Category: nannyism

Doom Fails to Arrive on Schedule

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 26, 2015
2 Comments on Doom Fails to Arrive on Schedule

Doom is not always bad. I’d appreciate the doom of nonsensical doomsaying, for instance… although I doubt that that glorious day will dawn anytime soon.

Equally unlikely is an apology from ABC and Chris Cuomo for pitching, back in 2008, a muddled ABC special, “Earth 2100,” about all the disasters expected to arrive by 2015, among other years.

The idea? Forecast the harm inflicted by allegedly man-made global warming and collateral calamities, via the scientific methodology of being safely vague or just making stuff up. One way the network secured data was to ask viewers to pretend they’re in the future and then “report back.” (Well, it was 2008, a more primitive era. They did things like this back then.)

Here’s a sample of what ABC purveyed as possibly impending:

“Temperatures have hit dangerous levels.” (Time for air conditioning and/or heat!)
“We’ve got more people, less and less resources. That’s a recipe for disaster.” (Let markets be fully unfettered so we can be sure to get more and more instead!)
“It’s June 8, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (Unless that’s a big carton, no. Try $3 or $4 a gallon.)
“We’re going to see more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.” (Good work, Nostradamus!)

We still get storms. (Always had ’em; always will.) And inflationary Fed policy and other bad governance still swirl on the horizon. So let’s have shelter, fire departments, umbrellas, and market-friendlier policies; and let’s not reside on hurricane-prone beaches.

Thanks for the heads-up, Chris.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags disaster, Doom, global warming, inflation, population, weather

folly general freedom nannyism

A Spring in Their Step?

The “Free State” — Maryland — just got a little freer.

Deborah Ramelmeier, Social Services Administration head honcho, has laid forth from her mighty public perch in Maryland’s Department of Human Resources an official directive to the state’s Child Protective Services (CPS).

She finally addressed the issues in the Meitiv case.

You’ll recall that Danielle and Alexander Meitiv allowed their 10-year old son and 6‑year old daughter to walk home together, without a parent or guardian or attorney present, from a public park a mile away. Silver Spring police snatched the two children off the street last December and so began a Maryland CPS investigation for neglect.

In April, the Meitiv kids were again caught flagrantly walking home from a park. This time they were held for more than five hours by police, then CPS, before their frantic parents were informed and the family reunited.

In the midst of threats, accusations, and fears, the CPS neglected to do the one sensible thing you’d expect: articulate a policy position defining just when or how or even if ever children are allowed out in public without constant and direct adult supervision.

That smidgen of sanity came last week, in Ms. Ramelmeier’s otherwise boring, bureaucratic 23-page directive. “Children playing outside or walking unsupervised does not meet the criteria for a CPS response absent specific information supporting the conclusion that the child has been harmed or is at substantial risk of harm if they continue to be unsupervised.”

Shazam! Just like that, “playing outside” and “walking unsupervised” are once again legal.

The children won’t be arrested! And their parents won’t be investigated or threatened with losing their little ones!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags child, children, CPS, law, police

nannyism national politics & policies

For and Against?

Bad ideas take a person only so far.

Proponents of a widely destructive policy may be loath to relinquish it altogether when destructive consequences loom. Yet they may also loathe to see it applied consistently — because of the pain it’ll cause their particular gang.

Harm to others inflicted by lousy ideas? Fine!

Harm to yourself? Not fine!

Hence the semi-reversal by Los Angeles union officials of their demand for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, recently approved by LA’s city council. Union leaders have been among the most ardent proponents of the new minimum, which until now they’ve insisted must be imposed equally, no exemptions for special hardship.

But now union reps like Rusty Hicks want exemptions for unionized companies so that unions are free to negotiate an agreement that, as Hicks puts it, “allows each party to prioritize what is important to them.” Wow! Sounds like he might favor free markets, in which parties to a trade participate, voluntarily, only when priorities are aligned and each expects to gain.

Many motives for Hicks’s contradictory stance are plausible. One is that the requested exception would encourage companies to unionize to escape burdensome new costs. Accept one burden to escape a worse one.

Instead of letting unions cripple all workplaces but their own, let’s “allow each party to prioritize what is important to them” across the board, by letting employers and employees negotiate without any political interference whatever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags labor unions, minimum wage

general freedom nannyism too much government

Wealth Versus Disaster

Poverty kills.

