Category: moral hazard

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy Snowden

Clapper into the Clink?

James Clapper, lies, Congress, testimony, Senate Intelligence Committee, surveillance, civil liberty

Lying to Congress is a strange crime. A number of people have been prosecuted for it over the years, but Congress isn’t a court of law and, more to the point, Congress may present the densest source of lies in the United States.

The idea that it would be illegal for a citizen to lie to a den of liars is, well, a bit amusing.

But it is illegal, and definitely should be illegal, for government functionaries to give false testimony before Congress.

That’s why the case of the admittedly “untruthful”* James Clapper is so aggravating. When asked by Senator Ron Wyden, on the Senate floor, about data collection of phone calls by the U.S. federal government, he — the director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama from 2010 to 2017 — lied through his teeth.

And had not Edward Snowden leaked information on the National Security Administration’s metadata collection program, we would not have learned anything about it.

No wonder, then, that several congressmen want to prosecute Clapper before March 12, when the Statute of Limitations runs out on his crime. Steven Nelson at the Washington Examiner quotes Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) as all being in favor of siccing federal prosecutors on the forked tongue spymaster.

Senator Wyden warns that letting lies such as Clapper’s go unaddressed encourages Americans to be cynical about government, and “makes it possible, even probable, for hucksters and authoritarians to take power.”

Too late?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Clapper’s March 2013 whopper at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was that the NSA was “not wittingly” collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans. Later, to MSNBC, he characterized his artful dodge as having been “the least untruthful” way for him to respond.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture moral hazard

Through a Lens, Darkly

Matthew A. Sears, SJW, Social Justice Warrior, University, dialectic, truth, argument, protest

The “best debates” are ones in which one side shouts down the other side and threatens violence.

Well, that is what a Washington Post essay implies. In “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the real defenders of free speech on campus,” Matthew A. Sears, an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick, offers a bizarre take on current campus controversies.

After two years of bizarre antics from leftist student bodies in colleges and universities all over the country, academics as diverse as Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, and Camille Paglia have denounced the intentionally disruptive and even violent tactics of student mobs. We need to go back to the Socratic method and “the disinterested pursuit of truth,” as Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it.

Sears counters this by defending the “social justice approach” as better than a “disinterested pursuit of truth.” Instead of “constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.”

Conflating Socratic “dialectic” with the screaming matches and overt force used by the social justice students who have shut down lectures, seminars and fora featuring non-leftist figures such as Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray, is more effrontery than enlightening.*

And about that “social justice lens”? Lenses refract, mirrors reflect — and Sears’ argument, you will notice, defends bad behavior out of his classroom by focusing on how he teaches in class.

We don’t need mirrors or lenses to see the deflection here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It was heartening to read most commenters on the page engaging in a merciless “dialectic” against the author.

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Accountability crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency local leaders moral hazard Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

Lock Her Up

Deyshia Hargrav, superintendent, schoolboard, Vermilion Parish school board, free speech, government, local government, Lozman v. Riviera Beach, Florida, Supreme Court

“Who Are We?” I asked Sunday at Townhall.com.

Today’s question: What have we come to?

Under a seemingly click-bait headline in The Atlantic, “Can Government Officials Have You Arrested for Speaking to Them?” Garrett Epps examines last week’s outrageous handcuffing and arrest of a Louisiana teacher, Deyshia Hargrave, for speech displeasing to the Vermilion Parish school board at a public meeting.

The elementary school teacher complained about a $30,000 raise the board was giving the superintendent, noting that teachers had not seen an increase in nearly a decade. After asserting that the raise would be “basically taken out of the pockets of teachers,” she was ruled out of order by the school board president and then asked to leave the premises. She calmly left the meeting room . . . only to be forced to the floor, handcuffed and arrested once in the hallway.

Police claimed the arrest was for “remaining after having been forbidden” and “resisting an officer.”

The school district announced it won’t press charges. Very funny. Anyone can see from the video that her treatment was excessive.

Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Lozman v. Riviera Beach, Florida, where an arrest was clearly retaliatory, but the city is newly claiming another violation it could have used to arrest Mr. Lozman.

Does this after-the-fact adding on of charges provide governments with an escape clause? As Epps argues, a Lozman decision “could either rein in, or embolden, the tiny-handed tyrants who rule county buildings and city halls around the country.”

