Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture responsibility

If You Build It, They Will Come

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was criticized for telling business folks “You didn’t get there on your own. . . . You didn’t build that.”

He meant something more than the truism that a successful businessperson functions not in splendid isolation but in cooperation with others, like employees and vendors (presumably compensated). He meant that successful people shouldn’t be so proud of their virtues. Also they must pay more taxes.

Surrogates yipped that Obama’s denigration of individual achievement wasn’t what it sounded like. But his inaugural address was more of the same. Charles Krauthammer calls the speech “an ode to collectivity,” with its stress not on voluntary associations but on coercive orchestration by the state. According to Obama, for example, “No single person can” do all the good things like build research labs and train teachers that we supposedly must do “as one people.”

Sounds like a glaring false alternative. David Boaz observes that “property rights, limited government and the rule of law”—under assault by Obama—are what we need to safeguard the voluntary cooperation critical to our progress and individual flourishing. I would add that we necessarily pay our own way as we engage in voluntary trade. We do “build that,” and so does the other guy.

Government can confine itself to protecting our rights in trade and otherwise leave us alone, or it can actively plunder our achievements. If the latter, we have less of what we built. Even though we did build that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Seize the Epoch

President Obama was sworn in for a second term on Sunday, re-enacting the rite on Monday so he could leverage the attention of a traditional news day.

Obama makes a good speech. He intones “We, the People,” with a pause in the middle: “We . . . the People.” He tells us to seize the moment.

But I’m not at all sure he’s seizing — or sizing up — the facts. He says, “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” As I understand it, those who do very well have increased in number. Many folks have moved out of the middle-income earning category into the upper regions. We’ve more millionaires now than ever — even adjusted for inflation. Their ranks aren’t exactly shrinking.

Many of us are struggling, though. And we struggle under the watch of a general “progressive” mindset. You can’t blame income trends on the “free market.” Though some sectors of the economy are pretty free — the important new technology sector, for instance, and much of consumer retail — the medical and financial sectors are heavily regulated and managed by government, and the housing market has been transformed by multiple government policy initiatives. And here, with these three institutions, is where we’ve taken the biggest hits.

And where some of the worst effects on the poorer amongst us can be felt — and where the biggest pro-rich policies can be seen. Think bailouts, for starters.

The Progressives long ago seized the epoch. The necessity of the moment is to seize it back from them. Their policies of government intrusion and management have rigged the game to get us where we are now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

A New Leaf

There’s apparently more than one way to mess up money.

Canada’s new plastic banknotes don’t work in all vending machines, I hear . . . and there’s a less practical problem with the new C$20 note: It has the “wrong” maple leaf on it.

Some botanists are complaining that the stylized leaf logo is not Canada’s native species, but one hailing from Norway.

I’ve not seen one of these bills up close (donations would be appreciated, though), but from the photo, the thing I’d be worrying about is that the Queen, on the basis of her appearances on bank notes, looks more like Dwight D. Eisenhower every year.

Here in America, our Washington insiders mess up money both symbolically and substantively.

In the old days, before president-worship had become something of the country’s official religion, Liberty was represented by female representatives or Indians. (The fact that the U.S. government killed off and hounded remaining populations of native Americans in that time put the latter practice into some cognitive dissonance.) Now, both coins and notes feature dead presidents. Frankly, I think we should junk the presidents and go back to stylized, classical representations of Liberty.

The biggest symbolic problem is having Andrew Jackson, America’s most successful and vehement anti-central banking president, placed on our central bank’s $20 note.

That’s an insult, not an honor.

Another way to mess up money is to devaluate it by over-printing.

Or creating too much credit. Or good old-fashioned seignorage. With the Quantitative Easing and “trillion dollar coin,” we’ve got these last two covered. Alas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

What’s in a Game?

I’ve lived near Washington, D.C., for 21 years, but somehow the local obsession for the Washington Redskins has never taken hold. Most of my “NFL time” has been spent rooting for Washington’s agony of defeat.

Recent seasons have been very, very good to me. But this year, an impressive rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III, led the team into the playoffs. In the opening game, RGIII and the ’Skins jumped out to a 14-0 lead. But Griffin, already hurt, re-injured his knee and had to leave the game. The Seattle Seahawks came back to win, ending the Redskins’ season.

That’s when Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy pounced, blaming the team’s loss squarely on “bad karma” caused by the “offensive team name and demeaning sports mascot.” Milloy even called the star quarterback a “noble savage.”

