Category: national politics & policies

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

Congress Moves to Censor the Net?

The Internet is not safe. Congress wants to regulate it. The most recent idea is to sic the Federal Elections Commission on Net freedom.

Recent hearings on something called the DISCLOSE Act disclosed that the act would “extend the FEC’s control over broadcast communications to all ‘covered communications,’ including the blogosphere.” Or so say the Center for Competitive Politics’ Bradley Smith and Jeff Patch, writing on Reason.com.

It’s hard to imagine a worse idea. No groundswell of citizens demanded this. So of course Congress is considering it.

Would they really try to regulate the blogosphere?

The lead “reformers” in Congress say all they want to regulate are political ads on the Internet, not bloggers. But, as Smith and Patch note, the actual language of the current bill quite clearly leaves open the blogosphere for regulation. They also doubt the good intentions of the would-be regulators, explaining how, in the early days of McCain-Feingold advocacy, “the ‘good government’ crowd . . . denounced a deregulated Internet as a ‘loophole’ in campaign finance law, a ‘poison pill,’ ‘anti-reform’” etc.

How can respectable Americans advocate regulation of speech, as if the First Amendment did not exist? It’s as if they are baffled by plain language: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech, or of the press. . . .”

How can they live with themselves?

For me, it’s a consolation to know that at least censors in Congress can still be thrown out, peacefully, with votes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Economics vs. Politician-Incurred Debt

For several years now I have worried — here on Common Sense and on Townhall — about the unsustainability of politician-incurred debt.

I’ve used the word “unsustainable” quite a few times. But too often I’ve simply called it “government debt.” I think I like “politician-incurred debt” better. For it’s politicians who have been unable to keep from over-spending.

And pretending that the consequent problem of debt is “impossible to solve in the current political climate.”

They’re wrong, of course. The “current political climate” is whatever people think and speak right now. Change the way we think and speak, and suddenly the impossible becomes possible.

But what do economists say?

Economists are notoriously able at the higher maths, such as simultaneous equations, symbolic logic and regression analysis. But the number of economists unfazed by the simple calculations to figure debt load and maintenance is almost as frightening as those figures.

Luckily, those ready to do the arithmetic of public debt are on the rise.

Take economist Veronique de Rugy.

Writing in Reason magazine, de Rugy succinctly offers up the numbers. America’s trillions in debt now surpasses half of Gross Domestic Product. Politician-incurred borrowing increasingly soaks up the limited capital available, undermining market recovery. She says politicians must “reform entitlement spending, put both military and domestic spending on the chopping block, and start selling off federal assets. Better to do it now than during a fire sale later.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies

Riot Cops to a Tea

Here’s a federal budget cut: Air Force One and all other presidential travel services. The prez doesn’t need to travel. Keep the Executive Entourage in Washington, DC.

This struck home to me when I saw video of police in full riot gear, called up specifically to keep Tea Party people from gathering to greet the president at an event in Quincy, Illinois.

The cops marched around and repelled the Tea Party folk, moving them back, away from the president and his admirers.

President Obama’s Secret Service and crowd control experts are carrying on the tradition of George W. Bush. I haven’t heard Orwellian talk of “free speech zones,” but that doesn’t mean that free speech or the mere waving about of signs is encouraged by the president.

Presidential outings and speeches are tightly controlled. They are now mere political events, designed to shore up the president’s party.

So there’s no reason, in the age of mass media, for American taxpayers to continue to pay for them. The president can speak in front of the camera, on radio and the Internet, and he can speak on the White House steps. But spending one more cent on presidential roamings to rally partisan troops just isn’t very American. Not if all sides aren’t allowed to participate.

What was unacceptable under Bush remains unacceptable under Obama. But I doubt if we’ll hear many on the left protest this marginalization of dissent.

Wrong crowd, I guess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Fearing Free Fall

The European Union is bailing out Greece. Fearing financial contagion, EU’s policy wizards decided to throw 100 billion euros at Greece, in tandem with demands for austerity.

New spending restrictions are tough enough to elicit the verdict of “savage” from Greece’s public employee unions. But are they “savage” enough?

