Category: national politics & policies

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national politics & policies too much government

Biden’s Peculiar Odor

Biden, inflation, odor, order

William F. Buckley used to say that there is always a presumptive case for order.

Philosopher Joel Feinberg argued that there’s always a presumptive case for freedom.*

This notion of a strong case for or against something prior to specific data can keep philosophers and economists and folks like you and me awake at night.

Here, I’m just going to bring it down to the politics.

Of inflation.

Why are prices — especially fuel prices — rising so?

The Biden Administration has been trying to argue that it’s caused by the war in Ukraine, and Americans’ need to sacrifice to defend that beleaguered country. 

But, as with his talk of “food shortages,” the war is almost certainly an exacerbating, not the prime, factor. Both fuel price spikes and bare shelves demonstrated an alarming trend before Putin invaded Ukraine. 

The cause seems obvious. Do we really need careful studies to show that both were caused by (a) COVID lockdowns and (b) a blizzard of lockdown bailout checks during Trump’s term in office and eagerly pushed also by the current president?

And Biden’s current kick, of demanding that gas stations (!) freeze or reduce prices to “match the cost of production,” has all the odor of cranky, old-fashioned soapbox socialism.

There is a presumptive case that inflation is caused by monetary policy, just as shortages are usually caused by regulations. Trump and Biden and Congress all contributed to over-spending, financialization, and regulatory hits.** But the stink of the growing mess must also affix especially to Biden. After all, one of his campaign promises was to cut production of oil on all government lands and offshore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (1972), pp. 20-22. Where Buckley discussed his presumptive case is your guess or mine. Probably a column back in the 1970s or ’80s.

 ** A few weeks ago an interesting exchange occurred in this website’s comments section, between two friends of this program.

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h/t crAIyon

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies political economy

Big Oil, Big Profits — Big Deal?

Joe Biden, oil, inflation

When President Joe Biden accused oil companies of excessive profiteering, and those profits as a cause of inflation, reactions were . . . mixed.

Democrats love that kind of talk. Ronald Reagan, back in his Democrat days, pitched precisely that sort of rhetoric when he campaigned for Truman’s re-election.

Republicans, along with most other Americans, are skeptical. Or just plain incredulous.

Meanwhile, what did Big Oil say?

Chevron’s CEO, Mike Wirth, took special care to complain of the president’s rhetoric, characterizing the administration as having “largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry.”

Perhaps Biden’s worst vilification was that Exxon had “made more money than God” — as if spending more money than God were his job and that he resented any money he couldn’t spend. 

EXXON responded by noting that the multinational had continued investing in infrastructure even during the pandemic lockdowns when the company “lost more than $20 billion and had to borrow more than $30 billion to maintain investment to increase capacity to be ready for post-pandemic demand.”

In a helpful mode, the company offered that “government can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines.”

Biden, who ran on decreasing oil production by regulatory crackdown, received a square hit.

Nonetheless, the Democrats double-down on their worn-out “windfall profits” alarmism. 

After a huge hit to consumption during the lockdowns, the profits are there not as recompense for Big Oil’s regrettable big losses, but as incentives to get out of the Great Suppression. 

We should want profits to entice more investment.

Could it be that Biden wants neither?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly national politics & policies

It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas

Joe Biden, gas, inflation

“Senior White House aides are exploring new ideas to respond to high gas prices,” informs The Washington Post, “desperate to show that the administration is trying to address voter frustration about rising costs at the pump.”

Not “desperate” to lower gas prices, mind you — which have hit $5 a gallon, a double-digit increase from last month — but to “address” the resulting “voter frustration” from high prices. 

After all, there’s an election in November. Suddenly, this crisis could affect important people in Washington!

“Biden officials are taking a second look at whether the federal government could send rebate cards out to millions of American drivers to help them pay at gas stations,” The Post reports. This generous brainstorm was previously rejected because “shortages in the U.S. chip industry would make it hard to produce enough rebate cards.” 

America 2022 isn’t even technologically capable of giving money away. 

Administration experts also worried “the idea could backfire by further pushing up prices by adding to consumer demand.” Oh, didn’t Congress repeal the laws of supply and demand?

Someone “familiar with internal administration discussions” offered that the administration was looking at “telling governors to lower or waive their gas taxes.”

Grover Norquist smiles.

“Other proposals floated by policy experts include suspending the Jones Act,” notes The Post story, “which would reduce shipping costs and make it cheaper to get gasoline from the Gulf Coast to the Eastern Seaboard.”

That act should have been repealed years ago. 

“They’re fighting about narrative rather than fighting about substance,” offered an unnamed outside economic adviser, “because realistically, what are they going to do?”

They could open up energy markets, of course — approve gas pipelines rather than blocking them, perhaps. 

Could? Should? Yes. Will? 