Sports columnist Mike Wise urged Griffin to take up the issue of the team’s name. “I just figure that, as a good, decent inhabitant of the planet,” Wise wrote, “he would respect the groundswell of offended people who don’t want to cheer for a team that enshrines America’s persecution of its indigenous people.”

Hey, Native Americans are cool, and U.S. Government policy toward misnamed “Indians” was very uncool — and dishonest and corrupt. So while I hate to see teams being coerced to toss out mascots like Chiefs, Braves, Warriors, Fighting Sioux, Seminoles, Fighting Illini, I think it a grand effrontery that Washington’s football team is named the Redskins.

It’s not just that the name “Redskins” offends — the mascot represents Washington, home to the government that cheated and abused Native Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Protect Us, Big Brother

Have Sixties-era flower children, those free spirits who once believed in peace and “doing your own thing,” been so conquered by fear that they now embrace a zero-tolerance, Big Brother-ish national security state?

Sixties generation folks largely run the show these days.

Is it blinding fear of terrorism that convinced them to allow unconstitutional violations of civil liberties? Or to permit the peace-prize-winning president to launch assassination drone strikes from prepared “kill lists,” with admittedly no legal framework to check this new life-and-death power?

Now, after the Newtown school shooting, we again see fear driving the agenda, threatening further erosion of liberty and giving new powers to government.

As the White House announces its agenda to tackle so-called “gun violence,” expect President Obama to follow a 13-point legislative and executive action program* just released by a key progressive think tank, The Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP calls for super-sizing the National Instant Criminal Background Check database, by tying federal funds to states turning over more information on those deemed “mentally ill,” and by pushing all federal agencies to share data on known drug use, etc.

Yes, the new progressive solution to mass shootings is a federal database containing information on every American who has ever seen a shrink or is believed to have smoked weed.

Congress is also urged to pass legislation denying those “suspected” of terrorism their Second Amendment rights. No need for trials anymore.

Still feeling groovy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Not to be confused with the 13-Point Program to Destroy America, an album by the punkish band Nation of Ulysses, album cover pictured above.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement too much government

None of Us Are Angels

An old thought: Were we all angels, we wouldn’t need government. Indeed, were we angels, it wouldn’t matter what kind of government we had.

But we’re not angels. We have limitations. Each one of us judges according to our own context-ridden conception of advantage and value, bound by our differing perspectives and situations. Despite our love for others, that love isn’t infinite and it doesn’t often trump our perceived self-interests, and it certainly isn’t angelically unlimited.

So we need something very much like government, and that government needs limits.

We need protection from criminals, but we also need protection from those who would protect us, who can — with “government power” — usurp their roles and become criminal themselves.

This is, I repeat, a very old thought.

Yet it seemed new when James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock advanced something very much like it with their book The Calculus of Consent, and in the many great contributions of their separate careers.

James M. Buchanan died this Wednesday. Before his contributions, economists typically assumed that public servants would swoop in like saving angels, setting the world aright according to the latest mathematical models, disinterestedly, without partisan passion or individual error.

Naive in the extreme.

Thanks to Buchanan, economists today occasionally go so far to confess that though markets often “fail,” merely appointing government to “fix” markets can put us in a bigger fix, since government failure is rampant. Government isn’t magic. It doesn’t change our natures for the better merely by being instituted, or by being called “government.” Power still corrupts, and economists now have to deal with that ugly but unavoidable fact.

By showing us that we’re no angels, Buchanan put himself on the side of the angels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

We’re All Bond Fans Now

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is so well liked that there’s even Oscar buzz about it. But it’s not just moviegoers who feel like they’ve entered a new era.

In the new flick, M, played by Judi Dench, argues before a parliamentary board that, because “the enemy” can be just about anybody these days, now’s really the time for some good old-fashioned espionage, James Bond-style. You know, with casual murders committed by men given a “license to kill.”

But things have changed. The old Bond skirmished with Russkies while fighting rich criminals who dreamed of destroying or ruling the world. Today’s Bond fights an ex-agent who wants to hurt the higher-ups in the spy biz who had hurt him.

In reality, it’s the U.S. President — Felix Leiter’s boss — who has the license to kill, exercising it by overseeing multiple drone programs, the practice of rendition, and a developing program called a “disposition matrix,” which aims to target people who are up-and-comers in the America-hating (and thus) terrorist game.

