Category: ideological culture

What’s Principle Got to Do with It?

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 26, 2016
1 Comment on What’s Principle Got to Do with It?

Maryland Primary, Chris Van Hollen,Donna Edwards, super PAC, the National Rifle Association, NRA

Today’s Maryland Primary features a competitive race to replace Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski, a 30-year veteran. Two House members, Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards, are seeking the Democratic nomination.

“[T]his is a contest between two candidates,” National Public Radio’s Kojo Nnamdi notes, “who agree on 99 percent of the relevant issues.”

The campaign got interesting, however, with an attack ad first run by a super PAC, Working for Us, and then by Rep. Edwards’s campaign. The ads hit Van Hollen for a special deal he had made trying to get his 2010 DISCLOSE Act passed. The legislation aimed to force non-profit groups to disclose their donors to the government.

Fearing the hostility of the National Rifle Association, Van Hollen cut a backroom deal exempting the gun rights group, along with several other powerful liberal organizations.

Whatever one thinks of the DISCLOSE Act — and I’ll proudly disclose my contempt — shouldn’t we all agree that drafting laws that apply to most groups except those with political clout is flat-out wrong?

Rep. Donna Edwards, an original co-sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, wasn’t amused by Van Hollen’s sell-out. She withdrew her support.

I don’t agree with all her principles, but I am glad she has some.

In Washington, it’s lonely for the principled. President Obama came to Van Hollen’s defense. So did the Washington Post, praising Van Hollen (editorially) as a “leading champion of gun safety,” and via Glenn Kessler’s Fact Checker column, which twisted logic to award the Edwards ad three Pinocchios. Democratic congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, also lauded Van Hollen and attacked Edwards.

Washington: city of celebrated sell-outs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Chris Van Hollen, Donna Edwards, Maryland Primary, NRA, super PAC, the National Rifle Association

general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Drinking Gourd

$20, currency, twenty dollar, Jackson, Hamilton, Tubman, illustration

By now, most people are probably OK with Treasury’s plan to oust Andrew Jackson off the face of the $20 Federal Reserve Note and replace him with Harriet Tubman.

I certainly am. Ms. Tubman was a great hero of freedom. President Jackson has a more . . . mixed legacy.

The original plan to rotate Alexander Hamilton off the ten spot met with pushback as a result of his rising popularity from the Broadway play, Hamilton. Besides, Hamilton deserves blame—er, placement on the nation’s official paper money. Hamilton devised the first national banking system. Andrew Jackson, decades after Hamilton’s death, nixed that insider-mercantile scheme by refusing to re-authorize the central bank of the day, setting up a very different system for the Treasury and America’s banks.

Less than a century later, Hamilton’s idea was revived in the form of the Federal Reserve. Which we benefit/suffer from to this very day.

But in a bizarre twist, Jackson was not simply replaced. He was demoted. Tubman is to be placed on the note’s obverse, and Jackson moved to the back of the bus, er, note. The reverse.

I would have preferred to revive Old Hickory years from now, after the Federal Reserve dissolved, to be featured on a private bank’s note. After all, private banks did that for years between Jackson’s time and the modern period.

Bank notes don’t need the imprimatur of government.

That would allow us to place, on the flip side of the sawbuck, a more suitable image — of the Big Dipper, which served escaped slaves as a direction, to go north: “follow the Drinking Gourd.”

Additionally, the Big Dipper suggests bailouts, doesn’t it?

We’ll have plenty more before the system is changed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags $20, Andrew Jackson, bank note, currency, fiat money, Hamilton, money, treasury, Tubman

Accountability crime and punishment folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Story, Story, Story

David Brooks, dichotomy, dualism, false, minimum wage, crime, illustration

David Brooks has a story to tell you.

His New York Times op-ed, yesterday, “The Danger of Single Story,” builds on a good premise: “each individual life contains a heterogeneous compilation of stories. If you reduce people to one, you’re taking away their humanity.”

Brooks puts a political edge on what otherwise might sound like a lesson in manners with his next sentence: “American politics has always been prone to single storyism — candidates reducing complex issues to simple fables. This year the problem is acute because Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are the giants of Single Storyism.”

Brooks then asserts that Trump and Sanders share a similar story that they beat to death, “the alien invader story.”

You can see how it applies to Trump, a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Aliens invade!

But Brooks recognizes that Sanders’s story is about “the evil entity called ‘the banks.’” Not exactly alien. This menace is home-grown.

Then our pundit moves on to issues not in the single-story vein of Trump and Sanders, and how what seem to be opposite stories (incarceration prevents crime; too much incarceration is a moral horror) can both be true.

Crime is low right now, but Brooks devotes most of this putative paean to multiple crime stories. The third Bernie story he takes a bite of, the $15 minimum wage, belies the Single Storyism charge. That is, the point of his essay.

Way to go, sophisticate.

