Category: national politics & policies

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ideological culture national politics & policies

War and Broccoli

The art of polling is similar to almost any effort where interpretation is required: Context is important.

The Reason-Rupe pollsters seem to get this. Their recent survey covers not only a lot of ground (the president’s job performance, possible candidates in the upcoming elections, health care, morality and war) but goes into some depth on a number of the issues covered. For instance, each of Obama’s major challengers is put in the context of several competitive scenarios — Obama vs. Romney, Obama vs. Santorum (the poll was conducted before Santorum dropping out), Obama vs. Gingrich, Obama vs. Paul, etc.— with even possible third-party runs brought in. All very interesting.

The biggest section of the poll concerned health care. These questions also probed alternatives, eliciting opinions explicitly in the context of possible options and outcomes. But the results regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities were especially provocative. Nearly half of Americans tend to favor military action against the country were we to discover that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weaponry. But, when the conflict was considered as a long, dragged-out affair — of the same variety as happened in Iraq — support dwindled, and the numbers opposed to intervention went well over half.

Not shocking. Costs matter. Context matters.

The most amusing element of context in the poll emerged in one pair of questions regarding Obamacare. Is the federal requirement to carry medical insurance unconstitutional? Over 60 percent said yes. But switch that mandate to requiring Americans to buy broccoli and other healthy foods, and those crying “unconstitutional” shot up to 87 percent.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies political challengers

Enemies, Bedfellows

The Ron Paul 2012 campaign’s caucus-state delegate strategy, discussed here before, aims to work around the candidate’s biggest hurdle: Republican voters. Though Ron Paul has a strong appeal to the young and to independents — constituencies needed to win against a sitting president — older, mainstream Republicans voters aren’t especially responsive to the maverick’s charms. Concentrating on selecting actual delegates at the caucuses, rather than the media-hyped (and electorally meaningless) straw polls, is a clever strategy.

But what’s good for the goose is great for the gander. A video from Washington State shows a self-proclaimed “mainstream” GOP activist offering caucus participants a slate of 31 delegates allegedly divided up amongst Romney, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, explicitly promoted to make sure that Ron Paulers don’t “take over” the party as they did, to his horror, in the Seattle area.

The Ron Paul supporters touting the video call it “election fraud.” Well, “caucus fraud” might be more to the point, considering that the slate offered was rejected by Rick Santorum’s  supporters as a con job. Since then Santorum folks and Paul folks have united. As one Santorum activist put it, “[i]n order for us to win the nomination in Tampa in August, we must deny Romney delegates to that convention. If . . . Romney receives 1,144 delegates before the national convention, it is all over for our campaign. That is the reason why the Senator himself directed us to coalition with the Ron Paul delegates to deny Romney any state delegates.”

Whether as a grand dialogue of ideas or a horse race, this time around the politics is interesting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

IRS Overreach

The taxman puts his hands in our pockets. But it’s one thing to reach into our bank accounts and take our money, it is quite another when governments engage in different kind of overreach, where they go beyond the rule of law and just start pushing people around.

Take the case of Sabina Loving and Elmer Killian.

The Institute for Justice has.

These plaintiffs are suing the IRS because that bureau of plunderers has ruled that Ms. Loving and Mr. Killian — who provide tax preparation services — must be regulated and schooled and certified by the IRS itself. The IRS says that these independent tax preparers (independent in that they are not part of big businesses) can’t just offer their services on the market, they must undergo an expensive annual education and certification process.

The overreach part is that the IRS has no statutory authority to regulate these businesses. Congress rejected precisely such regulation back in 2008. So the clever kleptocrats now argue that a pre-IRS law hailing from way back in 1884 authorizes their regulatory powers.

But that law doesn’t even deal with representatives of folks who owe the government money. It deals with representatives of people owed money by the federal government.

Nice try.

“You will be as shocked as Captain Renault to learn that big tax-prep companies — H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty — all support the new regulations,” writes A. Barton Hinkle in Reason magazine, “for the same reason big tobacco companies go after roll-your-own smoke shops: It’s in their interest to stifle low-cost competitors.”

