Category: ideological culture

Categories
ideological culture tax policy too much government

Customer Service?

It was no fun to watch Acting IRS head Steve Miller testify before the House Ways and Means Committee last week. Miller simply had no real explanation for the troubling actions at IRS.

Even his terminology induced cringes. Miller’s mea culpa was for “horrific customer service.”

Customer service? That’s a stretch.

A customer holds a position of honor in a free society. Businesses spend billions on advertising — just to gain our favor. We have the power to make a business succeed or fail according to our decisions.

We don’t have to be well connected or part of the political or social elite to share this power. The most ordinary of customers can have a powerful impact. When I was a kid, customers in my state helped build a small business, Wal-Mart, into the envy of the retail world.  In 1956, ordinary bus riders in Montgomery, Alabama, used their “buying power” to help change the world.

As customers, we make demands. We make sure we’re satisfied. Sometimes we negotiate price; when no negotiation is possible and we don’t like the deal, we walk away. We have a choice. We decide.

Does this same type of empowerment exist when dealing with folks at the IRS?

Not so much. They tell us the price. We submit or go to jail. That’s no customer.

Cowering serf might sadly serve as the more apt moniker.

As the IRS grows bigger and more intrusive each year, and as its agents shake us down for ever larger sums, we should at least be able to keep the word “customer” away from them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

No Humans Were Harmed

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry says “no one was fundamentally harmed” by the IRS’s targeting of Obama-unapproved applicants for tax-exempt status. (Go to 4:00 of the video to skip the preceding lies.)

Elsewhere, detestable Bill Maher inquires: “Is it unreasonable [for IRS] to target an anti-tax group?”

Good lord.

I’ve discussed the case of Frank VanderSloot, a wealthy businessman minding his own business preferring Romney to Obama when the Obama campaign attacked him for being a wealthy discredit-worthy Romney supporter. VanderSloot’s operations were forthwith audited by several government agencies.

VanderSloot is a big fish. Catherine Engelbrecht is not.

Engelbrecht is one of many right-leaning applicants for tax-exempt status forced to deal with endless intrusive questions, the ostensible result of innocent mismanagement by harried low-level IRS clerks. Her two political organizations are True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, and King Street Patriots, a discussion group.

As soon as Engelbrecht applied for tax-exempt status, the FBI began investigating King Street Patriots. Then the IRS audited the couple’s tax returns. Then the agency began its rounds of grilling about True the Vote and King Street Patriots. Then the ATF audited the machine shop. Then OSHA came.

“No one was fundamentally harmed”? Do we need corpses?

Reports about the IRS’s special targeting of non-liberal applications for tax-exempt status indicate that many folks gave up on forming their organizations. Other attempts have been delayed for years. Such time-wasting, money-wasting, action-stopping obstructionism makes it harder to pursue one’s mission during the run-up to a national election, nyet?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Tyranny? What Tyranny?

The United States was founded in response to tyrannical actions by the government of Great Britain: its increasingly intrusive taxes, mandates and prohibitions.

As students of history, the Founders understood that tyranny — the routine use of government power to violate rather than protect individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — is a constant threat. They counseled eternal vigilance against this threat.

Bad advice, says President Obama.

Obama seems to think (à la certain notions of Rousseau) that tyranny ain’t really tyranny if you participate, however nominally, in the political processes that spawn the tyranny. So he instructs a 2013 graduating class to ignore those who warn that tyranny is “always lurking just around the corner.”

“You should reject these voices . . . because what they suggest is that our unique and creative and brave experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

Come again, Mr. President?

The American republic was built on mistrust. There have to be checks and balances for a republic to work, and skepticism is key to the whole experiment. The “self-rule” idea becomes a sham precisely when we pretend that people with power can always be trusted.

