Category: ideological culture

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture incumbents term limits

Burial Rites

Libyan dictator Mu’ammer Gaddafi is dead. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez roams free.

Chavez recently returned to Venezuela from a cancer-fighting tour of Cuba, proclaiming that “there is not a malignant cell in this body.”

  1. This is almost certainly not true, but
  2. let’s pretend it is, and just say that Hugo reserves his malignancy for his politics.

Usually, I’d contrast the lives of these two headmen with the more peaceful careers of term-limited U.S. presidents. But if we stick to the news, to the very latest breaking stories, another contrast appears: The thousand-year-old Viking recently uncovered in Ardnamurchan, in the Scottish Highlands.

His burial was “high status,” we’re told. With him were his sword, his ax, his spear, and his shield. “He was somebody who had the capacity to do an awful lot of damage to people,” says one archaeologist.

In that way, the big-shot Viking was like Gaddafi and Chavez. But we’ll never know what this particular Viking did, in the way of harm. Of Gaddafi’s and Chavez’s crimes, we know all too well.

Gaddafi won’t likely receive as respectful a post-mortem treatment as the Viking received, at least if his “Weekend With Bernie” jaunt through Libyan streets is any indicator. It pays to die while still on top.

Which Chavez might be wise to ponder, instead of gloating about his cancer-free cellular composition.

Dictators might not be term-limited, but the ends of their careers tend to be pretty grim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

The Ism in Need of a Schism

The “Occupy Wall Street” protestors seem, mostly, to be against rich people.

But it’s not wealth as such that sparked the protests, is it? The ranks of the self-proclaimed 99-percenters may be filled with miseducated anti-capitalists, but the occasion of their ire seems fairly clear:

  • It’s the depression, stupid — or the stupid depression. The enduring character of it.
  • It’s the bailouts. A lot of borrowed money was thrown at “successful” people to make sure they remained “successful.”
  • It’s the frightening instability of our basic institutions, including government itself.

So of course folks protest.

Too bad they have barely two clues to rub together.

The general cluelessness does not end at the overflowing toilets and excrement-stained police vehicles. When the protests went global, the New York Times reported on the “thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.”

Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute expressed his incredulity:

A government-created institution that creates a government-issued paper currency that is a shabby piece of paper thanks to government intervention in order to bail out government-subsidized and government-sustained institutions. And they call this a capitalist symbol?

Obviously, “capitalism” today means “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism,” not laissez-faire. That some folks still think we live in a “free market” — and blame everything now not working on that system — demonstrates the need for careful distinctions from those of us who know better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement

A True Revolutionary

The key to success in business? Profitably serve as wide a customer base as possible. Mass production is the lynchpin. And it’s also at the heart of why many intellectuals hate capitalism: Serving the mass of mankind is “beneath” them. They have a higher calling. They serve Justice, or The Truth. Or, say, Beauty.

This curious by-product of capitalism is what Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises called “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality”: The tendency of intellectuals to react against the very instrument that serves the common man even while they ballyhoo the “cause” of the common man.

Mises and others focused on intellectuals’ envy as the reason for their strange, seemingly inexplicable “turn.” Why bite the hand that feeds so many? Because that hand doesn’t reward intellectuals enough!

F.A. Hayek added another reason: Incomprehension. How markets work is beyond the designs of any single mind. Intellectuals tend to be prejudiced in favor of singular minds. Theirs, at least.

The great revelation at the end of the last century followed from that: Command-and-control societies must fail. Regardless, though, “planning” does happen in a free society. Piecemeal. You plan. I plan. And entrepreneurs plan to serve us both.

And entrepreneurs of genius successfully serve millions, make a lot of money for all concerned, and find new ways to make life easier, more enjoyable.

Steve Jobs was such a man. He died yesterday, age 56. As head of Apple and Pixar, he changed society by serving the masses.

And even intellectuals approved.

