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.
