Bernie manages to pack quite a lot into one statement…
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Category: nannyism
Progressives are becoming increasingly defensive about nearly all forms of Big Government, relentlessly telling us that we need government for everything from money and roads to food inspection and subsidies and . . . well, the list is endless.
Food safety is one of their favorite subjects, but I’m increasingly skeptical. Do we really need to be protected from our neighbors’ produce and cooked goods, as can be found in community bake sales and potlucks?
In Arizona, legislators had long carved out an exemption from commercial food safety regulations for potluck and similar “noncommercial social events.” Great. But there was an unfortunate limitation to the exemption: it applied only to such events that took place at a workplace.
Home or church? Potlucks there are still against the law.
So of course officials took the occasion of said “loophole” to crack down on some neighborly events in an Apache Junction mobile home park, in Pinal County.
I’m sure hundreds, perhaps thousands of these events are routinely ignored by Arizona’s police. Indeed, I bet half of the state’s better cops engage in such activities themselves — just because potlucks are part of everyday life all over the country.
But the idiotic regulation allowed public servants (loosely so called) discretionary powers to attack a few people for reasons tangential to community safety. Thankfully, Rep. Kelly Townsend has introduced HB 2341, which would extend potluck freedom beyond the office or warehouse workplace.
Let us be clear: this was not a problem waiting to be solved by Big Government. It is a Big Government problem to be solved by new legislation to de-regulate home and community potlucks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Building a mega-state to fight corporate power…
…is like giving yourself AIDS to fight the flu.
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Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders winning in New Hampshire is as good an indicator as any that Americans — or at least Live Free or Die staters — are tired of the bipartisan Establishment. Victories for a billionaire iconoclast and a self-designated socialist.
Both are “players” in their distinct ways: the former a publicity-minded entrepreneur who boasts of having been a briber of politicians, the latter as a long-term senator with a consistently pro-government-growth voting record.
But both are plausibly outsiders, too. Trump speaks off the cuff and in an entertainingly anti-PC manner, and Sanders proclaims a love of government so strong that he willingly embraces a label with a very negative record throughout the last century.
Indeed, Trump’s many words and Sanders’s One Word serve to negate these two candidates’ “establishment feel.”
But if elected, would either rock the Establishment boat?
Based on his voting record, Sanders is liable to continue the bipartisan “War, Always War” strategy abroad, along with the same domestic policy of “Spend, Always Overspend.”
That is Establishment.
Trump is less of a warmonger than Sanders, oddly enough: The Donald has criticized the Iraq War, argued that Russia should take care of its nearby Syria problem, and offered that China should worry about North Korea . . . in other words, he can conceive of foreign areas being outside of American purview.
But Trump is as protectionist as Sanders, and loves taking property from private individuals (with “just compensation”) and giving it to developers . . . like himself. You cannot get more Establishment than that.
Still, New Hampshire voters know something, and that something is undoubtedly that something must change.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
He’s never met a government monopoly he didn’t love, or a free market service he didn’t distrust or despise…
…but don’t worry, he’s not really a socialist!
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The modern age sports an amazing feature that used to be hard to detect, because so drawn out: a shorter-than-ever-before lag between the proposal of some popular inanity and its complete debunking.
It used to take seemingly forever for a bad idea to be shown up, either in argument or evidence. Now it can be a matter of days or even hours. Call it the Buncombe/Debunking Lagtime.
Take the Flint, Michigan, water fiasco.
When the story hit the news cycle, almost immediately the progressive meme machinery began cranking out slogans imposed upon visuals — jpegs and gifs — to the effect that the poisoned water was the result of Republican “austerity” or (even) “libertarian” policy.
Somehow a Democratic mayor was less to blame than a more distant Republican governor, but in the minds of knee-jerk partisans, common sense is not as important as an in-your-face accusation.
But now, days and scant weeks into the story, it turns out that the story behind the story is not merely wrong, but entirely, upside-down wrong. The Flint water fiasco was caused by a stimulus project, and the switch from bad to worse water sources was made to promote “jobs”!
In the words of Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, “the Flint water crisis is the result of a Keynesian stimulus project gone wrong.”
Yes, another failed Big Government policy — just like progressives are always pushing.
And it didn’t take years for the truth to seep out.
Hooray for today’s accelerated history! Now, if we could only decrease the lagtime between lesson given and lesson learned.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Democrats aren’t very good at democracy.
Consider the party’s presidential contest, as I did yesterday at Townhall.