Not Biden!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Not Saving Lives

prayers, circus, politics, politicians

Virtue signaling won’t stop a mass shooter. 

Nor will scoring political points. 

If we earnestly want to focus on preventing these horrific attacks, let’s stop wasting everybody’s time advocating new laws that we already know, had they been in effect, would not have stopped the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. 

Or the recent massacre in Buffalo. 

Or virtually any other murder spree. 

“On the specifics,” Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), “how would your federal background check have stopped either of these two shooters in Buffalo and in Texas? Neither of them had criminal records.” 

“I just don’t get into the trap of having to write a law for the last mass shooting that captured the nation’s attention,” the senator responded, arguing that “on the same day of the shooting in Uvalde, there were 100 plus other people in this country who died.”

Sen. Murphy was anything but frank, certainly, but it was an admission that his proposal is clearly not geared toward stopping massacres by gunmen.

Americans should ignore the political circus, realizing that the politicians are working on other agendas while these killers have serious and often completely untreated mental health issues. Let’s concentrate public policy — and everyday neighborliness — there.

Lastly, while some dismiss the value of “thoughts and prayers,” I do not. There is a social, emotional, spiritual element that I think we totally discard when all we can talk about is what a bunch of corrupt folks in Washington “must do” to solve our problems.

On the other hand, a return to a culture of mourning, thoughts and prayers might at least sober up those drunk on power.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights national politics & policies

The J. Edgars’ Threat Tags

Attorney General, Merrick Garland

Last year, Attorney General Merrick Garland found himself under fire for putting parents under fire. That is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was shown to be targeting for investigation parents upset at school boards for promoting Critical Race Theory.

Garland tried to weasel out of the situation, but since then a lot of details accumulated, like the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center special “snitch line” allowing Democrats to report on parents who buck school board opinions on race.

And now it’s been shown to be worse: it is not just about CRT. Parents who complained about mask mandates also got flagged for being “threats.”

From its inception, the FBI has engaged in shady political activities. The Hoover years — in which J. Edgar erected quite a fiefdom for himself, giving rise to the moniker “J. Edgars” for FBI agents — has served as a casebook on how a government operation is not supposed to work.

During the Trump years, agents were caught lying on FISA surveillance warrant applications to engage in a long-running coup attempt. More recently, it was shown in court that the FBI had encouraged the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot.

On May 11, Representatives Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson co-signed a letter to Merrick Garland on the matter. Whistleblowers, they informed him, had confirmed the FBI was actually investigating concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” using the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division’s “threat tag” system.

Most investigations fizzled, since there was no real threat to be found on most tips, but the partisan slant of the tagging/targeting procedures suggests that the FBI has become, again, a deviously rogue agency pursuing partisan political goals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies

Quota Requirement Overturned

Jerry Brown, California, racism, quota, colors

In 2018, Jerry Brown, then California governor, signed a bill requiring corporate boards to include a high percentage of women. 

Now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has determined that the state failed to show that “gender-based classification was necessary to boost California’s economy, improve opportunities for women in the workplace, and protect California taxpayers, public employees, pensions and retirees.”

No news yet on whether the state will appeal.

In 2018, Brown had conceded that the law was probably doomed to be judged unconstitutional. But he apparently regarded questions of legality or constitutionality as irrelevant.

“It’s high time corporate boards include the people who constitute more than half the ‘persons’ in America,” he burbled in his signing message.

Fines for disobedience were to be steep: $100,000 for initial violations, $300,000 for subsequent violations.

Of course, it is neither immoral nor a crime to choose a man instead of a woman for a post. Making specific hires criminal depending upon the complexion of a business’s other hires amounts to the politicization of everything, swapping the goals of business for the goals of ideologues. It is destructive of individual rights and the requirements of conducting business profitably to compel employers choosing personnel to be guided by any considerations other than relevant qualifications. Or by any assessment but their own.

Managers of all non-government organizations should be free to use their own best judgment in hiring and contracting, whether the work involved is that of clerk, CEO, or board member. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Just Sue Already

Eric Schmitt, Jeff Landry, Missouri, Louisiana

Two state attorneys general, Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry (of Missouri and Louisiana, respectively), are suing the federal government for colluding with Big Tech to suppress speech in violation of First Amendment rights.

Their recent filing quotes a ruling which argues that it“violates the First Amendment ‘if the government coerces or induces [a private entity] to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint.’”

The plaintiffs observe that this has been happening for years, “culminating in . . . open and explicit censorship programs,” and they ask the court to permanently enjoin such unlawful conduct.

Separately, twenty attorneys general (including Schmitt and Landry) have sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the agency’s new board instituted to counter unapproved speech.

The AGs threaten to “consider judicial action” if Mayorkas doesn’t “disband this Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board immediately.”

According to the letter, the board “will inevitably have a chilling effect on free speech.”