The euros-to-the-rescue scheme occurred only after collapses of Portuguese and Spanish bonds. As mentioned last Friday, things aren’t good on Europe’s other southern peninsulas, either.

The “Domino Theory” remains a dominant metaphor. Once, we feared countries would fall like dominos to communism. Now, it’s like dominos into insolvency.

But propping up a tipped domino isn’t easy.

Drastic solutions, like expelling the duplicitous Greek nation-state from the EU? Not on the table. The apparent aim of the bailouts? Keep as many of the major players responsible for the fiasco in as good a shape as possible.

If, on the other hand, every politician were fired and every contract with unsustainable giveaways to public employee unions were dissolved as part of bankruptcy, might future policy makers be a little more cautious?

Meanwhile, the dominos keep falling. The day after announcing the bailout, the euro plummeted.

My question: What happens when “too big to fail” is applied not to a tiny country like Greece, but to the good ol’ US of A?

What if we’re too big to bail out?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

Democrats Give the Internet to the FTC?

Congress has all the backbone of a jellyfish. Tasked with sole power to declare war, it delegates such decision-making to the Executive Branch every chance it gets. The U.S. hasn’t declared war since World War II, but is now engaged in two land wars in Asia.

Further, for a long time, Congress has handed over law-writing tasks to various regulatory divisions of the Executive Branch. This may have gotten worse with the recent Democratic hegemony. Example? Congress is maneuvering to give the Internet over to the Federal Trade Commission.

Pelosi’s little platoons have hidden this momentous change in the recent banking regulation bill. But as Ed Morrissey of Hotair.com notes, the Internet had nothing to do with the recent financial collapse, another iteration of which the new bill is ostensibly designed to prevent

So why sneak this provision into an unrelated bill?

Maybe to come down on one side of the Net Neutrality debate without ever really confronting the issues.

People engaged in this debate about regulating Internet and bandwidth pricing may disagree about a lot of things, but surely they all agree that Congress should legislate for the Internet openly and honestly, not make its biggest decisions in obscure provisions of a measure that will be voted on only to solve utterly unrelated problems.

You may be thinking, FCC, FTC — does it matter? Well, I bet it really matters to some powerful Democrat. Hence the sneaky maneuvers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

The Inglorious Mess That Is Greece

Ah, the glory that was Greece! Too bad the modern country is anything but. The nation-state of Greece is going broke, and going broke spectacularly.

And, dare I say it, instructively?

Everybody’s blaming everybody else, there. But the simple truth of the matter is that the politicians of Greece — both socialist and “conservative” — enticed citizens to go along with a sustained binge of spending, spending far beyond revenues.

And then the government lied to European Union HQ in Brussels about how much it was spending over revenues.

And, you guessed it, Greece continued to borrow even more.

Yes, public spending in Greece was more out-of-control than government spending here in America. And that’s why it’s instructive. What is happening right now to Greece is happening elsewhere in Europe — Italy, Spain, Portugal — and is on pace to happen to us, too.

Greece does have one option the good ol’ US of A doesn’t have: It can go begging to the European Union. So far, saner heads in the EU are saying “no,” but that may not last.

While we don’t have that option, Greece lacks ours: With the Euro as its standard, it’s constrained from the monetary fiddling that American leaders are tempted with. Inflation. Hyperinflation.

When things get worse here, we’ll hear talk of huge tax hikes, confiscations, and sovereign default.

But also expect a lot of what Greek politicians did: Lying.

Inglorious, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The Chamber, Loaded Against the Free Market

You are familiar with the notion that businesses support the free market, while concerned citizens demand some sort of “regulatory oversight” by government.

It’s a canard.

Oh, some businessmen do indeed support free markets and decry subsidies — and lots of businesses oppose this regulation or that — but, on the whole, the major support for a regulatory regime, or for subsidies and tariffs, for almost any scheme of government control of business, is usually business itself.

Like individuals, businesses too often turn to government for special advantages — over other businesses, or over taxpayers.

That’s why the United States Chamber of Commerce gave Congressman Ron Paul such low marks. You could hardly find a more pro-free-market gentleman in Washington. But, as Timothy Carney notes in the Washington Examiner, 90 percent of Democrats got higher marks on the Chamber’s 2009 congressional scorecard than did Paul, who also got the lowest marks of any Republican.