A revolutionary, indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

The Wrong Track

Most Americans believe our country is headed in the wrong direction. But there remain folks who would like to take us all the way into downtown Wrongville.

Two Sundays ago, in my column at Townhall.com, I expressed exasperation at the “prestigious” Think Long Committee’s recommendations to make it much tougher for California citizens to place issues on the ballot, to allow legislators to trump any citizen-enacted measures, and to empower an unelected council chosen by the governor and legislative leaders to place any measure they desire on the ballot.

Then North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue (D) told a Raleigh Rotary Club, “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.”

After taking some hits, the Governor’s press secretary claimed she “was obviously using hyperbole.” But that’s not the way the audio sounds.

Finally, a New Republic article by Peter Orzsag, former Obama Administration Director of the Office of Management and Budget and now Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup, calls for more reliance upon “automatic policies and depoliticized commissions” because “we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.”

This just after our infamous 535 representatives handed away their power to a “super-committee” of only twelve people.

A whole class of people see the road to Wrongville and hit the accelerator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Ninety-Nine Percent Pure

Politics is dominated by pious, politic lies and half-truths. Every nation has them, and Turkey’s are most impressive.

Turkey has been a vanguard, in the Muslim world, of “Westernizing” and “modernizing” tendencies. But it still has one foot in the deep past. One of its great pious half-truths is that Turkey is “99 percent Muslim” yet possesses a “secular state” where “all religions are equal.”

With some religions more equal than others.

An Alevi spokesman, Izzettin Dogan, charges that the country “is actually a Sunni Islamic state.” There are 30 million Alevis in Turkey, according to the New York Times, and they are not alone in getting the short end of the stick in “secular Turkey”:

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

Good question.

And it gets to the heart of one of the reasons I’m so happy to live in America. Our government may be a mess, but we still have some basic freedoms. We’ve long gotten over the ancient fixation on the union of religion and state.

In ancient empires, kings styled themselves as gods.

We know better.

And we know better than to subsidize religion — or use it as a branch of the government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

A Social Contract You Can’t Refuse

Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren really worked up “progressives” with a rant about “fair taxation.”

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

As A. Barton Hinkle points out, no one suggests otherwise. But the real meat of her argument is worth studying . . . for a peculiar pathology in logic:

You built a factory out there? . . . You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Upon this rests her case for ramped-up progressive tax rates.

Apparently, according to Ms. Warren, successful businessfolk are takers only. But all along the way, businesses pay for the services they hire. Indeed, they pay for roads, too. Truckers, for instance, pay special weight-rate taxes and licenses for carrying heavy loads across roadways.

Her “argument” no more justifies government taxing truckers or factories more than a similar argument, mutatis mutandis, would allow the kid who mows your lawn to reach into your wallet when you aren’t looking.

The social contract doesn’t originate the way Warren specifies. Her logic establishes only that she’s not thinking clearly about obligations and lacks an appreciation for making a business succeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

The Public Square

Californians’ initiative, referendum and recall process is as hot a topic for debate as ever. That’s apt, for this year marks the process’s 100th anniversary.

On October 10, 1911, Californians went to the polls to enact these democratic checks on government after Governor Hiram Johnson persuaded legislators to put them on the ballot. On October 10, 2011, I’ll be in Sacramento at an event sponsored by Citizens in Charge Foundation to celebrate the centennial.

And a few days ago, I served on a panel of interesting people in front of a great audience of Californians at a Zócalo Public Square event in San Francisco, entitled, “How Do We Put the People Back in the Initiative Process?”

My answer: Make it easier, instead of harder, to put issues on the ballot. Presently, California requires 800,000 voters to sign petitions to put an amendment on the ballot and 400,000 voters for a statutory measure; sponsors have only five months to get all those signatures.

Why not give citizens a year to collect signatures? Why not lower the requirement?

Unless “reform” of the initiative is really code for not putting the people back in the process, of course. Some folks don’t think voters are up to the task of democratic decision-making — at least, whenever voters don’t decide their way.