It is, I suppose, conceivable that if a suit were filed the Biden administration would recognize that it can’t win and would dissolve the board immediately. So far, though, the administration has just been barreling ahead with bad policies unless and until legally thwarted.

So why are the AGs even bothering with a letter that must have even less effect than a filing?

Now the letter has been submitted. Fine. Give Mayorkas ten minutes to shut down the board. Has he shut it down? No.

Sue!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Homeland Censorship Board

Elon Musk, Twitter, free speech, censorship, First Amendment

We’re in a twilight zone beyond mere “mission creep” now. 

Two months ago, creeps at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created a new censorship board, secret until its existence was revealed in congressional testimony.

This disinformatively named Disinformation Governance Board is headed by an open critic of the First Amendment, Nina Jankowicz. The purpose of the amendment being to protect freedom of speech and other rights from governmental assault, the new board and its director are especially alarming.

The DHS was formed after 9/11 to protect national security and combat terrorism, a form of politically motivated violence. And whatever the exact definition of “terrorism” should be, we can at least agree that arguing about the origins and issues of elections, pandemics, or Russian invasions doesn’t qualify. The bitterest clashing over facts is just speech, unless part and parcel of criminal acts.

But the purpose of the Disinformation Board is to combat and “address this threat” of election disinformation.

Merriam-Webster defines “disinformation” as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread” to “influence public opinion or obscure the truth.”

The First Amendment protects dishonest and mistaken honest speech, not just infallible honest speech. But by “disinformation,” foes of freedom of speech often mean “any speech we dispute.”

If the government can repress any speech that it chooses to label “disinformation,” that portends the end of freedom of speech. 

The very existence of the Disinformation Board warrants a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

And since disinformation was coined to designate, specifically, government-concocted and distributed misinformation — a term of art in the “intelligence” and propaganda biz, called dezinformatsiya by Stalin  — it is especially rich to see the current administration apply it directly against the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies social media

Electoral Fraud, Google-Style

Google, deep state

“There exist many sneaky ways to get other people to do what you want, voluntarily — effectively blurring the line between legitimate persuasion and fraud.”

I wrote that in a Common Sense squib entitled “The Online Manipulation of Democracy,” in which I discussed the work of Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. That was over four years ago. Since then, his research has carried forward, focusing on how “the biggest tech companies influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in these companies’ products, with a particular focus on Google.”

I’m quoting from an article by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek, from page A4 of the latest issue of The Epoch Times. In that article, and in an online interview published April 7, we are told how vast this power is — capable of flipping close elections around the world — and how difficult the influencing is to identify.

And that’s not just because Big Tech outfits like Google are sneaky. 

Ephemeral events on our screens, like “a flashing newsfeed, a search result, or a suggested video are the ideal form of manipulation,” Epstein argues, “because they aren’t recorded and are hard to document.”

He insists they “affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere, and they’re gone.” 

Think about what that means: we don’t know we’re being manipulated, and “authorities can’t go back in time to see what people were being shown,” explains Epstein.

But it’s worse: Google, like many “free” online service companies, started out as a Deep State project.

We shouldn’t be shocked to find that sneaky, evasive, ephemeral manipulation techniques have been pioneered by . . . tax-funded spies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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That Other October Surprise?

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Harken back to those heady days leading up to Election 2020, when six men were arrested for a scheme to snatch Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer from her home.

As with other October surprises, the case was immediately politicized. 

“Democrats on Thursday made it clear they felt President Trump was at least in part to blame for an alleged scheme to kidnap the governor of Michigan,” government-subsidized NPR noted, “citing the president’s divisive rhetoric that has often found support among white supremacists and other hate groups.” CNN used the phrase “domestic terrorist plot” in relating presidential challenger Joe Biden’s laying of blame against Donald Trump.

Six men were charged in federal court with directly conspiring to nab the governor. Two have pled guilty to the federal charges, but on Friday the trial ended very differently for the four other would-be abductors.

“A federal jury acquitted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and deadlocked on the counts against two others,” reported The Washington Post, “apparently agreeing to some degree with defense claims that FBI agents entrapped the men in a violent plot shortly before the 2020 election.”

“The Whitmer kidnapping plot,” Reason’s Robby Soave explained months ago, “was extensively directed and encouraged by agents of the government.” 

This was not just a bungled prosecution.* This was the result of a wrongheaded and dangerous policy that, instead of lawfully monitoring suspected criminals to prevent violence, actively nurtures and encourages crimes. 

And breaks the story in early October of an election year.

Sure, I know the government is here to help — but even “domestic terrorists”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Suffice it to say,” Soave wrote about the FBI’s handing of the case, “it’s very hard to tell the cops from the criminals in this matter.” For instance, “the government’s star witness, FBI Agent Robert Trask, was fired by the agency after beating his wife following an orgy at a swingers party.”

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