Why?

Rep. Paul opposed the recent stimulus bill. And he opposed subsidizing the tourism industry as well as solar energy.

The Chamber is a typical business lobbying outfit, favoring an inefficient, mixed economy because some of its leading members hope to milk the taxpayers.

If you are a member of the Chamber but support the fair play of the free market, not the rigged play of government-business “partnerships,” you might want to speak up against your Chamber’s policies.

Or join another group.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

The Right Stuff Needs No Subsidy

When the president, in a rare fit of fiscal sanity, proposed cutting back on NASA, the subsidized sector of the high tech industry — the military-industrial complex — felt a shiver.

The first, I hope, of many.

NASA has long had a special, high-toned place in that hierarchy of government-funded industries. It’s the civilian wing of the military’s industrial juggernaut. As if to prove that government can accomplish things, NASA actually landed men on the moon. And it kept an ungainly shuttle program going long after its rightful expiration date.

But it’s time for private enterprise to take over in the space industry.

High time.

Still, questions remain — at least in the public mind. As a fascinating MSNBC article put it, “Can private companies build and operate space vehicles safe enough to carry astronauts?” The article’s author, James Oberg, focuses on the emerging market of space taxis, but does ponder the possibility of putting real astronauts out in space, privately. He consulted skeptical NASA engineers, who wondered how unsubsidized, for-profit businesses could mimic NASA’s record.

Where’s their collective experience?

Answer: Let most of NASA go, and that experience would be up for hire.

Our hopes for the future conquest of space depend, in part, on ceasing to subsidize it. Congress and the president should embrace that future, and realize that it is time to relinquish their control over another whole industry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Don’t Kill The Angels

President Obama is blasting what he calls “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists” to fend off tighter regulation of the financial industry.

Pretending that Fed credit expansion and governmental incentives to take on temporarily cheap mortgages had no part in the current crisis, officials carefully direct our attention elsewhere. Widespread moral hazard stemming from bailouts, both guaranteed and implied? Shhhh.

But the government, uninterested in regulating itself and its own excesses, is instead targeting you and me.

“Tighter regulation” means less freedom to make your own decisions about your own time and resources.

Venture Beat magazine reports on a provision of Senator Chris Dodd’s proposed reform that would make it much harder for so-called “angel” investors to fund new start-ups.

An angel investor is somebody willing to fund a new business with his own wealth, even when venture capitalists managing others people’s funds decline to invest. Dodd’s bill would force start-ups raising funds to register with the SEC and wait 120 days for the filing to be processed. It would also increase the minimum capital that “accredited investors” must have in the bank before the government will permit them to invest.

Based on nobody’s considered judgment about a particular venture but only on lawmakers’ nebulous fear of entrepreneurial risk, the proposed law would kill in the crib many pioneering and timely, must-act-now innovations.

Accidentally, I’m sure, current businesses would be spared competition from upstarts.

And this is supposed to help the economy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Quick! Stop the Rescue!

If there’s anything worse than running a state into the ground, it’s turning that state around.

Such seems to be the attitude behind yet another “bailout” program being mulled over by our congressional overlords in Washington, DC.

Over at National Review Online, Daniel Foster calls the Democrats’ proposed $23 billion fund for preventing teacher layoffs a “putting off hard decisions” fund. Pitched in the direction of Foster’s own state, New Jersey, the giveaways would sabotage efforts by the new governor, Chris Christie, to close a looming budget deficit for fiscal year 2011 of more than $10 billion.

The Garden State’s budget for fiscal year 2010 was about $30 billion. Christie is trying to cut funding to school districts. He has pledged to restore the funds in districts where teachers agree to a one-year pay freeze and to contribute a small bit of their salary (1.5 percent) to help pay for their own health insurance. Currently, most pay nothing.

But if the federal government flings borrowed largesse that makes the state’s budget cuts irrelevant, teachers will have much less incentive to cooperate with even marginally more responsible policies.

Perhaps that’s the goal for Washington’s big spenders. After all, if folks could get their fiscal houses in order without handouts from the spendaholics in DC, there’d be no need for such handouts.

And then just how “important” would those politicians be?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.