Category: general freedom

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Accountability folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Ex-Explosion

Margaret Sanger, population, progressivism, panic, birth rate,

When I was a kid, the trendy worry was “the population bomb.” Now we are supposed to worry about a population . . . fizzle?

“The U.S. birth rate has hit a new record low,” writes Peter Dockrill in Science Alert, “with women in nearly every age group giving birth to fewer babies than a year ago.” Titled “U.S. Fertility Rates Have Plummeted Into Uncharted Territory, And Nobody Knows Why,” Dockrill’s article fails to mention that diminishing population by reduced reproduction is an old worry.

It fanned the flames of eugenics and racism in Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. Progressivism was full of this concern, in its heyday.*

As societies get wealthier, reproduction rates decrease. Economist Theodore W. Schultz called it the swapping of “quantity of children” for “quality of children.” This appears to be a natural, voluntary sort of eugenics — which scares actual eugenicists.

The study that Science Alert focused on fingered a different cause: lead in the environment. Over at Reason, Ronald Bailey sees some plausibility in this Lead Poison Theory. But mostly, Bailey writes, population rates in America (and elsewhere) are declining “largely because Americans are choosing to have fewer children.”

Is this really a problem?

Well, for Big Government it is.** German’s demographic collapse appears to have been one factor prodding Angela Merkel to open the doors to millions of refugees — whom Europe seems to have more trouble assimilating than does America.

I like kids — both making and rearing them. But to each his or her own, of course. Still, maybe if people freaked out less about population explosions, the implosion would prove less serious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Before progressivism changed its name to “liberalism.” And now back. Oh, and note that the Nazis’ more famous eugenic programs were not identical to progressives.

** Ponzi-based safety-net pension systems worldwide were designed for growing populations. Oops!

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(Illustration from Margaret Sanger’s “Birth Control Review” from 1918.)

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard responsibility U.S. Constitution

China Marks Marx Anniversary

Karl Marx, communism, socialism, death, failure, China, Chinese, German city of Trier

The Chinese government has sought to honor the birth of Karl Marx (1818-1883) by giving a giant bronze statue of the social philosopher and pseudo-economist to the German city of Trier, his birthplace.

Agreeing that Trier and Marx should be thus honored, local officials shamefully accepted the donation.

Marx was a bad guy. His willfully destructive anti-capitalist theorizing and polemics have been enlisted to enslave and murder many millions of people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere. The story is told in works like Modern Times and The Black Book of Communism. One effective critique of Marxian ideas may be found in the second volume of Murray Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought.

We often hear that Communist implementation of Marxian theory poorly translates “real” communism/socialism/collectivism. No government unswervingly enacts all the ideas and prescriptions of a single intellectual founding father. But there is much in Marx’s volumes that openly demands the razing of the division of labor, profit-seeking, and other requirements of civilization.

In one article, Marx scribbled that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” There’s plenty more where this came from.

When a major nation-state gives a town a statue, it’s hard to say no. But one needn’t accept it at face value. Install it on a base that lists the separate bouts of Marx-inspired mass murder. Or use it as a target in paintball tournaments.

Or just place it in the local cemetery. Where deadly ideologies should go.   

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government U.S. Constitution

Hooray for Congress!

right to try, treatment, healthcare, Rights, FDA, democrats, Congress, medicine, experimental,

When Congress behaves badly, I criticize. When it works well, I applaud.

I’ve waited a long, long, long time to put my hands together in polite applause.

It happened yesterday.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a Senate bill, largely along party lines, to give those facing a terminal illness the “right to try.” That is, the right to try experimental drugs and treatments that haven’t yet been approved by the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA). 

Of course, Congress doesn’t actually give us rights. We have always had the common law right — indeed, the human right — to freely seek a path to wellness when we are ill.

From time immemorial. Even before the FDA.

So, this legislation was, more correctly put, a way to announce that the congressionally-created FDA would stop blocking our freedom . . . provided we are dying and the government-approved medical establishment has no more licensed hope to offer.

The bill now goes to President Trump. “People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure,” he declared in his last State of the Union, “I want to give them a chance right here at home.”

Democrats overwhelmingly disagreed. 

“This will provide fly-by-night physicians and clinics the opportunity to peddle false hope and ineffective drugs to desperate patients,” argued Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.).

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) likewise charged that the legislation “puts patients at risk by allowing the sale of snake oil.”

But of course these patients are dying. That’s already as “at risk” as it gets. Our right to live includes a right to try to live.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom ideological culture responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government

What to Do

guns, gun control, second Amendment, school shooting,can we do nothing?

Another school shooting — more dead and injured, many more terrified by the violence. And, in its wake, more demands for

  • gun control,
  • schools as hardened targets, and
  • mental health initiatives.

Oh, and finger-pointing at video games, too.

So what should we do?

  1. Stop publicizing the names of these school shooters and plastering their faces all over the media.

I’m specifically not calling for any new law or government regulation. These criminals’ names must be publicly available. Let’s not reduce transparency in government one iota. Instead, let’s demand that our favorite media do the public-spirited thing: don’t make these killers personally infamous. I’ve written about this danger, which even the ancients recognized, before.