Let’s agree that the people aren’t perfect. I still prefer citizen control over government to the alternative of rule by politicians and self-appointed elites.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture

A Membership Group vs. Its Members

What is the American Medical Association for? The group claims, in public-relations-ese, that its function is “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.”

But ask a doctor. You are apt to get a very different diagnosis.

The September 2011 survey of “Physicians Opinions About the American Medical Association,” published by Jackson & Coker, a physician recruitment firm, makes that very clear. Here are a few highlights:

  • “The AMA’s Stance and Actions Represent My Views”: 77 percent of doctors disagree.
  • “I agree with the AMA’s Position on Health Reform”: 70 percent disagree.
  • . . . effectively supports “physician practice autonomy”: 69 percent disagree.
  • . . . effectively insulates “physicians from intrusive government regulations”: 78 percent disagree.
  • . . . “protects physicians from insurance company abuses”: 75 percent disagree.

Those percentages include non-member and non-practicing doctors. Understandably, members of the AMA are more positive than non-members. But even among member doctors, a majority disapproves of the AMA’s insurance protection (the last bullet point, above).

The AMA carries a lot of weight in public policy debate. Unfortunately, its history of lobbying government has been very . . . “progressive,” paternalistic, and heavy-handed.

For example, before the AMA dominated American national medical policy, doctors routinely engaged in extensive pro bono work for the poor. The AMA worked mightily to stop that.

The result of this prescription? Medicare, Medicaid . . . and an insolvent entitlement system.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bright College Days

We parents worry when we send our kids off to college. But do we worry they’ll become terrorists?

No.

But a funny and slightly disturbing article by Colin Lidell in Taki’s Magazine takes notice of the deep connection between college life and terrorism. Indeed, “every major Islamist terrorist attack in Britain has been led by university students or recent graduates.”

Lidell makes a broader point, too, even with his title: “The Persistence of Bourgeois Radicalism.” Universities and colleges have long served as hotbeds of extremism:

Becoming “radicalized” — whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad — is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

The author concludes that the best cure for such radicalism is the requirement of work. He leaves that thought to linger in the readers’ minds, letting us extrapolate upon government subsidies to increase the rolls of college student bodies.

A related fact, uncovered by previous scholars of Islamic radicalism, is that the main subsidizer of Muslim radicals in the West have been the welfare states of those countries. It seems that the safety nets of British and European states (as well as Canadian and Australian governments) have funded quite a number of terrorist cells.

Perhaps one reason America has nurtured fewer home-grown terrorists is our tougher-to-obtain “welfare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Nab-N-Brag

Could America’s obsession with intellectual property be getting out of hand?

Congress has extended copyright protection for existing and old works as well as future works . . . which looks more like giveaways to major corporations than anything else. You know, like Disney, whose lawyers dread the day Mickey Mouse ever hits the public domain.

Now that patents have been taken out on “business procedures” and even strings of DNA, it seems that almost anything is up for grabs.

The easiest intellectual property to defend is the trademark, since unique identifiers are so important for both commerce and law. But even here there’s a lot of weirdness going on.

Take the recent lawsuit by In-N-Out Burgers against Grab-N-Go Burgers. The west coast outfit thinks the east coast outfit has, well, stolen its look. The Huffington Post calls it “copyright infringement,” but, in the first report I read, “the suit alleges that Grab-N-Go’s name and color schemes mirror In-N-Out’s signature style,” which sounds more like trademark. But the suit also mentions menu similarities.

Well, the names are similar, and the logos do resemble each other. But they seem quite distinct, and I would have thought common sense would judge Grab-N-Go as merely emulating In-N-Out, not infringing on rights. Businesses copy each other all the time. That’s capitalism.

It’s even Aristotelian. Keyword: mimesis.

Even innovation is never ex nihilo creation. It’s copying plus modification.

It’s why I call this commentary “Common Sense” and not “Xbligigroobi Blubqui.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.