Category: national politics & policies

Categories
crime and punishment folly general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies Popular privacy responsibility The Draft too much government U.S. Constitution

Leave Those Kids Alone

draft, selective service, conscription, war, slavery, servitude, Congress, hearings

Congress created The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service “to consider and develop recommendations concerning the need for a military draft, and means by which to foster a greater attitude and ethos of service among American youth.”

Is it possible that Congress and the commissioners have never considered the inherent contradiction between forcing people into the military against their will and fostering an “ethos of service”?

Today, I will get perhaps two minutes to address this commission at a hearing in Denver, Colorado, answering* these questions it has posed:

Is a military draft or draft contingency still a necessary component of U.S. national security?

The military draft has never at any time in the history of this country been a necessary component in U.S. national security.  

Are modifications to the selective service system needed?

No. The Selective Service System, the people who force very young men into the military against their will, needs to be ended. Not modified. Not expanded to women. End draft registration. Close the agency.

The United States should forswear any use of conscription. A free country need not force people into the military to defend it.

Is a mandatory service requirement for all Americans necessary, valuable, and feasible?

Necessary? Not on your life. Americans have always stepped forward — not only to defend their own country, but also in hopes of defending people across the globe.

Valuable? That’s a bad joke. People forced to kill and die in Vietnam and other conflicts and those imprisoned for refusing to take part in such a system fail to see any value. The draft has been disastrous.

What is valuable are the lives and rights of the young. They are free citizens, not Congress’s pawns.

Feasible? No. Because too many of us will fight you, refusing to go along. Even if it means our imprisonment.** Plus, a conscripted army is a poor substitute for the All Volunteer Force.

The draft is unnecessary, divisive and dangerous.

How does the United States increase the propensity for Americans, particularly young Americans, to serve?

Be worthy of the voluntary service of the American people.

If the government is responsible, then people will respond to protect it.

Commit to raising an army of soldiers and service providers by persuading citizens to freely serve their communities and their country. In short, this commission and this Congress should commit to freedom.

That would be truly inspiring.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I will also be submitting a longer, more formal statement in testimony.

** As regular readers know, I was one of 20 young men prosecuted for refusing to register for the draft in the 1980s.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

That Something You Do

Congress, Facebook, hearings, control, regulations, Mark Zuckerberg, censorship, censor, regulate

Congress grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last week, and as usual ended up roasting itself.

“Zuckerberg has already experienced the worst punishment of all,” quipped comedian Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. “He had to spend four hours explaining Facebook to senior citizens.”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, retiring after his 42nd consecutive year in Washington, asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“Senator,” Zuckerberg incredulously replied, “we run ads.”

Inc. magazine reported the obvious: “several of our elected leaders asked questions that were highly uninformed, or in some cases just plain weird.”

Uninformed. Weird. That’s them, alright.*

Still, the Washington establishment seems to seriously think these same congressmen ought to be re-writing privacy rules.

“Elected officials know the public wants them to do something to protect their privacy,” announced Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. “The question now turns to what is that something?”

“Americans are largely together on this issue,” Todd said, citing a recent poll where a similar “66 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans say they want more control over the information companies have about them.”

But Democrats and Republicans are together on something else: Only 21 percent of Democrats and a tiny 14 percent of Republicans “trust the federal government” to act on the issue.

The senators, though obviously “confused about basic topics,” Emily Stewart wrote at Vox,  “seem to agree they want to fix something about Facebook. They just have no idea what.”

Please Congress: DON’T “do something.” Don’t do that thing you do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Reason TV has a very funny video on the Zuckerberg hearing.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom government transparency moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

While the Clock Ticks

national debt, debt clock, Mercatus Center, economics, economy, folly,

Pushing annual federal spending over a trillion bucks into the red?

It has consequences.  

“Our debt is growing, and it’s growing fast,” writes Veronique de Rugy at Reason. “Though it’s a shame that lawmakers passed tax cuts without cutting spending to offset short-term losses in revenue, there’s no doubt that Social Security and Medicare deficits are almost entirely to blame for our impending debt crisis.”