  1. Fix the background check database. The main system for preventing bad people from getting guns relies totally on checking gun purchasers against a database that is full of holes.

Late last year, a man convicted of domestic violence and with documented mental health issues passed the background check to purchase the weapon he used to murder 26 people in a Texas church. The Air Force had failed to transmit his criminal record to the FBI. If our elected officials, on both sides of the “gun control” issue, are serious about saving lives, they will concentrate first on making certain the background check database is complete, and systematically updated.

  1. Give students greater choice.

Being a teenager isn’t easy. The more choice they have in the schools they attend and the type of bullying education they receive, the better — not only for their education, but for their mental well-being, too.

Let’s face it: we cannot prevent all future acts of violence. And should be wary of those who claim they can. Still, we can take action. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders media and media people

The Steps Beyond Argument

North Dakota’s junior U.S. Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, FCC, Rob Port, censorship, freedom of speech, 2nd Amendment

Rob Port’s job is to have an opinion. Opinions breed counter-opinions. Unfortunately, they sometimes conjure up concerted campaigns to pressure opinion-makers to shut up.

So, no surprise that his reporting — on his radio talk show and in print — on the doings and not-doings of North Dakota’s junior U.S. Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, has riled up nasty “feedback.”

Earlier this month, Mike McFeely, a “left of center” columnist at the Fargo Forum, where Port also writes, published a column calling Port’s “obsession” with Heitkamp “suffocatingly limited and boring” and acknowledging, “I have often voiced my concerns about the one-trick-pony nature of Port to my bosses.”

Port notes that McFeely’s criticisms are based on subject matter, not content, and suggests that journalism doesn’t spend too much time holding politicians accountable.

It gets nastier, though. Senator Heitkamp’s brother, Joel, is also in the radio business, managing a competing station and hosting one of its morning programs. Mr. Heitkamp got his mitts on Mr. Port’s divorce papers and tweeted out, “The #FargoForum is paying him 71K for part time work! What do the full-time employees get? #Wow #790KFGO #wishicould.”

Meanwhile, here comes the Senate Leadership Fund, associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to suggest the FCC remove Heitkamp’s station’s license due to his advocacy for his sister’s campaign.

Port, for his part, objects to the corrupt “help.”

“The FCC really has no grounds for getting involved,” he argues. “Free people should be allowed to speak freely.”

In the chaos of our current political battles, Rob Port stands on principle, offering equal freedom to his sleazy opponent.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* For the complete story, check out this weekend’s Townhall column, and the links at the column’s splash page.

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Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Working for Whom?

Rand Paul, John McCain, Vladimir Putin, balanced budget, spending cap

Two articles on Sen. Rand Paul appeared in my Reason feed the other day. Up top.

So it was hard not to look.

They were “John McCain: It ‘Wasn’t Incorrect’ to Say Rand Paul Was ‘Working for Vladimir Putin’” and “Rand Paul’s Plan to Balance the Budget by 2023 Will Get a Senate Vote This Week.”

The latter story is the bigger one, of course. In it, Eric Boehm asked, “Do Republicans have the guts to impose strict spending caps?”

His answer was “probably not.” Good guess.

“Passing the Kentucky Republican’s so-called ‘Penny Plan’ would be a dramatic reversal for Congress,” Boehm wrote, “which earlier this year approved enormous spending hikes that busted Obama-era spending caps and threaten to put the country on pace for a $1 trillion annual deficits. . . . Paul tells Politico that it will be a ‘litmus test for Republicans who claim to be conservative, but are only too happy to grow the federal government and increase our debt.’”

I am afraid the litmus paper has turned . . . red. As in red ink. As in accumulating debt till we drop.

Yesterday Paul’s plan was voted down, 21-76.

In the other Reason piece, Matt Welch noted that Arizona’s senior senator stands by his calumny, last year, against Kentucky’s junior senator. Paul had delayed “ratification of Montenegro’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).” McCain, a gung-ho NATO expansion proponent, accused Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

If Putin really seethes with ill will towards America, wouldn’t he want to see the country burdened with debt?

So, on this vote, those 76 senators who didn’t “stand with Rand” are undoubtedly working for Putin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo of Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore | Photo of John McCain from Wikimedia Commons

 

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Accountability folly general freedom media and media people Second Amendment rights too much government

Simplistically Wrong

guns, cars, regulations, meme, gun control, second amendment

A clever “meme” made the rounds earlier this year showing, in two columns, what it would be like were guns regulated like cars.

How reasonable that would be!

“Title and tag at each point of sale”; “Driver training”/“Gun training”; Liability insurance on each vehicle/gun”; etc. It seems sound, no?

No.

The memester failed to address a context: our car and driver regulations apply to vehicles and drivers on government-run roads. On your own property you can drive all sorts of vehicles, unregulated. And it is on their own property that most gun owners’ firearms stay most of the time.

So, treating “guns like cars” would put government deeper into our private affairs.*

The meme came into an economist’s view packaged under the slogan “doing nothing means more people die.” He saw problems. For example, “someone might propose that each person above the age of 10 years old be interned in a mental-health camp, until and unless experts appointed by the state certified that he or she was not a danger to society.”