Obama wants the young people he’s addressing to ignore any evidence of present or impending tyranny. Don’t be fooled by people who point to this evidence! Reject these voices! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

That citizens inertly obey such instructions is certainly in the interest of all aspiring tyrants.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Nullification Today

As the federal government lurches further out of control, wildly grasping to increase control over our lives, an old and controversial method of reining in our central government gains popularity: State nullification of federal law.

A recent Rasmussen survey asked whether “states have the right to block any federal laws they disagree with on legal grounds,” and 38 percent of likely voters surveyed said “Yes.”

Cutting to the quick of the Commerce Clause, a new Kansas law — Senate Bill 102, the Second Amendment Protection Act, signed by Governor Sam Brownback last month — states that firearms manufactured and owned in Kansas that do not cross state lines are not subject to federal law.

Of course, the Supreme Court thinks otherwise. In Wickard v. Filburn, the Court allowed the federal government to regulate darn near anything on the grounds that any conceivable act of consumption affects demand, and thus “commerce.” Goofy ruling? Yes. But by tradition it’s the Supreme Court justices who get the final word.

Yet even that has been denied by many constitutional theorists, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — “Mr. Constitution” himself — both of whom supported nullification, as recently explained by historian Tom Woods. No compact joined into by multiple parties may only be interpreted by one of the parties alone, unless specified to that effect. The Constitution doesn’t even mention judicial review, so the tradition of the Supreme Court’s final word is itself a matter of dispute.

Standing up for the status quo, Attorney General Eric Holder has written to Brownback against the new Kansas law, citing the Supremacy Clause. Problematic? Yes. But not easily dismissed.

Brownback has volleyed back.

At least we can expect the old issues of constitutional law to gain a new and lively hearing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The Wild Punch

Who hasn’t wanted to punch a politician?

But a fracas in Athens, Greece, yesterday, demonstrates that punching people, not to mention threatening them with firearms, is a bad idea, and too often apt to harm the wrong people.

In this case, the pugilist, Giorgos Germenis, was himself something of a “wrong person.” He’s one of 18 lawmakers in the Greek parliament representing the Golden Dawn Party, which is often described as “neo-Nazi” for its ugly nationalist, anti-foreigner sentiment — and for an awfully suspicious party logo.

Germenis had been part of a charitable effort held in Syntagma Square to hand out free food . . . but only to Greek natives! The government shut down the giveaway, and the scuffle, hours later, was part of the fallout. Reportedly blocked from reaching for his gun by security, Germenis threw a punch at Athens’s mayor, Giorgos Kaminis.

He missed the mayor, but hit a young girl.

Bruised, but not seriously hurt, the 12-year old did manage to escape becoming the centerpiece of the showdown between the anti-foreigner activists and the Athens City government.

Greece’s troubles don’t really have much to do with foreigners. Greek troubles, instead, have everything to do with Greek politicians, and the sad, once politically attractive but now quite bankrupt (fiscally and morally) habit of trying to live at the expense of everyone else.

Blaming foreigners is the wrong way out. (Here in America, too.)

Germenis’s group should have been allowed to give only to natives, but a hallmark of civilization is the respect for strangers, traders, wanderers. The Golden Dawners don’t have their hearts in the right place.

Which is shown by the wild punch and who it hit. An innocent. As usual.

This Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Sleep Rules?

Getting kids to go to bed at night, and to stay there till morning, and not get up, again and again, is possibly life’s greatest challenge. When I had young children, I was willing to do whatever it took.

Drink of water? Sure. Okay. No more.

Drone strike? Well, as tempting as that sounds . . . no.

But according to The Washington Post, Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni man, testified before the United States Senate that some parents in his country have taken to threatening their children at bedtime, “Go to sleep or I will call the planes.”

Pretty funny. Until it dawned on me that our USA is now scarier than the monster hiding underneath the bed.

“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” Muslimi warned, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon advisor, testified: “Every individual detained, targeted, and killed by the U.S. government may well deserve his fate. But when a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”

Anything that undermines the rule of law, undermines the United States of America.

It’s long past time we put the lawlessness of the killer drone program to bed . . . and not just till morning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Marathon Men

Prior to identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, upstanding members of the inane wing of the left intelligentsia fell all over themselves to express their earnest hope that the malefactors would turn out to be male right-wingers.

When the bombers turned out to be a couple of American lads who just happened to hail from Chechnya by way of Dagestan, and were Muslim, to boot, the disappointment was palpable. The burning desire to demonize white male tax protestors (read “Tea Party”/”militia” types) morphed into a defense of Islam and Muslim Americans at large . . . which is good, but why the defense of one set, but hatred for the other?

Now the “moral” conversation has switched to debating whether the surviving malefactor (the elder of the two brothers was killed in a shootout Thursday night), whose first name is Dzhokhar, should have been Mirandized (he was not) or even Guantanamoed (he hasn’t been so far).

Such is the state of ethical debate, today.

The story has overwhelmingly dominated the news. Why? Folks in general, including those on the inane left, like to hate bad guys. We’re fascinated by the story — more so, say, than the Texas fertilizer plant explosion that occurred the same week — because of the human element, the intent.

The malign intent.

But what the exact intention of these malefactors was, I don’t really know. What did they hope to accomplish? What could they achieve for Chechnya by killing Americans near a marathon finish line?

Once again folly and evil find intimate connection.

Maybe in some of our reactions, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

It Takes a Collectivist

First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or . . . the K-12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.

“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”

Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?

Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”

Of course.

What does Melissa Harris-Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.

Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers

A Sharp Report?

There’s a new report out on the GOP’s future prospects. The findings are grim; the recommendations are predictable and somewhat craven: “On messaging, we must change our tone — especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters. In every session with young voters, social issues were at the forefront of the discussion; many see them as the civil rights issues of our time. We must be a party that is welcoming and inclusive for all voters.”

Obvious problem? As Ms. Alex Palombo at DailyKos noted, the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Report is made up almost entirely of “surface suggestions.”

The deeper reality is that the Republicans have lost so much support in recent years mainly by betraying their one plank that appealed across party lines: fiscal responsibility.

The Republican Party will go nowhere until it gets serious and consistent about the principles of limited government. Sure, that has implications for social issues. I hope the GOP changes its position on gay marriage, which I support. Generally, I think progress on social issues can best be made outside of government.

But mostly what the GOP needs to do to thrive with the young, with women, with minorities, is to focus on the immediate threat to the country’s future, the federal government’s rising debt, continuing deficits and looming liabilities.

Were Republican politicians honest and serious about this, they could gain respect everywhere.

Still, many retain hope in surface tweaks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

 

 

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall term limits too much government

Don’t Copy Chávez

Americans eager to weaken various limits on political power here at home should pay closer attention to news from abroad.

Around the globe, killing presidential term limits is high on the to-do list of aspiring presidents-for-life.

Autocrats also dislike the right of citizen initiative. Even when they abstain from trying to kill initiative rights altogether, they often seek outrageous restrictions on them, or even stoop to harassing petitioners and voters.Hugo Cloned

One such enemy of the people was Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, now dead. Chávez was an equal-opportunity attacker of citizen rights. He expropriated businesses, bullied media, once even ordered soldiers to fire on anti-Chávez protesters (they refused). He also succeeded in eliminating presidential term limits.

In 2003, his government arranged for the public release of the names of Venezuelans who had signed a petition to recall Chávez. The names were stolen from the office charged with overseeing the petition drive and leaked to a pro-Chávez legislator, who then published them on his website. Many signers lost jobs, loans, and other opportunities controlled by the state.

American foes of term limits, initiative rights, and other constraints on concentrated power may think there’s no comparison. But every chipping away at protections against tyranny is dangerous.

While it is true that no single limit on power can substitute for all the cultural values and ideas that underlie our rights as free citizens, it is also the case that institutions and culture reinforce each other. The foundation of a building has more than one cornerstone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.