He also draws a complete non sequitur: “Raising the minimum wage to $15 may make sense in rich areas.” Nothing he wrote gives any credibility to that. At best the hike would do nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Bernie Sanders, David Brooks, dichotomy, Donald Trump, dualism, story

Accountability folly government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies

Money Means Nothing to Her

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 18, 2016
2 Comments on Money Means Nothing to Her

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, campaign finance reform, big money, illustration, angel, Saint Hillary

Campaign finance reform is surely dead . . . if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

Which would be good.

Not Clinton being elected, mind you. What would be good is the death of so-called campaign finance reform — the kind supported by Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. They insist on a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protection and give Congress awesome new powers to regulate their own and their opponents’ campaigns.

But wait — if Mrs. Clinton supports campaign finance reform, why would her election kill this seriously bad proposal?

Well, Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, as I explained this weekend at Townhall: large campaign contributions do not influence her in any way. Even a fat $15 million from Wall Street interests to her super PAC — or $225,000 a pop speeches paid by Goldman Sachs and their ilk — registers no corrupting effect whatsoever.

And those millions deposited in Clinton Foundation accounts from foreign governments?

They couldn’t possibly sway the steady former Secretary of State. Not even the smallest smidgen.

Just like there has never been corruption at the IRS.

Don’t believe Hillary? Then trust President Obama, who also gobbled up major Wall Street funding when he ran in 2008 and 2012. But again, according to her, “President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.”

Not. At. All.

So the solution to government corruption is simply to elect trustworthy, incorruptible candidates . . . like Hillary Clinton.

Well, call her half right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, campaign finance reform, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

folly general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

The Hypocrisy Gap

wage gap, pay gap, sexism, Equal Pay Day, illustration

You may have missed it. I wasn’t so lucky. This past Tuesday was “Equal Pay Day.”

“[T]he typical woman who works full-time earns 79-cents for every dollar that a typical man makes,” President Barack Obama said, repeating what we have already been told ad nauseum about the “wage gap” between men and women.

The “detailed calculation” used to determine this “gender wage gap”?

“Experts” simply added up all the money earned by all the men and all the women (subcategoried) and then divided by the number of men and women, respectively. No accounting for

the actual jobs performed,
hours worked,
education,
risk,
work history

. . . or any other factor.

Using this statistic make sense if all people — brain surgeons and taxi drivers alike, having worked every day for the last 40 years or re-entering the workforce after decades away — should earn the exact same amount.

Communism.

It is already illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work. Yet, on the WhiteHouse.gov page entitled, “This Is Why Today is Equal Pay Day,” the prez says “we must rid our society of the injustice that is pay discrimination.” The website insists that, Obama “has made equal pay a top priority.”

Then, why does a pay gap exist between the men and women working for Mr. Obama? According to the Washington Post, “The White House has not narrowed the gap between the average pay of male and female employees since President Obama’s first year in office . . .”

The good news? Equal Pay Day is over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Equal Pay Day, equal protection, gender pay gap, sex equality, wages

folly free trade & free markets ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies

Cranks for President

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, cranks, nuts, populists, illustration

Some of us who think of ourselves as populists — or just ordinary people, hence “outsiders” — are having a hard time this political season. The two most talked-about outsider candidates, billionaire Donald Trump and socialist Bernie Sanders, make for strange populists.

A billionaire as a “man of the people”? Not very plausible. It is his lack of a self-censor, his free-wheeling, stream-of-conscious grade-school-level discourse, that impresses many folks. Definitely not scripted.

A socialist as populist? Socialism, long associated with elitists, would put the State into every area of everyday life. Most folks with horse sense resist that.

But Trump and Sanders do have something in common. They rely upon common misconceptions about everyday market life. They both fan the flames of conspiracy theories about prices.

When the price of fuel was spiking a few years ago, Bernie Sanders warned us: “Forget what you may have read about the laws of supply and demand. Oil and gas prices have almost nothing to do with economic fundamentals.” It’s all greed, you see: arbitrary power.

But, as Daniel Bier reminds us at The Freeman, believing that businesses are superpowers out to screw us with ever-rising prices, unhampered by supply and demand, is not just socialist silliness, it’s Billionaire Trump silliness, too — four years ago, the developer not only trumpeted the idea that we simply threaten OPEC for lower prices, but suggested we actually seize foreign oil fields.

This is not common sense. It’s crankism.

It’s the kind of thing folks say when they’re drunk.

Maybe on power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, cranks, Donald Trump, populism, Presidential campaign 2016

free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture individual achievement media and media people national politics & policies

Parker and the Pope

Kathleen Parker, Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders, economic fairness

Kathleen Parker is far from my favorite columnist, but her Sunday column comparing Pope Francis and presidential aspirant Sen. Bernie Sanders regarding their shared message on economic fairness and equality of outcomes was well worth the effort.

She treats the men differently. She gives Pope Francis a pass because, as a religious leader, he “wants to raise consciousness about our obligation to the less fortunate,” while bashing Sanders, the politician, who “wants to restructure America’s economic institutions to ensure that money trickles down — mandatorily rather than charitably.”

“Let’s face it, most of us work hard . . . for a paycheck.” So Parker pointedly asks, “As the tax man chisels away at such monetary rewards, where goes the incentive to work hard?”

How persuasive — encouraging actual, real-world achievement — would a Sanders Four Year Plan be?

