Category: national politics & policies

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Slow Times for a Fast Car

How economical are electric cars? It’s hard to know. We don’t have a free market setting in which to judge the question.

Their obvious advantage? They don’t pollute.

But, skeptics remind us, their electricity does have to be first produced, and the most likely additional source? Coal. Dirty coal.

In any case, electric tech’s progress (or lack thereof) remains fascinating. When I wrote about the Tesla Motors electric sports car back in 2006, I was enthusiastic. But since then the car has not exactly “taken off,” and the company has received a huge, huge hunk of money in the form of loans from the Department of Energy in 2009, so it looks like just another Solyndra-like boondoggle.

But wait: It turns out that the company has faced an uphill battle: government.

The states heavily regulate auto dealerships. You know, “for the consumer” (read: for a few privileged dealers). Indeed, this regulation at the state level has plagued America’s auto industry for years. And dealers, privileged by these protectionist laws, really, really hate Tesla Motors’ marketing model: direct-to-customer.

In Colorado, car dealers got the law changed to prohibit direct-to-customer auto sales.

I hope Tesla sues to overturn the state dealership laws as illegal under the Constitution — after all, they do precisely what the interstate commerce clause was designed to prevent.

More likely, though, Tesla will seek and get an exemption from the Energy Department. And American mercantilism will continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Image is anachronistic, and later appeared no this site to illustrate a very different Tesla story.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Guns Grabbed in New York

Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.

However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.

“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-related disorders in the DSM-5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.

Ask David Lewis, a 35-year-old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.

A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.

Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.

Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.

Thus it begins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

The Infanticide Doctor and the Uneasy Silence

Rare events often define our view of society and government. The regular slog of life we habitually forget and everyday crimes we let pass as if unnoticed. But a massacre, an assassination, or a big storm — these get a lot of coverage. And exercise our political imaginations.

Often unduly.

Yet, presently a rare-event story certainly qualifies as “newsworthy,” though almost no one talks about, and almost no media outlet covers: the serial infanticides of the abortion doctor currently on trial, Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

While media folks and political activists continue to publicize the Sandy Hooks shooting, on Gosnell’s bloody tale they remain silent. As Ed Krayewski notes at Reason.com, just as a rare shooting has served a political cause, so too could Gosnell’s grisly crimes. But from the president, no grand “it’s not about me” speeches. From his followers, no demands for instant action.

Why?

The question doesn’t need to be asked. It’s politically inconvenient for “pro-choicers” to confront the grotesque crimes of a doctor engaged in late-term abortions that often became postpartum infanticide. And grisly ones at that.

The pro-choice movement typically responds to abortion in the same fashion they accuse those at the NRA: give no inch. Abortion rights activists defend late-term abortions and argue that bringing up the killing of infants is just so “off-point.” But after reading about the Gosnell case, it’s not off-point at all.

Certainly, Dr. Gosnell’s alleged infanticide should be mentioned for the same reason that any big story deserves coverage. Should it lead to immediate calls for more government regulation of abortion? That’s debatable. Should it inform the debate?

Yes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

It’s Not About Responsibility

“It’s not about me,” insisted the President of these United States, before crowds in Hartford, Connecticut.

Barack Obama, in expert oratorical mode, elaborated: “Some in the Washington press suggest that what happens to gun violence legislation in Congress this week will either be a political victory or defeat for me.” After a long and impressive facial pause, he went on. “Connecticut, this is not about me; it’s not about politics. This is about doing the right thing. . . .” but he didn’t stop there. He listed the beneficiaries of “gun violence legislation”:

  • “for all the families who are here who have been torn apart by gun violence”;
  • “and all the families going forward . . . so we can prevent this from happening again”;
  • “it’s about the law enforcement professionals putting their lives at risk. . . .”

Not about politics? Sounds exactly like politics.

No discussion of the efficacy or practicality of what’s on the line, universal background checks on all gun sales. (Private trades in legal armaments now constitute a “loophole,” you see.)  What evidence is there that universal background checks would have stopped the murderous Adam Lanza — or most such hard-to-predict murderers?

The Orator-in-Chief’s earlier emphasis on the ostensible fact of 90 percent American support for this rule is also political. You can bet that the pollsters did not probe very deeply into the nitty gritty of the issue by asking about increases in bureaucracy, paperwork, the regulation of law-abiding folk.

Or how to get criminals to comply.

None of that.

It is all politics. The feel-good politics of politicians claiming they are “doing something.”

That is not principle. Not philosophy. And certainly not responsible policy making.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Flight to Freedom

One of the more inspiring perennial stories of my youth were of defectors, people who left their Communist-controlled countries to reach freedom . . . on American soil.

Many, many Soviet and Eastern bloc subjects smuggled themselves out of their countries, or “jumped ship” while visiting the U.S. or other Western nations. The list of freedom seekers is long, impressive, and inspiring.

And this isn’t just “ancient history.”

After an international tour, seven members of Cuba’s National Ballet were confirmed by homeland sources as “not having returned.” And a Cuban exile website has informed us that six of the defectors are now in the U.S., while the seventh remains in Mexico, where the troupe had broken free:

“We were intent on seeking a better artistic life and economic well-being for our families,” Cafe Fuerte quoted one of the group, Annie Ruiz Diaz, as saying.

Correspondents say Cuba’s National Ballet has suffered from a number of high-profile defections over the years, as performers stay abroad in search of greater creative and economic opportunities.

But this is only the tip of the proverbial floating mass of frozen water. In truth, thousands of people defect to the United States every year. Leaving their countries of origin, they flee poverty, tyranny, reckless government and outrageous criminality (too often these latter are the same thing), seeking the comparatively peaceful life found under a nation run by the rule of law.

Alas, defection is going the other way, too, as more and more Americans attempt to escape from increasingly burdensome taxation, oppressive regulations, and selective enforcement of innumerable laws.

We honor the heroic defectors from Cuba only by making the U.S. a place that fewer and fewer peaceful folks would be tempted to flee from.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Imperator Obama

The current issue of The National Interest contains a perceptive essay by former Senator Jim Webb, “Congressional Abdication.” George F. Will echoes Webb’s arguments at The Washington Post, in “A bipartisan abdication.”

So, some abdication has occurred. Of what?

A congressional role in making U.S. foreign policy:

When it comes to the long-term commitments that our country makes in the international arena, ours can be a complicated and sometimes frustrating process. But our Founding Fathers deliberately placed checks and counterchecks into our constitutional system for exactly that purpose. The congressional “nuisance factor” is supposed to act as a valuable tool to ensure that our leaders — and especially our commander in chief — do not succumb to the emotions of the moment or the persuasions of a very few.

The problem, Webb argues, is that Congress has given up most of its power and authority, just letting presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama do pretty much whatever they want. And recently it’s gotten much worse. “President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress,” writes Webb, “at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”

Will summarizes the problem thusly: “Imperial presidents and invertebrate legislators of both parties have produced what Webb correctly calls ‘a breakdown of our constitutional process.’ Syria may be the next such bipartisan episode” of undeclared war . . . where the Congress merely sits on its hands and waits for the CNN reports.

The imperial nature of our system has been a long time emerging. As with ancient Rome, Big Men usurped power, and legislative bodies ceded authority, step by step, over time — becoming less republican.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Kentucky Grass

While the Supreme Court’s hearings on gay marriage stole the headlines, Senator Rand Paul was doing something interesting in the Senate. Teaming up with his fellow Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell along with Oregon’s Democratic delegation, the increasingly influential senator pushed S.359, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013.

Together with its twin in the House, sponsored by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, the bills seek to amend the Controlled Substances Act, which has outright prohibited the domestic raising of industrial hemp since 1970.

Hemp is marijuana, but grown for its fiber. And not potent in THC, so its recreational and medicinal value is nil. It was raised in colonial days, and by several of the Founding Fathers. I learned about it in Third Grade History. You probably did, too.

I wasn’t told that, if carefully cultivated, the same plant served other uses. There’s scant evidence that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — two enthusiastic if not completely successful hemp growers — exhibited any interest other than curiosity and acquisitiveness in their hemp growing.

The legalization move in Congress is about, pardon the expression, high time. Hemp is a great product, and the idea that, for the convenience of suppressing its cultivation as a psychoactive substance, not only a whole species but a whole industry would be suppressed is typical federal overreach.

Why the concentrated Kentucky interest? Well, it was the Bluegrass State where hemp was historically grown after the Civil War.

The Oregon angle? You’d have to ask Senators Wyden and Merkley. But I’ve known a number of Oregonian cannabis activists who’ve talked as much about the virtues of industrial hemp as the delights of their “grass.” Perhaps the idea is blowing in Oregon winds.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Time to Wait

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the mortgage/financial/intervention-induced crisis of 2008. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

The “important things” most politicians want to do usually involve more government controls. Post-crisis, they hurry to expand the state’s power over us before crisis-bred emotions like panic and anger can fade.

In doing so, they often blindly ignore relevant facts that even a little time for discussion would bring to light. That’s why Glenn Reynolds argues for a “Waiting period for laws, not guns” in a recent USA Today column.

Efforts to push legislation through while emotions are high mean that the legislation doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that legislation is supposed to get. Laws are dangerous instruments, too, and legislators seem highly prone to sudden fits of hysteria.

Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg now says we must “start thinking a little bit more about the implications of things before we rush to legislate.” That’s “a bit rich” for Reynolds, since Bloomberg had PR men on standby to exploit the latest mass shooting as quickly as possible.

Still, if even Bloomberg is okay with hitting the pause button, “maybe the next time politicians want to rush a bill through without sufficient deliberation, others will have the fortitude to slow things down, read the bill and inform the public.”

This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposal. In many cities and states, today, an informed public can even petition a hastily enacted law onto the ballot for a referendum, at least when legislators don’t slap on a phony “emergency clause” to speed their worst enactments past the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Bloomberg’s Megaphone

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not breaking his term limits pledge like a dictator, he’s outlawing soft drinks like a nanny.

Now he’s trying to undermine our Second Amendment rights, spending $12 million of his reported $27 billion net worth to run television spots in 13 states. Those advertisements aim to rile up the public and encourage folks to pressure their U.S. Senators into supporting gun control legislation.

Hey, da mayor’s just not my kind of guy. Except in one respect: His spending of $12 million . . . of his own money.

I admire that.

And, even with his $27 billion set against my . . . well, er . . . I’m not scared of his wealth advantage. I welcome his speech. Because my best chance to prevail politically is for all voices to be free to speak.

Plus, as National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre ably put it last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Bloomberg “can’t buy America.”

In fact, I don’t think the mayor harbors any such illusions. Bloomberg’s savvy enough to know that his rented megaphone won’t necessarily convince Americans . . . who are not mindless automatons programmed by 30-second television ads.

We make up our own minds.

Too bad he doesn’t extend this notion across the board. You know, to soda drinks and such.

So, regardless of Bloomberg’s inconsistencies and indecencies, let’s welcome folks like him who finance causes they believe in. They provide the venture capital for informed citizen decision-making.

We could use a few more billionaires giving on the side of freedom and responsibility, though. Any takers? I mean, givers?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers

A Sharp Report?

There’s a new report out on the GOP’s future prospects. The findings are grim; the recommendations are predictable and somewhat craven: “On messaging, we must change our tone — especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters. In every session with young voters, social issues were at the forefront of the discussion; many see them as the civil rights issues of our time. We must be a party that is welcoming and inclusive for all voters.”

Obvious problem? As Ms. Alex Palombo at DailyKos noted, the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Report is made up almost entirely of “surface suggestions.”

The deeper reality is that the Republicans have lost so much support in recent years mainly by betraying their one plank that appealed across party lines: fiscal responsibility.

The Republican Party will go nowhere until it gets serious and consistent about the principles of limited government. Sure, that has implications for social issues. I hope the GOP changes its position on gay marriage, which I support. Generally, I think progress on social issues can best be made outside of government.

But mostly what the GOP needs to do to thrive with the young, with women, with minorities, is to focus on the immediate threat to the country’s future, the federal government’s rising debt, continuing deficits and looming liabilities.

Were Republican politicians honest and serious about this, they could gain respect everywhere.

Still, many retain hope in surface tweaks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.