As an appetizer, I noted the Democratic National Committee policy of hiding their debates from viewers by placing them on weekend evenings pitted against major sporting events.
For meat and potatoes, ponder my warning of the very ugly scenario of Sen. Bernie Sanders capturing as much as 58 percent of the primary and caucus vote and resulting delegates, but still losing to Hillary Clinton.
How could that possibly happen?
Because of folks designated as “superdelegates” — those awarded voting delegate status for holding a party office or being an elected or former elected official.
Democrats brag that they’ve reduced these insiders’ impact. Democratically-unaccountable superdelegates once accounted for 30 percent of Democratic Party convention delegates; now it’s only 15 percent of the total. Still, Clinton leads Sanders 380 to eleven among superdelegates.
At that rate, she could lose the actual state elections and still win the party’s presidential nomination.
The Democrats’ dereliction of democratic duty doesn’t end there, either.
The process by which various powerful party “interests” endorsed either Sanders or Clinton is quite telling. Journalist Zaid Jilani reports in The Intercept that, “Every major union or progressive organization that let its members have a vote endorsed Bernie Sanders.”
“Meanwhile,” Jilani found, “all of Hillary Clinton’s major group endorsements come from organizations where the leaders decide. And several of those endorsements were accompanied by criticisms from members about the lack of a democratic process.”
Seems the insiders have decided Mrs. Clinton will be on the Democratic Party presidential menu, whether Democrats like it or not.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Government failure checklist. . .
Reference:
The Government Poisoned Flint’s Water—
So Stop Blaming Everyone Else
Flint’s water crisis isn’t a failure of austerity. It’s a failure of government.
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Bernie Sanders promises universal health care, but, up until the other day, just waved his hands in the air, without specifics. Now he has a plan.
Sort of.
Ezra Klein, writing at Vox, says Sanders’s “Medicare for All” is not a plan at all. It’s a “gesture towards a future plan.”
But that doesn’t mean that the thing isn’t “well sold.”
After praising the Obamacare/Affordable Health Care Act for giving “health insurance” to more than 17 million people, the preamble of Sanders’s proposal made its most predictable statement: “Twenty-nine million Americans today still do not have health insurance and millions more are underinsured and cannot afford the high copayments and deductibles charged by private health insurance companies that put profits before people.”
Forget that deductibles are integral to the very idea of insurance. Forget that profits are absolutely necessary for the success of an industry. Forget that profits come from serving people.
Remember, instead, the leftist clichés.
Sanders’s plan, such as it is, is a lie — or, in Klein’s phrasing, “has nothing to do with Medicare.” Sanders aims to get rid of deductibles and copays, on which Medicare depends. It’s what makes Medicare distinct from, say, socialized medicine.
Insurance covers individually unforeseeable but actuarially manageable risks. Socialized medicine gets rid of the idea of “payment for service” on every level — and thus the very idea of insurance — and turns the whole thing over into a tax-and-spend program, i.e., what Sanders really wants.
That won’t be cheap, as Megan McArdle demonstrated some time back during the Vermont “single payer” kerfuffle.
The only option for increasing value while lowering prices? Go the opposite direction from socialism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Tragedy has hit the environmental movement: The price of oil is going down.
And may go down further.
While environmentalists quiver, science writer Ronald Bailey chortles. “Resource depletionists” — the prophets of “peak oil” — should, he says, hide their heads in shame! They’ve been so very, very wrong in the prophecy biz.
As oil descends towards $20 per barrel, we should ask ourselves: where’s the tragedy? Well, it will postpone the switch to non-fossil fuels. The need is far from obvious, and the incentive is to use energy in its cheapest, most efficient forms.
But if increased CO2 in the atmosphere is destabilizing the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystem, cheaper oil (and thus more burning of it) might lead to the much-ballyhooed tragedy for all.
Still, that’s a big “if” — the more we learn about the climate, the more doubtful the identified CO2 causation and attendant doom.
Besides, global warming catastrophism’s implicit message — the “need” for global political control over everybody and everything to “manage” climate changes — seems awfully convenient for those who just love intrusive government . . . on “principle.”
It echoes the Keynesian technocratic conceit in economics — that experts should manage the economy by fiscal methods (increasing debt) and monetary intervention (central bank interest rate manipulation and bad asset purchase). It’s pretty obvious that they shouldn’t, because they’ve demonstrated they can’t.
As prices for oil defy “peak oil” prophets’ predictions, it becomes obvious: the world works differently than dreamed up by the prophets of doom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