Ms. de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, has a typo in the version of her article that I read (it has probably since been corrected): “Based on current trends, the debt held by the public is set to reach $15.7 trillion by the end of this year and continue rising to $28.7 trillion by 2028.” She surely meant “$25.7 trillion,” since the current debt clock figure shows the U.S. public debt at over $21 trillion. Still, $25.7 seems a bit high . . . but at this point we can leave the exact numbers to the professionals.

We just know that the debt’s too damn high.

As de Rugy explains, it has present as well as future cost. And, yes, entitlements are the biggest problem — but even more than Ms. de Rugy suggests. Congress owes the Social Security “trust fund” (in Al Gore’s infamous and non-existent “lock box”) nearly $3 trillion.

Our solons would have to (painfully) switch from revenue deficits to revenue surpluses just to pay off its debt to a much-relied upon institution.

What will happen, though, is surely this: Congress will borrow more from elsewhere to pay what Social Security needs — which all too soon will be a lot more than $3 trillion.

That’s not Common Sense. (But I am Paul Jacob.)

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom government transparency media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Wag the Wolf

Syria, Donald Trump, Trump, war, wag the dog, diversion, antiwar, gas, gassing, chemical, chlorine, false flag

Once upon a time, President Donald Trump was against attacking Syria merely on grounds that its dictator is a murderously bad guy — despite numerous chemical attacks on civilians in opposition-occupied and -contested areas that had been blamed on Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

Almost exactly a year ago, a sarin gas attack spurred President Trump to order a cruise missile strike on the Syrian airstrip where it was alleged the Assad regime sent those planes to drop weaponized chemicals on innocent populations. The strike was widely characterized as “Donald Trump’s most dramatic military order since becoming president.”

Since then, after another reported gassing — this time “chlorine”; this time a hospital as target — the drumbeat for war has gotten louder, despite Russia’s stern warning that there would be “grave repercussions” were the U.S. to attack its ally again.

Whoops and war cries even from the anti-Trump media.

But as Tucker Carlson argues, there are still legitimate disputes about previous gas attacks — about who really perpetrated them, and the uncertainty of proclaiming Assad the malefactor in the most recent one.*

Meanwhile, the FBI raided Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s offices. The rationale? Apparently unrelated to the “Russia investigation.” Instead, it is about “campaign finance law” — that is, the paid-off pornstar issue.

In the 1990s, we called Bill Clinton’s bombing of a “chemical weapons” factory in Africa — on the very same day that Monica Lewinsky testified before a grand jury about her affair with the president — “wag the dog.”

Trump cries “witch hunt!” but I wonder if the Deep State may not be trying to wag the wolf this time around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* News stories about atrocities have been faked before in the Middle East — remember the hospital baby-murder story in Kuwait? “Both” sides in Syria are known to possess chemical weapons.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Bias and Blindness

GAO, racism, race, boys, Roseanne, schools, education, bias

Neither stretching the truth nor ignoring it helps beat back implicit or explicit racism.  Yesterday, my Townhall.com column took the Washington Post to task for misstating the results of a recent GAO report.

The GAO noted wide discrepancies between the percentage of students facing disciplinary actions who are black, male and disabled and the relative percentages of these groups in the overall student population. Yet, the report also specifically stated: “Our analyses of these data, taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred.”

Nonetheless, the Post headline told readers: “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds.” The article claimed that “a government analysis of data . . . said implicit racial bias was the likely cause of these continuing disparities.”

The same discrepancies regarding boys of all races? And students with disabilities? Even the crickets had no comment.

In the Post’s Outlook section, yesterday, readers were treated to further edification on race — this time via C. Nicole Mason with the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest. “I feel alienated and slightly betrayed by the reboot” of the sitcom Roseanne,” she writes.

The title of her piece proclaims why: “‘Roseanne’ was about a white family, but it was for all working people. Not anymore.”

