Category: privacy

According to Economics

Tom Woods, Contra Krugman, podcast, healthcare, welfare,

“Everywhere you look, economics is despised,” writes Tom Woods in his Tuesday email letter.

You know what isn’t despised? A daily email letter.*

But I digress; back to economics.

“The gimme-free-stuff people hate it because they don’t like being told that there might be undesirable side effects from seizing other people’s things.”

Well, true enough. But turn it around: many people demand free stuff at least in part because they do not understand the bigger picture … which Mr. Woods ably provides in his daily podcast and on his weekly Contra Krugman podcast with economist Bob Murphy.

“Politicians hate it, because it imposes logical constraints on what political activity can accomplish.”

True, but, like many in the general public (from whence they come), politicians’ prior lack of economic knowledge also leads, in part, to their hubris.

“Even some folks in the business world hate it, because (1) they’d rather agitate for special privileges than hear the case for free markets, and (2) they’d rather have low interest rates than be warned about the causes of the business cycle.”

Yes, too true. But, again, business people are generally just people, most of whom haven’t even been exposed to something beyond boring and misleading textbook econ, if that. Mr. Woods knows that, since that’s what his mission is, exposing more folks to ideas beyond what he calls “the index card of allowable opinion.”

Well, I’m all about allowing the unallowable — if it’s right!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Historian Woods is now doing what I’ve been doing since 1999, providing a daily common-sense thought that is short and easy-to-read and dropped into your email box every weekday. Mine goes up online at ThisIsCommonSense.com; I don’t see his on his website … but I do see a lot of books and podcasts!

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Tags Contra Krugman, healthcare, podcast, Tom Woods, welfare

Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy responsibility too much government

UK Death Panel

healthcare, socialism, rationing, government

Six days ago, the European Court of Human Rights sided against the parents of Charlie Gard, a severely ill boy, refusing to allow them to take their infant son to America where he could receive full (and privately funded) experimental treatment. The court ruled that removing the child from the hospital would cause him “significant harm” — and authorized the termination of life support.

Yesterday, this site quoted Ben Shapiro on the case. Shapiro sees this sad story as a grand demonstration of what is wrong with government-funded and ‑managed health care:

Bernie Sanders tweets about how nobody should be denied care because they can’t afford it? But that’s what happens all the time under socialized medicine — the difference being, it’s not about you not being able to afford it, it is about the government not being able to afford it.

Economists tell us that, in a world of scarcity, there will be rationing, willy nilly: either by price (according to consumer and producer choices) or else by government diktat.

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights did its due diligence to ration resources — serving as a Death Panel.

The scheduled to pull the plug on Charlie last Friday, but there’s been a last-minute reprieve — no doubt a result of pressure from America and the Vatican.

Though the doctor who testified before the court insisted that any American medical institution would have provided the treatment he offers, the best the Gards can apparently hope for, now, is to be allowed to take Charlie home to die.

Think of it as socialized medicine in action.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags baby, British, European Court, healthcare, human rights, parents, socialism, socialized medicine, UK

ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies privacy responsibility too much government

Women and Men for Life

March for Life, Women's March, abortion, choice, pro-life

At Townhall on Sunday, I applauded the Women’s March on Washington for being peaceful, despite Madonna’s F‑bomb laden speech, culminating with her daydream of “blowing up the White House.”

We’ll never know how many more folks marched in that much-heralded event than attended last weekend’s pro-life march, because the mainstream media did not pay enough attention to the later, inconvenient-to-their-narrative event, and crowd-counters didn’t count.

The two marches did “intersect” (figuratively) when a pro-life group was kicked out as a “partner” to the women’s march.

“If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a woman’s right to choose [abortion],” declared Linda Sarsour, one of four chairwomen for the women’s march, who was described by the New York Times as “a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American Muslim racial justice and civil-rights activist.”

In its favor, the pro-life march, anti-celebrating the 44th year since the Roe v. Wade decision, had far more tasteful placards — despite the fact that pro-life protesters are often remembered for grisly signs picturing aborted fetuses. I particularly liked a sign held by a young women, reading:

“We are having a clump of cells.” — [said] No One Ever

Speaking of young people, Slate magazine reported that “the demographic outlook for the pro-life movement looks anything but bleak,” citing a 2015 poll wherein “52 percent of millennials said the label ‘pro-life’ describes them somewhat or very well.”

Remember, the pro-life movement has been marching all these years not to secure government benefits for themselves, but to protect others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags abortion, choice, March for Life, pro-life, Women's March

folly general freedom ideological culture nannyism privacy property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Democratic Socialism…

Because BIG BROTHER is okay as long as enough people vote for him!

CLICK BELOW for a high resolution version of this image:

Tags Big Brother, Democratic Socialism, egalitarian, meme, socialism, vote, voting

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy responsibility

In Plain Sight

terrorism, surveillance, privacy, fingerprint, targeted, illustration

The Berlin terrorist attack just a little over a week ago fit a noteworthy pattern. German authorities had investigated Anis Amri — the Tunisian man who drove that large truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding 56 others — and found “links with Islamic extremists.”

Later killed in Milan, Italy, Amri had been wanted in Tunisia for “hijacking a van” and jailed in Italy for arson and a “violent assault at his migrant reception center.” And yet with all that known or easily knowable, the German authorities couldn’t prevent him from killing innocent Germans.

It’s not just a European phenomenon, either.

Consider Omar Mateen, this country’s worst mass shooter, having massacred 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The FBI had spent ten months looking into Mateen.

Years before the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI had tracked Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.*

“In case after case … authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence,” the Washington Post recently noted. This was the case with the majority of recent lone-wolf terrorism plots.

“If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks,” a report in The Intercept concluded, “it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance …”

Yet intelligence agencies are still grabbing our metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That needs to stop.

The fact that known threats are consistently not being stopped suggests curtailing mass surveillance won’t hurt our security, but improve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The same is true regarding the Ft. Hood (work-place) shooter, Nidal Hasan. Likewise, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), who was under the active eye of the FBI after returning from Yemen … until he opened fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station killing one soldier and wounding another. Ditto Ahmad Khan Rahami, the less deadly bomber in New York City and New Jersey.

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Tags Berlin, fingerprint, illustration, privacy, surveillance, targeted, terrorism

Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility too much government

A Hailstorm of Orthodoxy

global warming, climate change, skeptic, Pielke, science, illustration

Don’t worry, scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., informs us. He is doing fine — he has tenure.

It is too bad, though, that he no longer works in climate science.

He was drummed out of that endeavor by journalists, big-monied foundations, and the White House.

Are you skeptical? Well, drill down into the Podesta emails on WikiLeaks. There you can read infamous billionaire Tom Steyer gloating, “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538,” a popular website. Pielke has not been published there at all since 2014.

Pielke had made the mistake of publishing the results of his research. He claims not to be heretical on the main points of the current orthodoxy. But Pielke ticked off all the wrong people with his demonstration that the evidence did not back up the climate change movement’s much-repeated charge that the weather has gotten more traumatic as the planet has gotten warmer.

Pielke relates all this in a fascinating Wall Street Journal commentary, “My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic.” Pielke is actually somewhat philosophical about the political and foundational forces arrayed against him — expressing more dismay at his betrayal by journalists and academics.

“You should come with a warning label,” jested one journalist who had merely quoted him. “Quoting Roger Pielke will bring a hailstorm down on your work from the London Guardian, Mother Jones, and Media Matters.”

This “hailstorm” is more widespread and damaging than the results of global warming itself. It effectively distorts both scientific research and the news.

Thus, a political orthodoxy rides herd over public opinion. Over us. By squelching good journalism and honest science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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