Category: ideological culture

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Forcing You to Pay for Bad News

Poor old-media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition.

What to do . . . aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work?

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering. . . .”

It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!

For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.”

It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”

Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths.

How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture too much government

Big Brother in the Trash Can

America, we’re catching up with the British.

For years we’ve trailed when it comes to stifling the medical industry with regulation, rationing and red tape. But thanks to recent legislation this side of the Atlantic, we can expect major gains. When it comes to liberticide, we’re catching up.

Locally, too, thrilling progress in freedom-killing is being made. I’ve reported before about how the British government hounds citizens who fail to lid their garbage properly or who — shame — put out “too much” trash. Now, Cleveland trash monitors are following suit.

Starting in 2011, city residents can expect to be more than hounded for failing to recycle. Is your garbage bin more than 10 percent full of stuff the trash police say you must recycle? Then expect a $100 fine. A spychip embedded in the trash bin will supposedly figure the proportions accurately and send reports on delinquents back to Big Brother.

Cleveland gets $26 for every ton of recyclables it collects. Even ignoring sorting costs, its “loss” from a household that fails to recycle must be much less than a dollar per pickup. So why not, at worst, charge those households an extra $4 a month?

Apparently, the goal is not to nudge people into better behavior. It’s to punish and humiliate those who neglect the rituals of the jihadist wing of the environmentalist religion. Government-mandated recycling isn’t about sensibly conserving our resources; it’s an excuse for obsessively overbearing government.

And it stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

He Lies!

A congressman yells “You lie!” during a State of the Union address and everybody blasts him for lapse of manners, failure to respect the office of the presidency. Less objectionable, presumably, is the statement itself. For President Obama and members of Congress do fib, misrepresent, lie: About this, about that, about the other. About a great many things.

We can safely say, I hope, that it is wrong to deliberately misrepresent any proposed policy for the sake of fooling people into supporting that policy.

Yet there are politically interested persons out there, men of good will in their own view, who not only endorse lying to advance “just” political causes but who even publicly defend such lying. Political writer Matt Yglesias doesn’t lie himself, he stresses. It’s the politicians, the activists who should lie. Yglesias has declared, for example, that it’s swell for proponents of government-funded rail to supply “unrealistically optimistic” estimates of ridership in order to secure government funding.

If you habitually support policies that rob people of their wealth and freedom, I guess you might not hesitate to lie about what you’re doing. You might be quite eager to deceive as many people as possible as much as possible. To insist, for example, that Obamacare will “save money” and “reduce the deficit” and “enhance competition.”

Yglesias says it’s okay to fight “dishonesty with dishonesty.”

But if you have truth on your side, you really don’t need to lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Move On to the Poverty Line

According to a recent email bulletin from Daniel Mintz of MoveOn.org, Republicans and running-dog Democrats are gearing up to “slash” Social Security benefits.

The tone of the bulletin? Strident hysteria. How can anyone even think of such a thing in hard times like these, when “no jobs bill can pass congress”?

Well, we’ve had stimulus bills up to our nostrils, but hope of “recovery” remains just that, mere hope. Mintz, who denies that Social Security is in anything like a crisis, ignores the devastation to the system caused by its Ponzi nature, Congress’s longtime plundering of the program, and the current depression.

He wants you to sign a pledge for no cuts and no raise in the retirement age. He says it would easy to “strengthen” the program by “making the rich pay their fair share.”

Of course, the effect of raising the maximum FICA payment (their “fair share”) without correspondingly increasing benefits to those who pay extra (no one’s proposing that!) would turn Social Security into a blatant welfare redistribution program. All ties to investment? Severed.

Further, it would signal politicians that their sins can always be covered over with a tax.

Worse yet, it would soak up huge hunks of wealth from those who do the most investing and turn a pension system — ideally a huge source of capital — into one humungous capital drain.

Making us all poorer. MoveOn-to-the-poverty-line.org.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture insider corruption political challengers

The Wicked Witch Is Dead

Many is the time I’ve compared various politicians to The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain. They’re not bad men; they’re just not very good wizards.

But today brings a different connection to Oz: I can’t get the song, “Ding-dong, the Witch Is Dead!” out of my head.

Tuesday, Oklahoma’s Democratic Party primary voters ended Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s gubernatorial bid.

Regular readers of Common Sense know I’m no fan of Mr. Edmondson, who attempted to bully and threaten two others and me, the Oklahoma Three, for daring to push a petition to put a state spending cap on the ballot. Edmondson indicted us, in 2007, on a phony felony charge that carried a ten-year prison term. After a year and a half of Edmondson delaying to deny us our day in court, the trumped-up charge was dismissed.

We certainly weren’t the only victims of Edmondson’s put-politics-before-justice philosophy. A Competitive Enterprise Institute report judged Edmondson to be the third worst AG in the nation for, among other things, abusing “the power of [his] office for political ends.”

At CapitolBeatOK.com, Patrick McGuigan detailed much of Edmondson’s bad behavior, helping hasten the day that Oklahomans would be free of him. In January 2011 that day will come for the man once described as “Barney Fife with bullets — and no Andy.”

Justice is finally sweeping down the plains.

Oh, wrong movie. Here: You-know-who has just met his opportune bucket of water.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture insider corruption

Lott of Chutzpah

Some people you can always count on. Like former congressmen and current lobbyist Trent Lott.

Count on Lott to confirm that he’s a true-blue partisan of gravy-train politics-as-usual, a dyed-in-the-wool establishmentarian committed to extinguishing each faint, flickering chance to downsize Leviathan.

The man is a rock.

“We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott with calm, sneering authority recently told the Washington Post, as his granite-hard jaw jutted with stern, rectitudinous integrity. “As  soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

What kind of creature is a “Jim DeMint disciple”? What terrible deeds will these zombie-like Jim-DeMintians perpetrate if the heroic former congressmen and his redoubtable cohorts fail to co-opt them in time?

The creatures are affiliated with the Tea Party rebellion against the super-escalating scope and reach of the federal government, as manifested in the looming takeover of the medical industry, trillion-dollar annual budget deficits, etc. Senate candidate Rand Paul told the Post that the goals of Jim-DeMintian Tea Party sympathizers like himself have something to do with fighting for term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and legislation that is consistent with the Constitution.

Sounds like if they make any headway we can expect more freedom, more real wealth, less red ink, less Washington-based strangling of everybody.

Hence, Trent Lott to the rescue.

Thanks a lot, Lott.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.