Category: ideological culture

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crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people too much government

Show Me the Way to the Next Hookah Bar

I could never emulate the economist Irving Fisher — and not just his use of index numbers. He was a perfervid purist. He didn’t just defend “the success” of Prohibition, he looked forward to the day when coffee, tea and bleached flour would be outlawed, too.

Hey, I love my coffee. You’ll have to pry my cup from my cold, dead fingers.

Of course, many forms of purism are obviously hygienic. But take purity beyond persuasion, into force, that’s not safe for anybody. And fraud? Weasel-wordy purists aren’t against lying for the cause, either.

Take the hookah.

Hookahs are to tobacco-smoking what bongs are to marijuana-smoking: A water-filtration-based, easy-to-share drug delivery system. In “Putting a Crimp on the Hookah,” the New York Times quotes one hookah smoker as saying he’s unconcerned about the health effects, since he only smokes it about once a month. The author then states “But in fact, hookahs are far from safe.” As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine points out, both can be true. Tobacco smoking isn’t exactly healthy. But occasional imbibing of water-filtered smoke is almost certainly better for you than regular cigarette use.

The New York Times focuses on the next leg of the “ever-shifting war on tobacco,” the prohibition of “hookah bars.” Though there’s some talk of protecting second-hand smoke victims, it’s pretty obvious that this war is really about squelching a “vice” by force.

Which is itself worse than vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture individual achievement

Commemorating Alan Bock

Journalist Alan Bock died in May after a long struggle with cancer.

In addition to many articles penned as an editorial writer for the Orange County Register as well as for various magazines, Bock also wrote four books: Ecology Action Guide, The Gospel Life of Hank Williams, Ambush at Ruby Ridge: How Government Agents Set Randy Weaver Up and Took His Family Down, and Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana. The last two deal trenchantly with government assaults on our liberty — assaults as foolish as they are destructive.

In his obituary for the Orange County Register, Greg Hardesty reports that Bock “cultivated a loyal following as a passionate defender of individual liberty and freedom.” He “cut a figure as a bookish intellect — yet one whose friendly, easygoing nature endeared him to family, friends and colleagues.”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher recalls that Bock “smiled every time he made a point that furthered his basic beliefs in freedom.”

His 25-year-old son Stephen Bock says that his father always had a smile on his face.

Decades ago, Alan met with me when I was facing prosecution for draft resistance, and subsequently wrote a great editorial defending me. We kept in touch in the years since. My own acquaintance confirms the consensus that he was a very learned, effective and happy warrior for freedom.

We talked politics many times, but I wish we’d found the time to talk about Hank Williams.

Alan Bock will be missed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture too much government

Io’s Vulcanism

Io is one of Jupiter’s four moons that Galileo Galilei discovered. Of those four, it is the nearest to the huge gas giant it revolves around, and it is the most violently and continuously volcanic.

Scientists now think they know why it’s so volcanic.

The tidal influence of Jupiter pulls at it constantly, and its internal solid matter — rock — gets squeezed and churned into magma. That magma layer may be quite large. So, no wonder lava keeps bubbling up and shooting out in the form of volcanic activity.

I bring this up not to extend the scope of Common Sense to astronomy and its subdivisions. Instead, I want to make an analogy.

The bigger government gets, and the closer it reaches into our lives, the more we are squeezed and churned — and so of course we get hotter.

And we will erupt . . . in the form of political activity.

Indeed, the Tea Party movement, and the underlying sentiments of distrust and disgust — as well as the rise of tax-and-spending-limiting initiative campaigns — can be understood as a natural result of letting government get too big. Jupiter-size. And we are too close to it for comfort.

Mavens who want a less volatile political culture might consider Io’s case, and see some good reason to shrink our “Jupiter.” There’s no easy way of moving us all out, into a more extended orbit from politics and bloated government. So shrinking our governing gas giant is key.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Pseudonymous Concerned Pseudo-Citizen

Is it wrong to admire a scoundrel, er, “W. Howard”?

In Everett, Washington, traffic enforcement cameras — so-called “red-light cameras” — have stirred up a lot of people, many airing their ideas or just venting on HeraldNet, the local paper’s website. Among the most persistent contributors to the comments/letters section has been “W. Howard.”

Readers got suspicious. Once he said he was from Lynnwood; in another post he implied he lived in Everett. But no matter what town he was from, he was always for the cameras, which he claimed would prevent pedestrian deaths and save the children.

He thus bucked the stream in the growing controversy over the cameras, which seem so big-brotherish, so totalitarian. Even when one is caught red, er, lighted.

But, hey, learn your lesson. That’s what “W. Howard” said, anyway. Get over your paranoia.

The “paranoid” turned out to be right about W.H., though. The newspaper traced his posts to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., far from the Evergreen State in Scottsdale, Arizona — which just happened to make and sell the cameras under question — all the way back to Bill Kroske, vice president of business development.

That makes Kroske a Saul Alinsky of marketing.

But a scoundrel nonetheless, mimicking a Music Man-style pretense of being “part of the community” just to stir up business.

Thankfully, the scoundrel was revealed as such by a free press and in public debate. The First Amendment rides to the rescue!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Prize Optimist

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has awarded its annual Friedrich Hayek Lecture and Book Prize to Matt Ridley, for his book The Rational Optimist.

I wrote about the book last July, focusing on the title theme. The course of the last few hundred years gives us plenty of reasons for an upbeat long-term view, in part because a few revolutions have occurred over that time, giving us plenty of, well, plenty.

Ridley, a popular science writer, actually takes a longer view than that. He identifies the source of most progress in trade. He starts the book discussing human prehistory, noting the evidence that Cro-Magnon people traded widely, while Neanderthals did not. This probably explains why we descend from the former, not the latter. The traders won out, out-producing (out-surviving) the more “socialistic” folk with bigger brains.

The ability to trade gave our ancestors a huge comparative advantage — a key economic principle that Ridley ably explains.

Ridley and Hayek share a general outlook, so the award is fitting. It’s also fitting to learn of it during “Hayek Week” — what with the new, “definitive” edition of F.A. Hayek’s classic Constitution of Liberty out, receiving reviews in major papers.

Here’s hoping Ridley continues to echo Hayek’s success in the marketplace of ideas. His recent Wall Street Journal op-ed cheering on “the cheapeners and cost-cutters” (rather than the usual ballyhooed inventors) suggests that he will do just that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Is Atlas Shrugging?

Atlas Shrugged: Part I, an adaptation of the first third of Ayn Rand’s 1957 bestseller Atlas Shrugged, is hitting theaters.

The movie has been awaited for decades, but some say it’s more than timely. Political commentator Robert Tracinski suggests that its portrayals of the themes of the state stomping the productive individual and the productive individual “going on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice” are being multifariously echoed in the real world.

Tracinski relates how one moviegoer saw the film at a giant mall built with millions in government subsidies that now stands nearly empty — much like the many empty buildings in the socialism-ravaged cityscapes of Atlas Shrugged. Other parallels Tracinski sees:

  • The federal government demanding that companies not locate operations in states relatively free of onerous regulation.
  • Environmentalists and regulators seeking to thwart innovative ways of extracting resources from the earth, like hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from shale.
  • Government punishing successful companies in order to provide bailouts for failing companies (General Motors, Chrysler).

And entrepreneur Jerry Della Femina just sold his famous eponymous restaurant and abandoned other business ventures. “I’m just not ready to have my wealth redistributed,” Femina explains. “I’m not ready to pay more tax money than the next guy because I provide jobs and because I work a 60-hour week and I earn more than $250,000 a year. . . . Read a brilliant book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged, and you’ll know.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

A Fairy Tale Day

Aren’t weddings fun? And romantic, don’t forget.

That’s why I’m excited about the wedding of two young people I don’t even know: Gladys Smith and Fred Klinkle. Yet, you won’t see their wedding on your television today. Instead, the tube will revel in the wedding of Britain’s Prince William and “commoner” Kate Middleton.