If respectfully challenging our so-called public servants in meetings designed for that can lead to being arrested, handcuffed and dragged off, we no longer live in ‘the land of the free.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability folly government transparency local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Babylon Goes Broke

California, pension, crisis, canary, cage, coal mine, spending, taxes

A few Babylonian, er, California cities going bankrupt — Stockton, Vallejo, and Bell — should be seen as more than dead canaries in a coalminer’s care.

Indeed, you don’t need special prophetic gifts to see the dangers posed by over-promising cushy pensions to government workers. Californians are coming around. And the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, appears to be “calling for reductions in gold-plated, unsustainable public-sector pensions,” as Nick Gillespie informs us at Reason.

But statewide reforms will not be easy. The problem is huge, presenting grave costs. “Absent the ability to alter pensions, states and localities have to devote more and more of their taxes to simply covering the costs of retired workers,” Gillespie explains. “Worse still, they often raise taxes to cover rising costs, typically at the expense of providing basic services such as police and road maintenance.”

Yes, over-promising defined-benefit pension packages effectively distributes wealth away from basic government services and into the pockets of the people with whom politicians work most closely.

Unfortunately, the courts long ago decided that politicians’ promises to employees outweigh basic government duties. That is, the courts determined that “public-sector employees at all levels of government had an inviolable right to the pension benefits that existed on the day they were hired.”

But the courts seem to be lightening up on this “California Rule,” and the governor has dared mention that, come “the next recession,” some headway might be possible.

No matter what you may think of this rather desperate hope, the writing is on the wall. And it is in red ink and numbers, not Babylonian.*

As America’s Babylon is finding out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* And not “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

Earmark This Bad Argument

earmarks, ear marks, pork, Congress, spending, corrumption, deals

With President Trump endorsing a return to earmarks, House Republicans too are reportedly “reconsidering” their usefulness and pondering “how they might ease back into the practice.” Lawmakers fret that they have lost too much power by giving up this instrument of corruption. (Not their characterization.)

Wikipedia defines “earmark” as a budgetary provision that “directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or [competitive] allocation process.” An earmark is a taxpayer-funded goodie bestowed on a congressman’s constituent, the sort of crony willing to contribute to the bestower’s next election campaign in return.

Quid pro quo, pay-for-play, bribery. Whatever you call it, there’s darn good reason why political leaders who fight corruption have fought to end earmarks.

Congressional Republicans imposed a ban on earmarks in 2011 to show that they were anti-corruption. So why relapse? Well, “the time is right,” according to GOP Representative John Culberson, for Congress to prove it can use earmarks responsibly. His bad argument is that the “excesses” of a decade ago were committed by “knuckleheads [who] went overboard.”

Somebody alert Culberson to the fact that many of the same knuckleheads are still in office. Ahem. Congress is not yet term-limited, remember?

The more basic point is that earmarks are by nature corrosive of sound government. President Trump’s only metric is apparently “getting [things] done” as opposed to obstructionism, preferring “the great friendliness” when we had earmarks. Sure, stuff got done — a lot more spending, a lot more bad stuff.

To the extent they’re gone, earmarks should stay gone. The only appropriate action is to make it even harder to bring them back.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy tax policy

Hey, It’s Your Money

tax cut, trickle down, supply side, taxes, jobs, employment

I leave it up to you how to spend your own money. You decide, based on your own circumstances and priorities.

Oh, you don’t need my permission?

Of course not.

But some people think that if you spend your own money on your own priorities in accordance with your own judgment, it is indeed a problem. At least when you get to keep more of your own money because of tax cuts.

President Trump has often suggested that recipients of new corporate tax cuts will spend the additional money mostly on increasing wages and hiring new workers. Yet some major corporations reportedly say that they will spend the additional money on paying dividends or buying back shares. Maybe others will buy more advertising, storage space or tools. Various commentators fret. But why should a firm hire new workers if other expenditures would be more productive at the moment?

Of course, in the long run, a company that is more profitable and successful can hire more people and can pay them more.

But wages are not the only expense that companies must cover in order to be successful in the long run. Managers do, and should, devote resources first to the improvements that they conclude are most urgent. That a company’s resources increase because of a tax cut doesn’t alter the necessity or reasonableness of pursuing economic goals in accordance with one’s best judgment.

An approach that, to be sure, also benefits present employees as well as future ones.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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