The “not anymore” refers to Roseanne’s support of (and Mason’s derangement syndrome over) President Trump. Interestingly, a more legitimate “not anymore” angle was completely missed — or ignored. The Connors now have a black granddaughter. The new show isn’t “about a white family,” but a racially mixed family.

When racism is finally extinguished from this planet, someone remember to tell the race-hustlers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Myth of the Monoliths

NRA, monolith, March for our Lives, members, gun control, guns

According to organizers of the “March for Our lives,” the National Rifle Association is wholly evil, a corrupter of democracy, a malign presence straight out of Mordor, bent upon murder — a monolithic influence responsible for every mass shooting event.

The clearest expression of this is by young David Hogg, who figured that the NRA’s sum of contributions to Sen. Marco Rubio, when divided not by the number slain in the recent Parkland shooting but instead by the total number of students throughout Florida, came out to $1.05 per student.

Forget the computation — think nasty imputation.

What Hogg and his friends in the media elide is a simple little fact: the NRA is a membership organization. When critics of the Second Amendment point at the NRA and shout “evil!” they are really pointing at the organization’s millions of members.

People, not malign institutions.

Also neglected? The fact that, as near as I can make out, not one NRA member has mown down students in any school or church in America. Instead, at least one civilian NRA member took out his AR-15 to bring down one such mass-murdering shooter.

“Evil NRA” talk is misdirection and slander.

Also not a monolith? Students. Christian Britschgi, writing at Reason, notes that teenagers made up only 10 percent of marchers at the recent rally, and, catching a whiff of astroturf, cites a poll that found less than a majority of Millenials favoring an “assault rifle” ban.

Citizens of all ages disagree. Pretending that all kids are against guns, or that the NRA is anything other than a citizen advocacy group, distorts reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility too much government

You’re Fired!

Veterans Administration, health care, VA, waste, waiting time, Secretary Dr. David Shulkin, Donald Trump,

If government were reality TV — and it is — this current administration would obviously be The Apprentice.

Who do you most want fired?

Last week, President Trump gave Veterans Administration Secretary Dr. David Shulkin the heave-ho, after a “damning” Inspector General’s report not only charged Shulkin with misusing tax dollars but also detailed myriad problems at the VA that continue to “put patients at risk.”

In a New York Times op-ed, the former Secretary defended his “tenure at the department,” arguing that he had “expanded access to health care by reducing wait times, increasing productivity and working more closely with the private sector.”

Speaking of the private sector, however, Shulkin suggested his firing was orchestrated by those favoring privatization — and that “privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea.”

Last April, President Trump signed the Veterans Choice Improvement Act, expanding the ability of vets to access private medical care outside the confines of the VA system. Why? Because IG investigations discovered that wait times were actually killing veterans — and the VA bureaucracy was actively covering up the problem.

“Critics have questioned whether increasing veterans’ reliance on private doctors might move the VA toward privatization,” the Washington Examiner noted at the time, “while proponents of such efforts have accused the VA of resisting steps to implement the program in order to protect the status quo.”

Vets deserve a choice, not a bureaucracy. After failing veterans for decades, Status Quo, you’re fired!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

The Sitcom Society

Roseanne Barr, sitcom, sit-com, comedy, Television, controversy, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, satire

If we are entering a new Golden Age of television, it is for the most part passing the legacy TV networks by.

So, Roseanne Barr to the rescue!

The reboot of ABC’s Roseanne — a hit situation comedy of the late 1980s and much of the 1990s — should put the network and the art form back in the spotlight.

But though it is very popular, the show is not without . . . its political controversy. You see, funny-woman Roseanne plays Roseanne Conner, and she . . . (drum roll) . . . voted for Trump.*

Horrors!

Predictably, our modal mainstream media cultural mavens are not on board. Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, complains that Roseanne’s views are “muddled and incoherent.”

Roseanne to Roxanne, hello-o-o: the character is fictional. Who said characters in a comedy should have coherent views? One would think the point of comedy would require the opposite.

