Category: ideological culture

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

The Election Addiction Fiction

Poor Willie Brown. Ever since California slapped term limits on state lawmakers, Brown’s lacked a permanent perch in power.

For many, Brown’s 15-​year reign as speaker serves as Exhibit A in the case against unlimited terms. Brown himself bragged that he had been the “Ayatollah” of the assembly — though later he seemed to repent of his support for untrammeled spending in that role. 

He next lathered patronage as mayor of San Francisco. But this was another term-​limited post, so he couldn’t barnacle himself there either.

It still bothers Brown how voters limited tenures. He’s always opposed term limits. And now the papers quote him telling a Republican political club that term limits are a “disaster.… We’ve allowed ourselves to become addicted to elections.” (You guessed it: He disdains citizen initiative rights too.)

Elections, an addiction? Like heroin? Of course, we’re “addicted” to everything these days. Obama says we’re “addicted” to oil (as did Bush). We’d all admit a compulsion to consume food and oxygen.

To learn what weaning ourselves off term limits might be like, check Ballotpedia, which reports that even in this roiling political year, only 19 incumbent state senators out of 1,167 running for re-​election lost their primaries. Less than 40 percent — the exact number is 459 — even faced an opponent. In general elections, incumbent re-​election rates typically exceed 90 percent, even in tough political times.

That’s fine with politicians like Brown, who always crave another fix — of political power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

My Enemy’s Money

American democracy is uglier than necessary. We don’t have to talk so nasty about our opponents. Or their money.

The usual snipe about this process is that funders of “our side” (whichever side that happens to be) are Good and True and Selfless, while funders of the other side are Evil and Dishonest and Selfish.

So, Democrats decry — and often seek to regulate — the spending of wealthy conservatives and “major corporate lobbyists”; Republicans decry — and, perhaps less often, seek to limit — the spending of unions and billionaires such as George Soros.

Because organizations like MoveOn have been funded by Soros, they are said to be somehow less “legitimate.”

When it was discovered that the Koch brothers of Koch Industries had funded various “Tea Party” organizations to the tune of (it is said) many millions, Obama-​hurrahing pundits and activists decried this, charging that it proved that there was no “grassroots” element to the movement. “Astroturf!” they cried.

All nonsense.

Now, Democrats from Obama on down claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign money for ads. But Democrats haven’t produced a shred of evidence. It’s simply a wild accusation.

Look: It’s not tainted money when the other side gets it and you don’t. Or vice versa. Besides, rich people should be as free as less rich folks to give to their causes.

And perhaps we’d see less money pouring into politics from billionaires were campaign contributions for the rest of us less limited.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

A Literary Giant, a Giant of Liberty

Had we but world enough, and time … we’d read all the books on our reading lists.

Last week I contemplated the classics of political liberty and a book I hadn’t read. After that, the days of the week clicked off, as they do, and a writer I was familiar with (but had never read) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

I wonder: Will I ever make time to read his books?

They don’t exactly look like my cup of tea. But, perusing the list of novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, there seems to be something for nearly everyone.

What I knew Vargas for, mostly, was his notorious move away from trendy communism and towards an appreciation of freedom. Individual freedom. Liberty. He even ran for the presidency of his country on a limited-​government platform, and raised quite a lot of interest, only to be beaten by a sly, dark horse of a candidate who went on to stay in the news for quite some time. 

Success or no, by standing up for constitutional limitations and private property and civil liberties as one coherent package, Vargas made an important contribution to world culture that almost deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Too often, literary types feel (like his friend-​enemy-​frenemy Gabriel Garcia Márquez obviously feels) destined to ally themselves with “the Left.”

Mario Vargas Llosa broke that tradition.

So, congratulations to an eminent man of letters … and liberties.

Too bad he lacks a North American counterpart.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture

Should I Read This?

Yesterday I talked about a New York Times piece on the Tea Party reading list. I mentioned several authors, including Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, and even Saul Alinsky. As an astute reader mentioned, I did not bring up W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap, which Ms. Zernike’s article treats at some length.

I also did not deign to mention a few books merely cited, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Why?

Well, of the books I didn’t mention, I’d only read one. And it wasn’t The 5000 Year Leap. More importantly, the title of the Times piece, what interested me about it, were the classics. The 5000 Year Leap isn’t a classic yet.

But perhaps I should ask you: Have you read it? Does it deserve to be a classic?

The New York Times didn’t exactly entice me into the book’s pages. According to the paper, Skousen thought Jefferson urged teaching Christianity in state public schools. This seems to fly in the face not only of Jefferson’s humanistic “Epicureanism” but also of the disestablishmentarianism of the Baptists for whom Jefferson supportively coined the expression “wall of separation between church and state.” (It’s often forgotten, these days, that, during our nation’s founding period, Baptists were ardent supporters of keeping religion and politics separate.)

But I’ve learned long ago, you can’t always trust the Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
ideological culture

Tea Readers

According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-​Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.

Tea Partiers are reading classics … but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:

  • Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
  • F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  • Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-​level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-​funded gimme-​gimme state. 

The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-​market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.

That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something. 

Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.

Wow. What a revolutionary thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Demolition Time!

The socialist party of Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, expects to lose seats in the next election. El Presidente pled with voters to not forsake the “revolution.” He dubbed the opposition — which last time around boycotted the elections — “Operation Demolition.”

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

Surely what we hope for in an opposition party, in South America or El Norte, is, in everything but the incendiary, literal sense, demolition.

Of expansive, intrusive, know-​it-​all government.

“Big” and “intrusive” are just two words that characterize what the GOP brought to America during its heyday. Others? Massive spending, a new medical “entitlement,” growing public debt, and — as a sort of crackpot coda — bailouts for rich people. 

Same for united government under the Democrats: More uncontrolled spending, an even more massively expensive medical “entitlement,” ballooning public debt — and, as a variation on a theme — more bailouts yet.

Massive government with no limits. But we’re told we can’t call it socialism!

Reports from Venezuela say the opposition has shifted from hatred of Hugo to issues such as rising crime and cost of living. In America, Tea Party folks have gained most ground when they attack spendthrift and socialistic policies rather than demonizing President Obama.

In both cases, ordinary people’s everyday concerns — taxes, debt, inflation, thuggery, and all the other things that go along with socialist-​leaning policies — trump the cult/​anti-​cult of personality as well as political theory, expressed by this ism or that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.