Too bad. Neither Gladys nor Fred are known to benefit from unjust privilege or to have been enriched through centuries of their family’s tyrannical rule.

Not to be the skunk at the royal party, but I have a slight problem with those who live off the involuntary sweat and toil of others. Granted, to her credit, Miss Middleton has not been a leech on the British people . . . until today.

Sure, princes and princesses are just precious when animated by Disney. And it’s nice to know that in today’s real-life Britain the royals can no longer separate the heads of “subjects” from their shoulders. But still I find it hard to get in a celebratory mood for the activities of a family that represents the most rotten aspects of our unfree past.

Why do the Brits put up with the royals?

Inertia, perhaps.

Why would any liberty-loving American be caught fixed to today’s TV spectacle?

Beats me!

To Gladys and Fred and other loving non-monarchical couples, best wishes: live long and multiply. To William and Kate? Once you renounce your position and stop fleecing the taxpayers, same to you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

The AP’s Memory Hole

In our age of the Internet, cheap digital video recorders, etc., it’s harder than it once was to enforce an “official” version of an event . . . . the un-airbrushed knowledge of which might embarrass some potentate.

Memory-tweakers keep trying, though. Including Winston-Smith wannabes at the Associated Press.

An example is President Obama’s appearance at a wind turbine plant, where he made a pitch for “energy independence,” a concept presidents have been pitching at us at least since the long gas lines of the 1970s. One concern of attendees was the latest bout of high gas prices, caused by inflationary pressures and uncertainty about the Middle East.

According to an early version of the AP’s report, “Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle. ‘If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,’ Obama said laughingly, ‘you might want to think about a trade-in.’” The passage downplays how jovially patronizing the president was even after it became clear that the questioner had ten kids to support.

Obama’s unscripted condescension toward a struggling plant worker is not so outrageous as the AP’s strange memory-hole behavior. The incident was later scrubbed from their report. But InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds saved a screenshot of the original passage. And there’s video.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture tax policy

The Audacity of Sleep

During Wednesday’s big speech, just as President Obama laid into Rep. Ryan’s Medicare reform proposal, Vice President Joe Biden skirmished with the Sandman. Zzzzz.

Obama wasn’t boring, though. He had a theme.

As he saw it, the Republicans’ “pessimistic” vision is of an “America [that] can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made for our seniors” or “invest in education or clean energy” or fix “our roads” or afford to do all the cool things done by South Korea, Brazil, and China.

He didn’t explain how it might have come to pass that our government became disabled. He barely mentioned previous budgets’ waste — on goofy projects, overpayments, duplicated efforts, and undeclared, never-ending wars. Or how government regulation and subsidy might be the reason many people cannot afford medical insurance.

Or that if the government doesn’t invest in something, it doesn’t mean that private investors aren’t investing.

But he did mention his opposition to “more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.”

And then came the corker: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.  And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?”

Wow. America’s wealthiest merely “saw their incomes rise”? They didn’t actually do something for their gains?

Maybe Obama was napping while others were working.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

Atlas Screened

John Galt had it right in Atlas Shrugged when, stepping to one side so that the whole world could see the gun being pointed at him, he told the politicians and bureaucrats: “Get the hell out of my way!”

Want markets to work? Leave markets alone. Leave people alone.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, Rand’s perennial bestseller has been selling even better. Now sales of the apocalyptic fable are about to jump again. After 18 years trying to bring a studio on board, rights holder John Aglialoro decided to produce the movie himself.

He made that decision in April last year. Filming began two months later, just before his option would have expired.

“I have been an entrepreneur with companies in different industries — from airlines to health care, oil services, and exercise equipment — and I have had to deal with government in every one, at every step of the way,” says Aglialoro. “It’s a constant drain of time and energy. We could be in the 24th century today, in terms of technology, innovation, and wealth if it were not for all the controls. . . .

“Atlas Shrugged is my fortification against all that. It’s a liberation of the human spirit. That’s what I get from making the movie. And that’s what I want people to get from watching it.”

The movie hits theaters April 15, 2011. Catch the trailer online. And a scene.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.