Category: nannyism

Digs at the Gig Economy

Uber, Lyft, sharing, economy, HIllary, Bernie, illustration

In Texas’s progressive enclave of Austin, the government has regulated Uber and Lyft out of the city.

Massachusset’s uber*-progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren cautions that the “much-touted virtues”of the “gig economy” that these services represent are actually dark signs of the times, providing workers a false “step in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world where all the benefits are floating to the top 10 percent.”

Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, is also no fan. Why? These services are not regulated.

Sanders’s charge that these person-to-person (P2P) ride-sharing services are “unregulated” is of course the opposite of the truth. They are self-regulated for safety and efficiency in ways that taxi services never were. How much extra value did governments add, with their regulations of the taxicab industry? They just reduced competition and made cabs more expensive.

P2P online cooperation is revolutionary. And “progressives” are stuck in the past, itching to suppress that revolution. “Initially,” writes Jared Meyer in the July issue of Reason, “hostility mostly came from state and municipal governments, at the behest of local special interests.” But as the services became more popular, opposition shifted. To the national Democrats like Sanders, Warren and … Hillary Clinton. She promises to “crack down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors or even steal their wages.”

Par for the course: the Internet provides more opportunity than ever, and all some progressives see are the old socialist fears of “exploitation” and “greed” … while they greedily suck up to unions and special interests.

The bright side, Meyer argues, is that they are on the losing side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*I guess the pun here is intended. Or not. You choose, P2P style.

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Tags gig economy, labor unions, Lyft, regulations, sharing economy, Uber

Accountability ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility

The Climate Cassandra

Global warming, climate change, illustration

Thirty years ago, in June, 1986, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee met to consider the problems of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, and climate change.

Present at those hearings was today’s climate Cassandra, James Hansen, then of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. And he was predicting that “global temperatures should be nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years,” according to Associated Press reporting at that time.

There was some sloppiness either in Hansen’s account, or the AP’s, for in one part of his testimony Hansen claimed that his institute’s climate models projected, for “the region of the United States, the warming 30 years from now is about 1 1/2 degrees C, which is about 3 F.”

Ronald Bailey, the science writer over at Reason, tries to make sense of this mess of numbers, models, and predictions.

Oh, and actual, tabulated results.

Hansen’s predictions went, as Bailey put it, “definitively off the rails when tracking the temperature trend for the contiguous U.S. between 2000 and 2016. Since 2000, according to the NOAA calculator, the average temperature trend has been downward at ‑0.06 F degree per decade.”

That’s not the whole picture, though: “global temperatures have increased by 0.51 C degree since 1986, so perhaps the man-made global warming signal has finally emerged.”

No matter, though, as Bailey notes, “the United States and the Earth have warmed at considerably slower pace than Hansen predicted 30 years ago.”

Which suggests that Hansen’s models may be inspired more by wish, fear, and ideology than genuine science.

So, to those who wish to rush to “do something” (anything?) to combat “climate change,” take it slow. Follow the pace of the Earth itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags climate change, global warming, James Hansen, prediction

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Beggar Thy Philanthropist

seatbelt, trap, police, Regina, Saskatchewan, illustration

Making up petty rules and enforcing them is one thing governments do well.

On Monday I warned about the dangers of asking too much from government. I think, today, I’ll make the opposite warning: of not asking enough.

Mandatory seatbelt laws were enacted (sometimes by citizens initiative and referendum) to save people’s lives. But the reason many police and local jurisdictions like these laws is that it gives them a chance to engage in shakedowns, entrapping citizens into non-compliance, and then socking them with fines.

In Regina, Saskatchewan, a man pulled up to an intersection and saw a down-and-outer with a sign. He felt sorry for him, so, as he pulled up, he unbuckled his seat belt and pulled three bucks in change out of his pocket. And dropped the three dollars on the curb.

A few moments later, police stopped him, and handed him a ticket. The “homeless guy” with the sign turned out to have been an undercover cop, and the few moments without a seat belt was enough to charge our philanthropist $175 Canadian.

Though an obviously preposterous misuse of police time and attention, and an abuse of the citizenry, Regina’s police force remains adamantine, claiming that “this is nothing new. It’s part of a project that has police watching for traffic violations at intersections.”

Because this sort of thing only hits people almost at random, but the benefits are concentrated on police coffers, it’s hard to organize against such nonsense. Which is precisely why such nonsense goes on.

Still, we must prevent such abuse at the local level, if we’re ever to control the federal leviathan.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Canada, law, police, seat belts, ticket

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights

A New Way to Steal

ERAD, gift card, civil asset, forfeiture, stealing, theft, drug war

The fight against government theft of private property, through “civil forfeiture,” just got a little harder.

There’s a new technology available: ERAD card scanners.

And the Oklahoma City Police Department’s joint interdiction team has them, and can use the scanners to take money from you without your consent.

What money, in particular? The money you have stored in pre-paid debit cards.

ERAD stands for Electronic Recovery and Access to Data, and the ERAD Group, Inc., stands to make a lot of cash from the technology. Police around the country want to be able to take the funds secured in debit cards. It’s the latest thing in the war against the war against the War on Drugs.

Drug traffickers, we’re told, hide dozens of such cards in vehicles transporting drugs.

It’s not enough that police can, in the course of investigating a crime — without conviction, mind you; indeed, without charges being filed — confiscate the cards themselves.

The police also want to be able to siphon the money out of those cards.

Which leads to corruption. Which is already rife in civil forfeiture usage, as a recent Oklahoma state audit found — missing money, misused funds, that sort of thing.

The cavalier way in which government officials defend expropriation by ERAD scanners is chilling. In an Oklahoma Watch article, reporter Clifford Adcock relates the official explanation: “These cards are cash, not bank accounts.… Individuals do not have privacy rights with magnetic stripe cards.” Why not? Because the information on the strip “literally has no purpose other than to be provided to others to read.”

That’s so open to logical criticism you could drive a confiscated truck fleet through it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags abuse, asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, civil forfeiture, Drug War, ERAD, police, theft

moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Sit, UBI, Sit: Play Dead

Swiss, Switzerland, UBI, Universal Basic Income, socialism, robots, illustration

This weekend, the Swiss people rejected the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with a whopping 77 percent against.

That’s the kind of overwhelming result that one finds in America for, say, term limits. And 23 percent, you might notice, is about the percentage of the population in America of hard-core “liberal” progressives, the kind of people usually in support of such measures.

In Switzerland’s case, it was a measure put on the ballot by one group, Bien-CH. But if you are thinking “socialism,” the group insists that that’s the wrong way to think about the plan. UBI is needed, the group’s website says, “to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies” facing a declining need for workers as a result of technological advance.

Yes, UBI is a policy designed to accommodate the coming horde of robots! How? By “increasing demand” by spreading out wealth from the connected-to-tech few to the witless-about-tech many. (How vulgar Keynesian.)

The Swiss government urged a No vote, fearing a need to raise taxes by fifty percent. Quite a hike.

Meanwhile, the notion garners worldwide interest, and even libertarian social scientist Charles Murray promotes this guaranteed income idea (under a different initialism), mostly to streamline the costly bulk of the welfare state.

I’m dubious.

After all, about our latest industrial revolution, in artificial intelligence and in robotics: I say open up labor and entrepreneurial markets from excessive regulation, and allow networking advances to transform capitalism on its own terms, with person-to-person (P2P) cooperation (think AirBnB and Uber and Lyft) and much more.

The best is coming, I bet. If clunky proposals like UBI don’t get in the way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags income, socialism, Swiss, Switzerland, U.B.I., UBI, Universal Basic Income, welfare

ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

The Long Road to Citizens United

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 2, 2016
2 Comments on The Long Road to Citizens United

Krist Novoselic, Citizens United, free speech, fairvote.org

Everybody is familiar with the standard theory regarding the Citizens United decision. Former comedian and current earnest socialist Sarah Silverman puts it this way: “Every politician takes money from Big Money, ever since it was made legal with Citizens United.”

Like most folks who talk this way, she doesn’t give a squeak of context. She barely even indicates that it was a Supreme Court case, 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. She does not mention at all that the ruling overturned the FEC’s act of suppressing a political movie.

But there is a much wider context than such bare facts — and if you want a good synopsis, you could hardly do better than read my friend Krist Novoselic’s calm, reasoned “look at the history of attempts to regulate independent campaign expenditures.”

This “modern history” started with what the New York Times called Richard Nixon’s “revolution in political financing.” The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 “required detailed disclosure of campaign contributions; set campaign contribution limits to candidates, parties and committees; set expenditure limits on campaigns, independent groups and individuals and created the first public financing of presidential campaigns and national conventions.”

And almost immediately the law began suppressing political speech and advertising. And led to a long series of court cases.

And decisions.

And revisions.

That define our times.

Krist (with whom I serve on the board of FairVote.org) provides the context you need to see through what he aptly calls “the hype” about “Citizens United,” as well as how the decision correctly removed the license given to the FEC’s role as “state censorship board.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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