Like Ms. Loving and Mr. Killian.

As we prepare our tax returns in the next several weeks leading up to April’s filing day, perhaps we should burn a little incense along with our midnight oil in support of the plaintiffs and the Institute for Justice. For, really, they are fighting for us, too — eternal vigilance and all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Central Planning, Clarified

Last Friday, the President of the United States signed an Executive Order on “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” and it’s gotten no small amount of attention. It seems to commandeer the entire economy — pretty much anything the government needs — in cases of a presidentially (not congressionally) declared “emergency.”

The powers are vast.

The checks and balances, vague.

The whole thing is matter-of-fact, sporting that business-as-usual style we’ve come to know and . . . view suspiciously. A few clauses at the end of the document build up to a sort of finale of weirdness with this clarification: “This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.” It may be about “national security,” but the government has certainly protected itself. Against us.

Reasons for angst? Yes.

But the angst should not be conceived as new.

Economic historian Robert Higgs, writing for The Independent Institute, notes our long history of what he calls “fascist central planning.” Citing his own milestone work Crisis and Leviathan, he fingers warfare as the major rationale behind the centralization of power and industry. Under the Defense Production Act of the Truman Era, “the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”

It’s breathtaking. It’s sweeping. It’s almost ancient.

And it shows how important actual peace is to our freedoms, our property rights, our very lives.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Very Lame Duck

A Washington Post feature story on Kent Conrad refers to the retiring U.S. Senator as “the Democrats’ balanced-budget guy for more than a decade.”

Of course, no budget has been balanced for “more than a decade.” Being the Democrats’ “balanced-budget guy” is sorta like being the Taliban’s diversity outreach guy or AARP’s youth activities director or the bartender for the Temperance League.

I won’t dispute Sen. Conrad’s claim that he’s “done [his] level best,” but, in the time he’s been in Congress, the federal debt has climbed more than 700 percent, from $2.1 trillion in 1986 to $15.4 trillion today.

Nonetheless, Conrad continues to work his colleagues in the dark corridors of the capitol, and The Post reports his goal is to “draft far-reaching legislation to tame the debt and present it for a vote after Election Day, when lawmakers will be under intense pressure to reach an agreement to avert huge tax increases and deep spending cuts set to hit Jan. 1.”

But how will the desire to avoid tax increases and spending cuts “pressure” Congress to pass Conrad’s preferred package of tax increases and spending cuts? Especially in a lame duck session that sidesteps public pressure?

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan offers a different view: “We shouldn’t be insulating this from the American public, trying to cut back room deals on commissions or whatever. I think the process is moved forward if we put plans out for the public to see and defend our ideas.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The $820 Billion Oops

Getting good estimates is not easy. Anyone who’s hired a contractor knows to make sure the estimates are sound by insisting that bidders stick to their estimates.

This is not what happens in government, though. Projects almost always start out with a whopping figure for an estimate . . . and then as the project gears up the costs shoot higher and higher — it soon becomes clear that the high initial cost estimate was a low-ball figure after all.

My “favorite” recent example of this has been California’s high-speed rail project, which soared by the billions before even breaking ground.

But move over, transit. Here’s medicine — 2008’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” has just received an estimate upgrade. When passed, the legislation’s enthusiasts boasted a ten-year cost estimate of “only” $940 billion. Now, the Congressional Budget Office has revised the decade’s cost tally up to $1.76 trillion.

According to Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, the CBO says that weakness in the economy leads to more people “obtaining insurance through Medicaid than it estimated a year ago at a greater cost to the government . . . fewer people will be getting insurance through their employers or the health care law’s new subsidized insurance exchanges.”

