez. 

Touchy, touchy, El Presidente.

“If the Venezuelan government can imprison a former presidential candidate and the head of the country’s only independent TV network because their opinions ‘offended’ the president,” asks Javier El-​Hage, HRF’s general counsel, “then what options are left for a college student who wants to protest against the government, or an independent journalist wanting to write a critical investigation?”

The Human Rights Foundation is one of many organizations rebuking Chávez’s conduct and calling for the release of persons arrested for what has been called the “crime of opinion.” They will have earned a large share of the credit if Chávez is ever forced to change course — or Venezuela manages to change course by getting rid of Chávez. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom

Searching for Google’s China Policy

Google took flak a few years ago when it announced that it would cooperate with Chinese censorship to operate a Chinese version of the Google search engine. The company’s top brass wrung their hands about the decision, since it seemed to clash with Google’s official “do no evil” policy.

In January, Google and other large companies suffered a major cyber attack apparently originating in China. In Google’s case, the target of the assault was the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Further investigation in the weeks since then has tended to confirm that the Chinese government sponsored the attack.

In response to the attack and further assaults on freedom of Internet speech in China, Google said that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” its search results. It said that it would shut down Google​.cn if the government would not let it provide unfiltered results.

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb reports that Google​.cn is still censoring its search results. The Chinese government isn’t about to cave. 

So why hasn’t Google left China?

Sure, it would be disruptive. People would lose their jobs. But in January’s   statement, Google seemed to be taking a belated but praiseworthy stand on principle. They should follow through. If there’s anything worse than doing evil, it’s publicly repenting it and then continuing to do evil as if nothing had happened.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

1984 in 2010

Students in a Pennsylvania school district are learning more about George Orwell’s novel 1984 than they had expected.

No, they’re not being subjected to “a boot stamping on a human face, forever” — the bottom line of Orwell’s bleak techno-​totalitarian dystopia — but they sure have gotten an unexpected taste of the telescreen in every room.

The Lower Merion School District says it intended no such thing when it handed out webcam-​equipped laptops to 1,800 students. It says that the only purpose of its ability to switch on the cams remotely was to help track lost or stolen laptops.

But Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High, found out different. According to a class action lawsuit against the district, assistant principal Lindy Matsko confronted him about a bad deed he had allegedly done at home. As proof, Matsko pointed to an image on the laptop taken by the webcam. Matsko thought it showed Blake taking drugs. Blake says he had simply been eating Mike & Ike candies. Nor had he reported a lost laptop.

What exactly happened with these webcams will be thrashed out in court. It’s also being investigated by the FBI. But the district admits it never told anybody that it could operate the webcams remotely.

The kicker is this: Kids at the school had just read Orwell’s novel. I guess they’ll remember it better now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.