In “The Tragedy of Nepal,” aerospace engineer Rand Simberg explains why industry-deniers striving to block economic progress in the name of blocking “climate change” do no favor to the poorest countries of the world.

Human beings cannot prevent disasters like the earthquake that recently struck Nepal. We can, though, mitigate their destructiveness … by being as economically free as possible and, therefore, as rich as possible.

And thus able to afford more durable — even antifragile — structures and infrastructure.

The same capital-intensive achievements that protect us when Mother Nature is quiescent also protect us when she’s at her worst. Buildings are more likely to withstand a quake when constructed of the best possible materials and designs. But the most robust safeguards can be the norm only when we are free and wealthy enough to engage in the industrial processes required to produce them.

This is a familiar point. But it bears repeating because it is not familiar enough to discourage foes of a vague threat called “climate change” — nothing new in earth’s history — from also ranging themselves against industrial production.

Industry-deniers assert that we can manipulate climate trends for the better if only we radically curb our carbon-emitting impact on the atmosphere. But attempts to enact this fantasy will only make it ever harder to grapple with vagaries of nature commonplace long before the rise of civilizations.

Human survival requires the opposite policy. It requires full freedom to build nature-transforming industries — and buildings, and all the other man-made bulwarks of our lives and future.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags antifragile, climate change, earthquake, industry, Nepal

nannyism responsibility too much government

A Progressive Non-Solution

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 29, 2015
2 Comments on A Progressive Non-Solution

Urban African-American poverty is a problem, as is, increasingly, rural and urban white poverty. What can we do?

Not what folks at The Nation suggest: by increasing progressivity in local taxation, adding progressivity to fines (making the poor pay less and the rich more), and the like. That’s the gist of what Brad Lander and Karl Kumodzi write about in their article “How Cities’ Funding Woes Are Driving Racial and Economic Injustice — And What We Can Do About It.”

Though they call their solution “forward-looking,” it is not that time element that makes their views “progressive.” It’s their obsession with tax rates. What makes a progressive a progressive seems to be little more than a reliance on progressive rate taxation.

Embarrassing.

The three big examples of failed cities the authors give are the urban community of Ferguson, near St. Louis; Detroit, Michigan; and now Baltimore, Maryland, currently undergoing “protests” and conflagration.

Typical for Nation writers, they see the problem as not the poverty, culture, and behavior of black individuals in neighborhoods where few work and 70 percent grow up in fatherless families, but not taxing whites enough.

Meanwhile, Detroit and Baltimore have been run as “liberal” Democratic enclaves for years. Yet “blame the rich” is the approach. The authors want to double down on old, failed policies. More taxes. More government.

Now, government is to blame, of course: “welfare” programs encourage the break-up of the nuclear family; horrible public schools; minimum wage laws that hit low-skilled population hardest; and the Drug War.

The authors are right, though, that the cities’ desperate regressive burdens on the poor are no answer. Less taxes, less regulation, less subsidy, less policing for profit, more freedom — those are the better solutions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags progressivism, race, tax policy

folly free trade & free markets nannyism

A New, Freer Sector

Current trends in public policy and law seem to be pointing not to consistent principles, but contradictory ones.

Wyoming just made it legal for farmers to sell directly to local customers, in such venues as farmers’ markets — without government inspection and conformity to the usual, clunky set of regulations that apply when selling to other businesses for resale.

The bill, recently signed into law by the governor, also allows neighbors to sell homemade foods to one another informally and at special community events like bake sales.

An obvious win for freedom. Who can argue against a free market in foodstuffs at the community level, where normal transactions tend to be customary and casual, and also obviously subject to regulation by reputation?

But government regulations still apply maximally to farmers and supermarkets and grocery chains. And yet, many of the arguments for local free markets apply equally to these currently controlled ones. Free competition would likely lead to the re-introduction of reputation economies into big agribiz markets. Could very well be transformative.

For our health.

After all, it’s not as if government has really helped us in this realm. We are right now working our way out of a government-sponsored health and diet paradigm that we are learning was exactly wrong.

The official “anti-fat” hysteria made us fat.

A more competitive approach, allowing for different philosophies to operate — as they can at the community level, with old recipes co-existing with the new-agey ones, as well as with non-pasteurized milk and organic farms and local cheese and everything else — would encourage new ways of meeting old food fears as well as accommodating new food fads.

Extend freedom. (Not waistlines.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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