I “daringly” predict that this estimate, too, will turn out to be woefully below the actual figure . . . unless something novel happens, like Americans rallying around a “throw the bums out” campaign to elect a Congress and a President that will surgically remove Obamacare from the body politic. Before it kills us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Blame Policy

Petroleum-based fuels are going up in price, so naturally people start looking for someone to blame. Call up the Usual Suspects:

  1. Speculators. These futures market folks never get credit for lowering the prices of gas, but they can always be counted on to serve as easy “bad guy” targets when prices go up. Same this time. You’ve heard the rumors, the rancor. (It’s nuts.)
  2. President Obama. You know, for not allowing drilling and pipelines and such. Go to a meeting of conservatives and you’ll hear someone yell out “Drill, baby, drill!” Now, I’m all for drilling, and it’s stupid to clamp down on future supplies of oil — indeed, investors in the futures market for oil see these political and bureaucratic restrictions on exploration and mining and refining, etc., and no doubt bid up the price of oil — but really, don’t blame just Obama, blame, also,
  3. Romney and Santorum and Gingrich. All these presidential candidates have engaged in hysterical, belligerent rhetoric about Iran, threatening warfare in the Persian Gulf region. War is bad for supply lines. Compromising supply lines means compromised supplies. Which means less oil. Which means rising prices.

So of course futures traders will bid up those prices — they would lose money if they didn’t — and in so doing they make the likely future conditions palpable to contemporary decision makers.

That’s their economic function. Don’t blame the messenger.

So, if you think the U.S. should bomb Iran to prevent that country from bombing the U.S. in a few years (after which the U.S. could easily make the populous nation, full of innocents, a sea of irradiated glass), don’t gripe.

One consequence will be (must be) rising prices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
incumbents national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Emperor Obama

People change.

George W. Bush won the presidency pledging a dose of “humility” in our foreign policy and forswearing the temptation to rebuild failed foreign states. But after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . followed by even more deadly and difficult nation-building efforts.

Presidential powers expanded.

Along came Barack Obama, the peace candidate. His advantage in winning the 2008 Democratic Party nomination was his unequivocal opposition to the Iraq War. Meanwhile, then-Senator, now Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had voted to give Bush congressional approval to launch that war.

During the campaign, Obama recognized constitutional limits on the commander-in-chief: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

But as president, Mr. Obama launched air strikes against Libya without congressional authorization. In fact, he refused to even report to Congress as required by law.

And then last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “Do you think that you can act, without Congress, and initiate a no-fly zone in Syria, without congressional approval?”

“Our goal would be to seek international permission,” Panetta replied, and then added, “and we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this.”

A republic? America goes to war on the order of one man: Emperor Obama.

But empires change. Past empires rarely asked foreign permission for their military adventures.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access national politics & policies political challengers

Seven Million for Show

Complaining about the cost of holding an election is usually done by those who fear the election’s likely outcome, not the price.

I’m not very sympathetic.

Yet, I’m in total agreement with Andrew Wilson, a resident fellow at the Show-Me Institute, whose article “Money Down a Drain: The Millions Spent on Missouri’s No-Show Feb. 7 Election,” states flatly that legislators ought to be “embarrassed” for calling “a statewide election” in which “nobody came.”

Missouri taxpayers forked out $7 million to hold the state’s February 7 presidential primary, which produced only a meager eight percent voter turnout, netting a whopping $25 cost for every vote cast.

The legislature had moved the primary date up to gain a greater edge for the state in determining delegates for deciding the presidential nominee. When that timetable didn’t work with the National Republican Party’s nominating rules, legislation was drafted to cancel the primary.

But the legislature and the governor couldn’t bring the bill beyond the draft stage. Instead, they stuck Show-Me State citizens with spending seven million for, well, show . . .  the primary having been rendered absolutely meaningless in terms of winning delegates.

Hence the low voter turnout.

There is a very simple solution. Let political parties have the freedom to run their own affairs, their own primaries. And let them do it without taxpayer subsidy.

Governments (taxpayers) pay for the general election; parties pay for their primaries.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies video

Video: Nick Gillespie Interviewed by Jon Caldara

There’s a lot of interesting talk here at “The Devil’s Advocate”: