Category: ideological culture

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Big Business vs. Big Liberty

“Incumbents Fear Cantor’s Loss Will Fill Tea Party’s Sails” is the headline.

Before a few days ago, GOP establishmentarians felt that they had finally quelled the Tea Party notion that Republicans should be more than 2 to 4 percent different from Democrats on whether the country should suffer a socialist health care industry, endless tsunamis of red ink, etc.

Coca-ColaCertain big businesses also hate Tea-Party-style boat-rocking. In his article “Big Business Vs. Libertarians in the GOP,” David Boaz observes that candidates who plausibly oppose crony capitalism are drawing opposition from firms like Coca Cola, Delta, Georgia Power, and AT&T. These and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce created a “Georgia Coalition for Job Growth” to defeat Republican Charles Gregory and other candidates who are “just too libertarian” for them.

What do these anti-liberty businesses — in Georgia, Kentucky, California and elsewhere — fear? The lower taxes that real-deal Tea Party candidates support?

No.

And it isn’t “gay marriage or foreign policy that seems to annoy big and politically connected businesses,” writes Boaz. Who they oppose are representatives who refuse to “bring home the bacon,” who “actually take seriously the limited government ideas that most Republicans only pay lip service to.”

Don’t be shocked to witness big businesses working against limited government, welcoming regulation and subsidy as a way of life.

Why? Because the “mixed economy” approach (whether mercantilist, “progressive,” fascist, what-have-you) allows them to rig the system in their favor, usually by discouraging competition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Do Not Pass Dumb, Do Not Collect Your Wits

In the empire of fibs and euphemisms, the person who re-asserts the bald truth can find himself excoriated not merely as a traitor to All That Is Good And True and Beautiful, but scorned as a crazed lunatic and all-around dangerous fellow.

After economist David Brat defeated the House Majority Leader this week, folks left, right and center set themselves to poring through the professor’s writings for any juicy tidbit to get excited about. The drollest kerfuffle was over this:

If you refuse to pay your taxes, you will lose. You will go to jail, and if you fight, you will lose. The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military.

Max Weber: 1864-1920Charles Cooke defended Brat from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico’s Ben White, all dismissive or worse. And then, for the real meat of the frenzy,  “[a]s is its wont, the progressive blogosphere lost its collective marbles too: One contributor sardonically described Brat’s claim as a ‘doozy,’ while another contended that such opinions were sufficient for ‘one to question his, shall we say, cognitive coherence.’”

Cooke’s point is that Brat’s thesis is obviously true.

But it’s more than that. This notion that governments claim a monopoly on the use of force is non-controversial. It was defined neatly in almost those very words by the near-universally respected sociologist Max Weber. A long time ago.

And, news to progressives with short attention spans, Barack Obama also stated this as a bedrock truth: “What essentially sets a nation-state apart . . . is the monopoly on violence.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Don’t Empower Venezuelan Government

If you run a company that buys oil from Venezuela, stop.

If you purchase fuel from a company getting its product from Venezuela, stop.

If you run a government that imposes lots of arbitrary restrictions on the exploration, development, and/or transport of oil, stop that also. 

But don’t wait for the last to happen if you can do the first. Or second.

And the second means: Don’t buy gas from Citgo.Leopoldo López

We have long had more than sufficient cause to refrain from financially empowering Venezuela’s autocratic regime, and to make it a lot easier for domestic buyers and sellers to shun dealings with dictators who happen to be sitting on a lot of oil. These reasons didn’t fade after the death last year of Hugo Chavez.

News from the communist country underscores the viciousness of the Venezuelan tyranny. Organizations like the Human Rights Foundation have called attention to the plight of all those detained and abused for peacefully protesting the regime by formally declaring opposition leader Leopoldo López, detained since February, to be a prisoner of conscience of the Maduro government; and by vocally condemning the government’s torture of student protestors Marco Aurelio Coello and Christian Holdack, also detained since February.

Communist governments steal everyone’s stuff; that is the pain that everybody who works for a living sees and feels. They also tend to resort to repression and torture of any who dare object to their repressive policies. Persons free to boycott such tyranny should boycott it. Now. In order to do so, we need not wait for a government or even have the support of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

A Sweltering Storm of Orthodoxy

Can we agree to tolerate disagreement?

Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson’s “defection” from an alleged climatological consensus has been greeted with hysteria from some colleagues. His sin was joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which challenges the received wisdom.

The alleged scientific consensus is that mankind, in its industrial phase, is not only a cause but the pivotal cause of recent global warming/“climate change.” Also that our carbonic effusions are triggering not mild, normal, nothing-to-panic-about global climate variation but imminently catastrophic variation.

Is it okay to dispute these and related hypotheses?

Debate about complex scientific contentions isn’t a bad thing. New knowledge is gained both by positive investigation and by correcting errors and misinterpretations. One does not abet scientific inquiry by treating any challenges to a favored explanation as per se illicit, regardless of evidence or argument.

But Bengtsson reports that he has been subjected to enormous pressure “from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me . . . I see therefore no other way out . . . than resigning from GWPF. I had not been expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure . . . from a community that I have been close to all my active life.”

What’s the message? “Regardless of your reasons or credentials, don’t dare deviate from our ‘consensus,’ at least not publicly — or else we’ll make your life very very hard.” Whatever the motives and goals here, they have nothing to do with either the methodological or the social requirements of science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture political challengers

The Next Coalition

Can the American people squeeze out the middle . . . like popping the world’s biggest zit?

Ralph Nader thinks the answer is Yes, if by “the middle” we mean the political center, where the Republican and Democratic Party higher-ups want to be, and where most folks in Congress find themselves.Unstoppable, by Ralph Nader

Huge swaths of the American people, he says, are ready for some big changes. But the ruling insider class stands in the way.

What is needed? A coalition of progressives and libertarians and other independents willing to work together on issues like

  • initiative and referendum rights in every state and locality;
  • stricter ethical standards for representatives;
  • an end to bailouts of businesses and investors;
  • a rational attack on the eternal and sumptuous giveaways to contractors for the Pentagon; and much more.

Nader thinks a coalition like this is, as the title of his book has it, “Unstoppable.”

His book hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves. (Even from me: I’m at Disney World as I write this, and somehow reading of books hasn’t exactly taken over my schedule.) Nader, one of the most influential activists in American history, has hit a nerve, but not a lot of media outlets. I’m told he did chat with the folks on Fox Business News’s The Independents, but he could use more readers and more listeners.

Interestingly, Nader tips his hat to my day-job outfit, Citizens in Charge, as “already at work” doing what needs getting done, putting citizens (not well-connected businesses and pressure groups) at the center of the government.

By working for greater ballot access and initiative rights everywhere.

So, join us. (And I promise: no more pimple-popping metaphors.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Rand Paul’s No-Special-Deals Petition

Are you tired of members of the political class foisting burdensome laws on us from which they liberally exempt themselves? Sign the petition.

I mean the “No Special Deals” petition expressing support for “Senator Rand Paul’s Constitutional Amendment to stop Congress from passing legislation that doesn’t apply equally to U.S. citizens, the Executive Branch, Congress and the Supreme Court.”

This is one of those amendments with the job of shouting “Read and adhere to the document I’m attached to!!!!!!!” We need almost as many such amendments as there are constitutional provisions, considering how chronically the Constitution is violated.

The spur is Obamacare, the latest package of law and politics to combine crippling mandates for most of us with special deals for those with political pull. Some people are deemed more equal than others when it comes to “equal protection of the laws” and so forth.

The rationale for equally applying laws that are tyrannical? To discourage tyrants loathe to be battered by their own bludgeons. And to disallow their divide and conquer gambits.

That’s the hope, anyway.

But if officeholders find a way to tyrannize to begin with, and don’t hesitate to tyrannize, will any formally enshrined demand for equality of tyranny serve to deter them?

No, sadly, Sen. Paul’s amendment won’t prevent assaults on our rights that aren’t already supposed to be prohibited by the rest of the Constitution. Not by itself. But the amendment could help and certainly can’t hurt.

(Hurt us, that is —  if it hurts our lawmakers, that’s the idea.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Free Money

If an email popped up offering free money, what would you do?

Delete it? And wonder how it got past your spam filter?

Me, too.

