Category: individual achievement

Categories
individual achievement insider corruption

TheHealthSherpa.com

Government incompetence is no mystery. It’s very similar to government competence: throw enough money at a problem and something will happen.

It may not be what you want, or what you expected, but something will indeed happen.

The ObamaCare rollout is a grand example of governmental hubris and incompetence, as I explained this weekend at Townhall.com.

But the story has a more amusing twist. Three young professional website technicians saw the fiasco of healthcare.gov and decided to try a different approach, cooking up a website in their spare time.

They found enough information and access to information buried in the multi-million dollar contractors’ code, and reconfigured everything.

Their insight? The main ObamaCare website had it all backwards. People want to be able to start shopping immediately. So that’s what they allow visitors to do, start shopping without sign-up.

On e-commerce websites, you can sign up at almost any point.

The young men’s TheHealthSherpa.com is up and running, allowing people not served by a state-led marketplace to check out the “competition,” select the policy that’s right for them, and go directly to the company offering the service.

So how could three guys working pro bono do a better job than the inside-the-beltway “Internet” professionals who were paid millions?

The well-connected insiders were thinking as insiders do. Instead of seeing that their job was to entice customers, they tried corralling citizens, requiring people to first “sign up.”

Of course, the real and enduring problems of ObamaCare are on the “back end,” behind the websites, where the regulations and taxes and mandates (and pride and hubris and incompetence) will do the most damage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement

Just a Lot of Hard Work

Did it take courage to do what Bob Fletcher did?

Fletcher was a California resident who died this June at the age of 101. The New York Times reports how he helped Japanese neighbors after the U.S. began interning Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast, a shameful policy adopted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. (Some Germans and Italians were also interned during World War Two, but not on the same scale.)

In 1942, Al Tsukamoto asked Fletcher to run the grape farms of two family friends during their internment, in exchange for the profits. He agreed to manage those farms and Tsukamoto’s as well, working the total 90 acres for three years. He kept only half the profits.

“He saved us,” says Doris Taketa, who was 12 when Fletcher agreed to take care of her family’s farm.

Many other interned Japanese Americans lost their property.

Some Florin, California residents were upset with Fletcher for helping the Japanese. Even before the war, they had resented Japanese success.

In 2010, Fletcher recalled that he “did know a few [of my Japanese neighbors] pretty well and never did agree with the evacuation. They were the same as anybody else. It was obvious they had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.”

Fletcher downplayed his virtue in saving the livelihoods of his Japanese neighbors despite the hostility of other neighbors. “I don’t know about courage. It took a devil of a lot of work.”

Yes, he worked the farms, kept paying the taxes, and made money, too. I call that the happiest of possible outcomes: doing well by doing good; saving his neighbors at a profit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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
Accountability general freedom individual achievement initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

It’s a New Democracy!

Another New Year.

Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?

When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?

After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.

Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.

And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.

Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.

Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.

But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.

Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.

Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative . . . and a few unashamed exclamation points!!

This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

The Lion of Oregon

When I think of Oregon, I often think of Don McIntire. Last Friday, 74-year-old Don died from a heart attack suffered at home.

I knew him as a great storyteller, with a Mark Twain sort of wit. But McIntire was best known in the Beaver State as a longtime taxpayer activist, specifically the main proponent of Measure 5, a 1990 citizen initiative that limited the state’s oppressive property taxes.

Then-Governor Barbara Roberts hyperbolically predicted that if voters passed Measure 5, “people would die.” Nonetheless, voters enacted the citizen initiative . . . and lived to tell about it.

Learning of McIntire’s passing, Jason Williams with Oregon Taxpayers United recalled the many phone calls he’d received from senior citizens, expressing their “heartfelt gratitude for Measure 5” and saying, “If it wasn’t for Don McIntire, I wouldn’t be able to live in my home today.”

Radio talk show host Lars Larson recognized McIntire as “a tax hero to millions of Oregonians whose taxes were reduced by literally billions of dollars because of the tireless efforts of this man.”

“Don McIntire was a giant in Oregon’s limited government movement,” said Cascade Policy Institute founder Steve Buckstein. “He gave tirelessly of himself for literally decades to reign in the government he thought was too large and too intrusive. . . . Every Oregonian who wants to keep government in check owes Don McIntire a huge debt of gratitude.”

