Category: ideological culture

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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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.