Category: ideological culture

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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.

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ideological culture

Serpentine, Indeed

California, increasingly known for its faults, has a major problem. Its politicians have rocks in their heads.

As the state teeters on the brink of insolvency, legislators are considering de-​listing the mineral serpentine as the state rock.

Sponsored by State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat hailing from la la L.A., Senate Bill 624 would raise “awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Serpentine contains asbestos, a known carcinogen. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the state.”

The trouble with this is that not all — or even most — samples of the mineral (or, more correctly, mineral group) contain asbestos. Geologists, when they learned about the bill, were all abuzz. What was the Senate up to when it voted to throw out the rock?

Dan Walters, writing in the Monterey Herald, has the answer: Litigation. If the state defines serpentine itself as asbestos-​laden — not just those forms that sometimes contain the substance — then trial lawyers can sue more people for having the rocks on their property, etc. Predictably, the “language in the bill was provided by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, an anti-​asbestos group whose major sponsors are law firms specializing in asbestos litigation.”

If California legislators toss out the state rock to aid lawyers in plundering others, maybe the state’s citizens can use the initiative to make the rock the official symbol of the California Legislature. But only those chrysotile forms that contain the dreaded silicate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Déjà vu Economics

Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-​Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-​killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-​Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there? 

Back then, the loss part of the profit-​and-​loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-​taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Sometimes a Great Reversal

After World War II, European Social Democrats — the heirs of Karl Marx’s delusional vision — broke with their heritage. They rewrote their political principles, compromising. No longer would they go for socialism whole hog; they abandoned its key feature, the replacement of markets with total government control.

This was a great moment for modern civilization. It bequeathed Europe (and, perhaps, America) a clunky and intrusive (and unsustainable) welfare states, sure … but that’s far, far better than Communism.

We may be witnessing a similar groundswell of ideological shift in America’s stronghold of the status quo, the media. This week the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times endorsed budgetary rules that would take power and unlimited budgetary discretion from California’s out-​of-​control legislature:

It’s unfortunate that automated budgeting is necessary. But it is necessary. The state must continue to invest in the social welfare of its people, but we must do it in accordance with California’s projected growth so that we do not repeatedly yank from the young, the elderly and the poor the very services that we provided only a year or two before.

This may not sound revolutionary. But, as Tim Cavanaugh put it on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, the Times — long an opponent of spending limits — has “acknowledge[d] clearly and publicly that out-​of-​control spending, not insufficient tax revenue, is suffocating the Golden State.”

And that is revolutionary. Not American Founder-revolutionary, but Social Democrat-compromise‑y revolutionary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency ideological culture

“Representatives” Who Avoid Voters

Here’s a surprise. Congressional Democrats who faced angry voters in town halls last summer have scrupulously skipped the pleasure during more recent visits home.

The New York Times suggests that although the open town-​hall style political meeting may not be quite dead yet, it’s “teetering closer to extinction,” inasmuch as only a few of 255 House Democrats held such meetings during a recent week-​long recess. Instead they arranged invitation-​only, scripted meetings with that portion of the electorate who believe that super-​sizing the nanny state and burying the country in an Everest of debt are the best things that could ever have happened to us.

These congressmen evade communicating with unhappy constituents to “avoid rage.” And to prevent video clips of their fatuous non-​answers to highly pertinent questions about mega-​billion-​dollar bailouts and pork barrel projects and socialized health care, etc., from showing up on YouTube.

One politician explains that town hall attendees last summer didn’t want to “get answers” so much as pursue a political agenda. I can’t help but remember the YouTube video in which a congresswoman “leading” a town hall forum seemed more interested in her cell phone than in a constituent’s explanation of why she didn’t want a government solution to medicine’s current institutional problems. Anyway, who really expects to escape “political agendas” at political forums convened to discuss politics?

Hopefully, the brilliant campaign strategy of ignoring voters and their legitimate concerns won’t pay off on election day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture

Facebook’s Secret Shame

Facebook has had some bad press lately.

The popular social networking site got in trouble in recent months for the ever-​more-​cavalier way it treats users’ privacy. People complain that their data has been unilaterally exposed in ways they never expected when they first signed up for the service, and that privacy settings have devolved into a confusing, hard-​to-​tweak labyrinth.

Facebook seems to be adjusting its privacy practices in response to the bad publicity. But there’s another lamentable Facebook practice that has, unfortunately, received less sustained attention: Its willingness to shut down a user’s Facebook page solely because somebody else is offended by the viewpoint expressed on that page.

The “somebody else,” in the case I’m referring to, is the government of Pakistan, which banned Facebook because of a page encouraging people to display images of the prophet Muhammad in protest of threats of violence against the show South Park, which had made fun of making threats against people who display images of Muhammad.

“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” gloated Najibullah Malik, who represents Pakistan’s Orwellian “information technology ministry.”

It’s dangerous to cave in to demands for censorship. The folks at Facebook were faced with the loss of a large market, but they should have let the anti-​censorship page remain published and let Facebook users in Pakistan pressure their government to lift the ban.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.