Thanks, Don, for siding with taxpayers. Rest in peace.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement video

Video: A Truly Great Olympian

A great sports event held greater-than-usual significance:

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture individual achievement

Two Legacies

Two great economists died this month.

Anna Schwartz, co-author with Milton Friedman of the classic A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, passed away last Thursday, at age 96. For reasons known only to a few Swedes, she did not receive the Nobel along with her more famous research partner.Anna Schwartz and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom, on the other hand, who died about two weeks earlier, at age 78, did manage to nab a Nobel.

While Mrs. Schwartz may not have received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, she had received the more popular honor of being dubbed “the high priestess of monetarism.” She knew more about the history of banking and finance than just about anyone. Tellingly, her intellectual odyssey didn’t stop when she reached retirement age.

In recent years, she attacked the politically popular notion that bailouts are a good idea during economic downturns. She also came out against the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, and argued that government was the main instigator of the 2008 financial bust.

She knew how to make waves.

Elinor Ostrom focused her work not on finance but on the problems associated with managing common-use resources. She found that government regulations tended to mismanage resources, while individuals and communities better negotiated creative and effective solutions to problems that previous economists deemed insoluble without government.

Like Anna Schwartz, she was much more than an armchair theorist. She didn’t merely draw equations on a blackboard and pontificate on how necessary it is for “government” to “fix it.” The evidence — which they collected — is in, government most often is the problem that must itself be fixed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement video

Video: Twelve Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs

Guy Kawasaki worked for Steve Jobs twice in his career, serving as an “evangelist” for Macintosh computers, among other things. So the lessons he learned from the revolutionary Mr. Jobs are worth thinking about. One of his lessons is skepticism (to put it nicely) about the opinions of “experts.” There are a lot of experts out there, and often they are wrong — or, at any rate, right only for a subset of cases. If you have an exceptional vision, exceptional drive, or simply one exceptional notion, you may want to just ignore the naysayers amongst professional know-it-alls. (This echoes a theme I floated earlier this week.)

Oh, and if you are not familiar with the talks given at TED conferences, check out ted.com.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement too much government

Skipping the Political Pomp

Tim Thomas is the All-Star goaltender for the Boston Bruins, winners of the National Hockey League’s 2011 Stanley Cup — which “was won by defense as much as by offense,” President Barack Obama said yesterday at a White House event honoring the team:

Tim Thomas posted two shutouts in the Stanley Cup finals and set an all-time record for saves in the postseason, and he also earned the honor of being only the second American ever to be recognized as the Stanley Cup playoffs MVP.

But Thomas wasn’t there to hear the president’s praise. He chose not to attend, explaining cogently in a statement:
Tim Thomas

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People. . . . This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country.

Boston Bruins President Cam Neely explained that Thomas’s “views certainly do not reflect those of . . . the Bruins organization.”

Sportswriter Joe McDonald charged that “when the president of the United States invites you . . . you go and represent the team,” and that “Thomas instead chose to represent himself.”

Yes, as Thomas admitted: “This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.”

His quiet, conscientious choice to stay home — no news conference or interviews — was heard loud and clear by me.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

You’re the Top

Rob Walton is rich, $21 billion rich.

An email I received yesterday from the folks at Wal-Mart Watch (WMW) implores me to click to a website to vote for Mr. Walton as “the worst of the 1 percent . . . the person who is doing the most with their wealth to exploit the rest of the country.”

Could this be true?

“The Waltons inherited that wealth,” WMW says, “much of it was created by paying many workers at poverty-level wages, offering poor benefits, and lowering conditions in the supply chain by demanding ever-lower prices.”

Count me out.

Even Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, had the right to give his wealth to whomever he wished, especially his children. Besides, as chairman of Wal-Mart for 20 years now, Rob’s earned plenty on his own.

The email forgets to mention that Wal-Mart provides more to the poor through lower prices than the federal government provides through food stamps.

And hey, didn’t workers at Wal-Mart apply for — and freely accept — their jobs? How many “living-wage” jobs has WMW created?

The sentence in bold type signals the real gripe, I bet: Rob Walton has transgressed by supporting causes that “advance a right wing agenda.” The Walton Family Foundation (of which he’s a board member) has donated to the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, school choice groups, and others.

Horrors! If Rob Walton is the worst of the 1 percent, the self-appointed vanguard of the 99 percent ought to occupy a mirror.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.