Addressing the Pope’s harsh words for individualism, Parker argues, “The ‘rampant individualism’ that Francis condemns is precisely what has driven American ingenuity, entrepreneurship and a level of prosperity unmatched in human history.”

Precisely.

In other words, maybe — just maybe — we did build it. Through our own sweat and toil. Individualism is decidedly not big government. And it is not public-private crony capitalism, either.

So, considering that it was America’s laissez–faire-ism that created such great wealth and prosperity, which presidential candidates are promising a return to more robust and vivacious individualism?

Not the ones promising everything. Nor the one promising the “best deal.”

The job of the next heroic leader will be to shovel whole layers of intrusive government out of our way.

Parker seems on board, boasting, “This is common sense.”

Hey, wait a second, Kathleen, that is my line. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Bernie Sanders, equality, fairness, individualism, Kathleen Parker, Pope Francis

folly general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies Popular

Extremist Against Charity

Bernie Sanders, charity, welfare, government, against charity

Vermont’s favorite son, Senator Bernie Sanders, has a long history of saying strange things, comments that cast a shadow on his current spin that the socialism he favors is a “democratic” one.

He really is (or has been) quite extreme, extremist.

How extreme? He is against charity. You know, private aid provided to alleviate private suffering.

Steve Hayward at PowerLine has unearthed a New York Times piece from way back in Bernie’s mayoral days, about something he said addressing a United Way crowd:

“I don’t believe in charities,” said Mayor Sanders, bringing a shocked silence to a packed hotel banquet room. The Mayor, who is a Socialist, went on to question the “fundamental concepts on which charities are based” and contended that government, rather than charity organizations, should take over responsibility for social programs.

How telling is that?

What many of us have long suspected about anyone calling himself a socialist is that, in his heart of hearts, he really is against any degree of freedom.

The free society alternative, on the other hand, is the common sense policy: we all do the good that makes sense to us, each act or operation judged by our differing metrics, investing our time and money as we see fit.

This allows for innovation and speedy adaptation to changing needs.

Bernie, on the other hand, figures everything has to be centrally organized and taxpayer-funded. That’s not merely a good definition of socialism, it’s creeping totalitarianism . . . and not the least bit charitable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: Marco at Flickr

Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, charity, Presidential campaign 2016

crime and punishment folly ideological culture responsibility too much government

Pincher, Pinchee

police, crime, law, rights, pinch, juvenile, illustration

Limited government sports several rationales. The need for it pertains on many levels. One such level we don’t think about enough? This: Not every rights violation warrants calling in the law.

Take the strange case of Breana Evans, 12-year-old assailant, charged with misdemeanor battery.

What did she do?

She pinched the gluteal posterior of a boy she did not know.

Now, pinching the butt-end of strangers is a breach not only of decorum (to the extent that this standard we call “decorum” even exists any more), but of a pinchee’s rights.

Yet it was a mere pinch.

And the boy did not press charges.

The school’s “resource deputy” did not arrest her; she was merely suspended from school.

It would have remained a minor matter (so to speak) had not the boy’s mother “insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana,” as Robby Soave explained over at Reason. “She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention.”

The escalation of the dispute over carnal rites and personal rights into a matter fit for the police is, it seems to me, a grave result of a sort of cultural hysteria about all sorts of things. The willingness of some adults to push children through our harsh, bureaucratic, and often ruthless criminal justice system is sad to behold.

It is more indecent than a pinch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags assault, child, children, crime, law, public schools, rights

folly ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies tax policy

Rebranding the Odious?

tax, taxes, charity, IRS, I.R.S., Alain de Botton, branding, rebranding, illustration, folly, Common Sense

Being a clever person is hard work. Many of the truly clever things about everyday life have already been said. New and innovative cleverness? A rare thing indeed.

But if you are in the business of being clever, that puts you in a pickle, if “being relevant” and “worth our attention” is part of your cachet.

Take Alain de Botton, a very clever man who has written at least one brilliant book . . . and several not-so-brilliant ones. He has tackled Proust, Epicureanism, and is now deeply into religion.

Well, maybe not so deeply.

He wants politicians to follow the lead of religious leaders, who, he asserts, are masters of rebranding. (I had thought that was for marketing specialists.)

Recognizing that the word “tax” is an odious one — few people really like paying their taxes — de Botton says that politicians should follow what “religions do” and “rebrand ‘tax’ as ‘charity.’”

Charity, he notes, is a “much more appealing word.”

Well, yeah. That’s because charity is a word for love. It is all about deep concern, sympathy, etc., and “acts of charity” are expressions of love and concern.

And the only way that acts of charity can be determined to be expressions of concern is that they are voluntary. Taxes, on the other hand, are not voluntary. They are taken by force (try not paying them — force will find you).

Forcing people to “be charitable” will automatically scuttle that very purpose.

Trying to rescue politics from the stench of compulsion should not be done with rebranding, but by limiting government.

The less government, the less force.

And more scope for charity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags branding, charity, Fed Up With Taxes, image, marketing, propaganda, tax, tax policy