Well, some Washington wags — call them re-distribution professionals — say we’re crazy.

As are Republicans in the 19 states that have refused to expand their states’ Medicaid rolls as part of Obamacare, and in the five states — Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia — still debating whether to do so.

Republicans are “rejecting what is more or less nearly free money from the federal government,” says a baffled Josh Barro of the New York Times.

Karen Finney, host of MSNBC’s Disrupt, sneers that these GOP-led states are “leaving money on the table.”

“It’s free money!” exclaims an exasperated Joan Walsh of Salon.com, adding that, “It’s stimulative money.”

Under Obamacare, the federal government first demanded and now urges states to expand the Medicaid rolls well beyond those at the poverty line, with our central government generously offering to pay the cost for the massive expansion fully for three years . . . and then 90 percent after that.

One local newspaper identified one major issue, trust: “The trademark of Obamacare is broken promises.”

Will the federal government keep paying nearly all the cost? In Virginia, before any expansion, Medicaid already accounts for nearly one out of every four dollars in state spending.

“This is another picture of how extreme this Republican Party has become,” according to Walsh, “that you had this organized backlash to taking money that once would have been a no-brainer.”

This is the new GOP extremism, refusing to be bought off?

It’s no vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture

Firefox Fired

Brendan Eich resigned last week as CEO of Mozilla under pressure from gay rights activists upset because six years ago Eich had given a thousand bucks to California’s anti-gay marriage initiative, Prop 8.

On Fox News’s Special Report, George Will dubbed the story “redundant evidence that progressives are for diversity in everything but thought,” as well as an alarming illustration of the intolerance of “sore winners.”

Whatever one thinks of the campaign to drive out Eich (and a number of prominent gay leaders have spoken out against it), those demanding Eich’s ouster were within their legal rights. Still, such a political attack wouldn’t be possible without government assistance in denying donor anonymity. That’s the major lesson Mr. Will drew from the fracas: anonymous contributions are vital:

The people advocating full disclosure of campaign contributions say, “we just want voters to be able to make an informed choice.” That’s not what they’re doing at all. They really want to enable themselves to mount punitive campaigns, to deter people, and to chill political speech.

What’s wrong with today’s vendetta politics (what Pat Buchanan calls “The New Blacklist”) is not that boycotts are immoral, but that, when made personal and coupled with ideological conflict, they lead to never-ending feuds.

Anonymous speech and press and donations remain key to a peaceful society.

Advocates of mandatory campaign finance disclosure should be asked, “do you also, then, oppose the secret ballot?”

The privacy of the voting booth was also instituted to insulate people from the worst aspects of partisan discord . . . and commerce from the legacy of the Hatfields and McCoys.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture video

Video: Why George Will Changed His Mind on Contribution Disclosure

There’s a lot in this discussion, about the Mozilla CEO’s past political contribution and the hysterical and retributive boycott by advocates of gay marriage. But consider, especially, what George Will says:

Categories
government transparency ideological culture insider corruption obituary

One Cheer for an IRS Man?

I’m hesitating. But given the way many IRS honchos have too often behaved throughout the agency’s history, including today — yes, I’ll applaud Randolph Thrower for saying no to a President.

Thrower died in March at the age of 100 as the “IRS Chief Who Resisted Nixon.” He had headed the agency from 1969 to 1971, before getting fired for challenging the administration’s political hardball. Nixon henchman John Ehrlichman delivered the pink slip.

White House staffers were pressuring the IRS to audit various activists, journalists and congressmen. These were persons that Nixon felt deserved government harassment.

Too often, IRS officers have been all too eager to politicize tax procedures at the behest of those in power. Not Thrower. He may have been guilty of naïveté. When asking to meet with the President, he said he felt sure that Nixon knew nothing of the pressure coming from underlings and would repudiate “any suggestion of the introduction of political influence into the IRS.”

Thrower’s request for a meeting was denied. The record shows that Nixon soon demanded his removal and also that the next IRS commissioner be a “ruthless [s.o.b.].”

My problem with Randolph Thrower is his failure to say anything publicly about why he was fired. By speaking out, he might have prevented some of the evildoing the White House would perpetrate over the next several years.

He owed that much to his employer: us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.