Same logic — we cannot do nothing, can we?

Another economist dubbed the problem we have identified here as “a simplistic model of public policy.” Policy advocates tend to assume that if you change a policy we get only one effect. Not true.  

A third economist (I’m going for a trifecta!) discovered that even adding safety features to cars comes at a cost in human life: feeling safer, drivers compensate . . . and it is non-drivers who suffer. More drivers hit more pedestrians.

Be cautious when you drive, sure. Be cautious when you shoot, of course.

But be cautious, especially, when you prescribe new laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Not to mention that gun rights are specifically enshrined in the Constitution and vehicle rights . . . not so much.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Grading Democracy on the Curve

public schools, education, democracy,, propaganda, ignorance

Voters, we are told, are amazingly ignorant. So, what to do?

“Ultimately, the ideal democracy is one in which as many citizens as possible vote,” writes Dambisa Moyo at The Guardian, “and the voters are armed with the most objective information. Yet today only a fraction of the electorate are voting, and many are armed with a diet of hyped-up statistics and social media propaganda.” Among her proposals is a voting booth access test: “why not give all voters a test of their knowledge?”

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons, as can Ilya Somin, over at Volokh Conspiracy, who considers just a few. One of the more interesting is this: whereas Moyo has no wish to shove poor people out of the voting booth, and so envisions public schools to teach to the test — “the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum” — Somin quotes John Stuart Mill about the very political dangers of the very idea of public schooling: “A general State education,” wrote Mill in On Liberty, would inevitably be devised to please and serve “the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation” and must constitute “a despotism over the mind.”

Though Moyo does observe incumbency and political careerism as big problems, she is innocent of the more fundamental issues.

Indeed, she does not consider the obvious: today’s voter ignorance of politics and government is in no small part the result of government schools.

For politicians, general ignorance is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Let’s look for solutions to political problems that do not give politicians more power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders national politics & policies political challengers property rights Regulating Protest too much government

A Sanctuary from Centralization

decentralize, centralize, federal and state and county, power, nullification, distributed

Defiance . . . nullification. It is a trend.

I take it as a sign of our contentious times that we now witness states in open rebellion against centralized control from the Imperial City of Washington, D.C., while cities and counties are also rattling the chains set by their respective state capitals.

The sweep of marijuana decriminalization and legalization is only the most obvious. The rise of “sanctuary cities” defying federal government immigration laws — often backed up by state legislatures — has been a contentious issue, with progressives supporting this sort of nullification and conservatives opposing it.

But the latest development does not hail from the left.

In Illinois, a number of rural governments have taken a cue from the immigration debate by “declaring themselves sanctuary counties for gun owners,” we learn from the AP’s Don Babwin, writing in the Chicago Tribune. “The resolutions are meant to put the Democratic-controlled Legislature on notice that if it passes a host of gun bills . . . the counties might bar their employees from enforcing the new laws.”

An Effingham County Board Member calls “sanctuary” an attention-getting “buzzword,” reporting that “at least 20 Illinois counties and local officials in Oregon and Washington have asked for copies of Effingham County’s resolution.”

Now, cities and counties do not have an analogous relationship to their state governments as do states to the federal government: the states created the “United States of America,” while cities and counties are also state creations.

Yet this move is important. It shows a growing recognition of the tyrannical nature of centralized power.

And the usefulness of decentralization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability general freedom media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Matter-of-After-the-Fact

Trump, dictator, war powers, Congress, Executive, power, incompetence

“For some time now,” writes Sen. Rand Paul for The American Conservative, “Congress has abdicated its responsibility to declare war.”

Kentucky’s junior senator knows how unconstitutional this is. “The Founders left the power to make war in the legislature on purpose and with good reason,” Rand Paul explains — correctly. “They recognized that the executive branch is most prone to war.”

So, Washington Senators Bob Corker and Tim Kaine are here to help?

This bipartisan pair has retrieved — from deep within the bowels of congressional R & D — a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). This would, explains Paul, give “nearly unlimited power to this or any other president to be at war whenever he or she wants, with minimal justification and no prior specific authority.”

The wording of the new AUMF “would forever allow the executive unlimited latitude in determining war, and would leave Congress debating such action after forces have already been committed” — allowing Congress only carping rights.

Shades of the Roman Republic, in which the Senate appointed dictators in tough times.*

These days, all times are tough times.

Meanwhile, Bob Corker is in the news for having just received the “George Washington University Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication’s first annual Walter Roberts Award for Congressional Leadership in Public Diplomacy.”

And Kaine just a few weeks ago made a big deal about his no vote for Trump’s Secretary of State nominee: “We have a president who is anti-diplomacy and I worry that Mike Pompeo has shown the same tendency to oppose diplomacy.”

How does making a foreign policy dictator out of Trump (or any future president) advance diplomacy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Arguably Congress’s open-ended AUMF’s are much worse than ancient Roman practice, since today’s crises are not specified and the dictator is not forced to step down after the problem is solved — or a term limit of six months reached.

 

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