Many critics have noted that the recent Bond films starring the brilliant Daniel Craig have become more personal and less gadgety. Maybe that’s the way real-life spying plays in Britain (I doubt it) but from the American perspective, the current reality of drone strikes overseas, unregulated-by-law rendition tribunals, and database management geared to determining terrorist psychology is positively science-fictional.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

This is not a Brave New World or a 1984, I realize. But it still frightens.

Indeed, for people in the targeted regions it must be pure horror. America’s ruling classes have upped the game. And we can expect to reap a . . . skyfall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture responsibility

Thoughtful Kindness

Bumper stickers. Now that’s free speech. Which I love. But that doesn’t mean I love all bumper stickers. Sure, some are cute, funny, occasionally brilliant. Others are just crude.

But my least favorite bumper sticker might surprise you. The bumper strip that ticks me off the most reads:

“Practice Random Acts Of Kindness And Senseless Acts Of Beauty.”

Now, most folks who put this one on their car are nice. They’re thinking about “kindness” and “beauty” — so, I’m certainly not gonna say anything if I see them at the market.

But . . . why waste kindness by doing it randomly? The random implies heedlessness, thoughtlessness. How much better to be provident in kindness, thinking ahead and in context.

Should the purse-snatcher really benefit as much or more from our kindness as the little girl in the neighborhood who is always helping us with our groceries?

Should our lazy, good-for-nothing brother-in-law get what time we have for kindness or should it go to someone who will take our kindness and turn it around into even more kindness?

Now, I’m not suggesting anyone be unkind to anyone. But precisely because practicing kindness is so important — it’s the glue that holds a friendly society together — it is worth taking the time to recognize and reward good behavior. Rather than bad. Or just sticking the dial on “random.”

And how can beauty ever be senseless?

How about a new bumper sticker: “Practice Thoughtful Acts of Kindness and Sensible Acts of Beauty”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

This installment of Common Sense first aired in November 2006.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Cold as Ice

Well, it’s a few days after the much-ballyhooed End of the World, wherein the magnetic poles were (according to some less-than-astute prognosticators) supposed to flip — North would go negative, and South, positive — causing volcanoes, tidal waves, and all sorts of havoc.

But Christmas Eve has arrived on schedule, the Mayan calendar goes back to being as irrelevant as Isaac Asimov’s idea of a quarterly calendar that would “abolish the months,” and we can return to thinking about the upcoming magnetic pole flip in a scientific way, sans Apocalypse.

Indeed, on Christmas Eve, the only talk about poles is about Santa’s storied connection with the North.

But hey: don’t think Arctic, think Antarctic. The big story, today, is that Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee monarch of America’s “Mother Country” (sorry, Mother), is getting a plot of land on the Frozen Continent named after her.

Yes, to celebrate her 60 years on the throne, she attended a cabinet meeting, and received 60 place mats, one for each year of “service.”

“Can’t have too many place mats,” somebody said. Or must’ve.

Then she was chauffeured over to the Foreign Office where she received the “fitting tribute” of a big triangle of forbidding land south of the Ronne Ice Shelf, which will be called Queen Elizabeth Land. I’m assuming it’s a tribute to her warmth of personality.

Frankly, I’d prefer the place mats. But then, having a stretch of land you will never visit named after you is its own kind of place mat. Just goes to show you that giving gifts is not easy. What do you give the Person who has everything?

That is, everything but relevance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

An Actor’s Act

Think you can raise taxes without negative consequences? Consult Gerard Depardieu.

The great French actor (known for his prominent schnozz) moved across the border to Belgium, and is giving up his French passport. While other well-off folks who have moved out of their native land, such as billionaire Bernard Arnault, pretend that their moves are for non-tax reasons, Depardieu has no problem admitting that he’s leaving his country to avoid next year’s whopping new wealth tax.

For this, he has been criticized by France’s prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who publicly censured Depardieu for a lack of patriotism “at a time of cutbacks” and judged the actor’s decision “shabby.”

“Paying a tax is an act of solidarity,” Ayrault intoned on TV, “a patriotic act.”

Depardieu rightly objects, accusing the socialist government of President Francois Hollande of “driving France’s most talented figures out of the country”:

“I am leaving because you consider that success, creation, talent, anything different, must be punished,” he said.

Depardieu said that during his long career he had paid 145m euros (£118m) to the French taxman.

“At no time have I failed in my duties. The historic films in which I took part bear witness to my love of France and its history,” he said.

But it’s hard to maintain “solidarity” with a beloved country going socialist. Depardieu will find a lot of sympathy with his plight from even not-so-rich Americans. You know, we who put freedom and achievement and principle above kleptocracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.