Jezebel provides another fine example of this. In “What’s Up, Deplorable; Roseanne Is Back,” Rich Juzwiak opines that “[n]ever discussed was the laundry list of hateful, stupid, and wrong things Trump said, nor their even more nefarious implications.” On Twitter, Professor Jared Yates Sexton calls the character’s perspective “a cleaned-up lie,” and amounts to a turning a “blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.”

Neither Juzwiak nor Sexton mentions any problem with the main alternative to the president in the last election — something Roseanne does in the show itself.

It’s almost as if what these (and many similar) critics want is a tidy propaganda piece for their opinions; it’s almost as if their objection is to the show’s realism.

Now that’s comedy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In the season opener, Roseanne defends the president from her dippy Democrat sister, whom she had not been speaking with since the election. Her sister, Jackie (played hilariously by Laurie Metcalf), enters the tenth season wearing a red pro-Hillary t-shirt and one of those grab-em-by-the-x pink hats. Their reconciliation is a hoot.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies privacy subsidy too much government

The Post Office Scam

USPS, Post Office, monopoly, competition, Amazon, discounts

The President of the United States says that the U.S. Postal Service is scamming us by offering shipping discounts to Amazon, the mail-order giant. “Post Office scam must stop.”

President Trump is hovering in the vicinity of the right idea. But what about government-required discounts for shippers? Are these scams too?

Congress has long required lower postal rates “for religious, educational, charitable, political and other non-profit organizations. . . .”  Robert Shapiro estimates that such mandates cost the agency over a billion dollars a year. The government forces USPS to do a great many things that lose money — things that companies functioning in a free market cannot profitably do.

And American taxpayers must perennially fork over billions to sustain its lumbering operations.

It is true that, in markets, buyers of large quantities of a good or service routinely pay less per unit than buyers of small quantities; such discounts can enhance the seller’s bottom line. The fact that USPS offers discounts to a mega-shipper like Amazon does not in itself show that charging more per parcel would generate more revenue.

The question is, then, which transactions would flourish if the agency were just another market player instead of a government-protected, government-hobbled, government-subsidized bureaucracy?

Like any government-run “business,” the Post Office is itself a “scam.” This scam must stop. Phase out USPS as a government agency and let any company deliver first-class mail to our mailboxes on any honest terms that might attract customers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

 

Categories
crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

High on Hemp?

hemp, marijuana, legalization, prohibition, THC, CBD, Mitch McConnell

Hemp is not marijuana.

And yet it is.

Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he will introduce legislation to legalize industrial hemp.

He is not concerning himself with marijuana, which is what we call the plant Cannabis sativa when cultivated for its Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content, the principal chemical in the plant that makes it ideal for “recreational” uses. Industrial hemp is Cannabis sativa, too, just with minuscule THC.

Hemp products are actually legal to buy and sell in the United States.

Sort of.

But growing it is murky, considering that ingestible hemp is a Schedule 1 drug no matter how little THC it has — despite the fact that Congress has allowed states to regulate the growth of low-THC hemp for “industrial” purposes.  

A complicating factor is that industrial hemp contains an oil, Cannabidiol (CBD), which is neither an ecstatic nor a hallucinogenic drug, but is widely believed to have many therapeutic powers. And is widely sold all over the country, wherever states have allowed for medical marijuana.

Nevertheless the DEA objects to it as much as to THC, saying that all ingestible forms of hemp are illegal.

Because of all this murkiness, McConnell’s bill might seem to be welcome step towards clarity.

Trouble is, since industrial hemp is indistinguishable from cannabis with THC — to look at; to smell; to touch — officials hoping to crack down on marijuana-as-a-psychoactive-drug would be much hampered were industrial hemp commonly and legally grown.

What a mess. The only real solution is to de-list all forms of Cannabis sativa from the War on Drug’s Schedule of Drugs It Unconstitutionally Proscribes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing