Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

A Matter of Trust

You don’t trust President Barack Obama?

No faith in the massive federal bureaucracy? Do you lack confidence in Congress representing your interests? How much do you trust the federal courts that handle secret requests from the Department of Justice . . .and then issue secret decisions based on the judge’s secret interpretation of the law?

Be advised: President Obama finds “your lack of faith disturbing.”

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch, but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law,” Obama told reporters in response to the public uproar to a leak of classified information suggesting that the detailed phone records of every American have been seized by the National Security Agency, “then we’re going to have some problems here.”

Agreed. Problems galore. The morning paper reads like a dystopian novel.

Are we really supposed to feel protected by a federal judge in a secret court wherein only the government is represented?

Or represented by Congress, for goodness sake?! Only a few congressmen are told, and those sworn to secrecy.

The Obama Administration incredibly calls this set-up “an unprecedented degree of accountability and transparency.”

There are compelling national security interests, upon which our rights must be balanced, the president explains. But in our constitutional system, as I argued at Townhall.com yesterday, there is no more compelling national interest than that the government fully obey the Fourth Amendment — and the entire document, please.

Thank you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

A Smear Is Not an Argument

Given that former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been so frequent a target of smears himself, one would hope he’d be loathe to engage in same.

But at a recent forum, the software maestro was less than his moral best when asked about the book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, by Zambian writer Dambisa Moyo. Gates, now a full-time philanthropist, charged that Moyo “didn’t know much about aid” (a topic she’s been investigating for years) and that “books like that are promoting evil.”

Moyo’s book considers the long-term effects of non-emergency aid. She argues that it can encourage corruption and discourage the development of free enterprise. For example, when Western aid organizations distribute large quantities of mosquito nets, they can put a native seller of mosquito nets out of business.

Moyo is not arguing against all aid regardless of circumstances (as Gates seems to assume), but rather against ongoing or “structural” aid that fosters long-term dependency, lines the pockets of dictators, and makes it easier to defer basic reforms. Her diagnosis may be arguable. But Gates didn’t argue. He just smeared the woman and her book.

Evil? For considering costs? Cause and effect? The long run?

Businessmen are lucky, so to speak: They exist in a system that tells them when they are doing well, no matter what critics say. Gates thrived at Microsoft, despite choruses of critics. Now he has entered a field dominated more by good intentions than accepted standards of output. Hence the ugly nature of this dispute, and perhaps why he eschewed what Moyo identifies as “logical counter-argument.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

Ding Jinhao Was There

Boys will be boys. And tourists will be tourists.

Not long ago, a graffito was spotted on an ancient Egyptian wall — a stone relief, with pictographs and representations and the whole gamut of ancient Egyptian art — photographed and then posted to the Internet, where it got more than 100, 000 comments.

It was soon discovered to have been scratched into the wall by a 15-year-old lad from Nanjing: his mark read “Ding Jinhao was here.” And then came the firestorm. Though the BBC tells us that Egypt’s ministry of antiquities has dubbed the scratchmarks “superficial,” the “controversy comes days after Wang Yang, one of China’s four vice-premiers, said . . . that the ‘uncivilised behaviour’ of some Chinese tourists was harming the country’s image.”

Welcome, China!

Previously, the world had been blessed with the Ugly American, the Annoying European, and the Over-Photographing Japanese — tourists from wealthy or up-and-coming countries not uniformly presenting their respective nations in the best possible light as they tramped abroad.

In this case, though, it’s worth noting that most of the scandal is confined to China itself. The bloggers’ ire was primarily an in-group thing, and even the government (especially the government?) has gotten in on the shame game bandwagon, trying to needle tourists to behave themselves. (So much so that the desecrating teen’s father pleaded for the critics to let up — “too much pressure,” he said.)

As an I-try-not-to-be-ugly American, I appreciate the Chinese concern for manners and image — honor, really. And hope that all their graffiti remains easy to repair, and that the concern for national honor doesn’t go too far in over-reaction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.