Category: property rights

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Accountability crime and punishment moral hazard property rights U.S. Constitution

Forfeiting Common Sense

civil, asset, forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, cash, grocery bag, Whole Foods, theft, police, corruption

Is it okay to steal if you can get away with it?

A full answer would require a treatise. But most of us common-sensibly understand that evil does not magically become good when perpetrators are not stopped or punished. Thrasymachus was wrong to contend, in Plato’s Republic, that justice is merely the “interest of the stronger.”

When it comes to crimes like bank robberies, muggings and car jackings, we have no doubts about this. In such blatant cases, we suffer nothing like the legitimate confusion to which we may be prone regarding the exact border between adjacent parcels of land or the niceties of intellectual property law.

Well, somebody tell the New Hampshire state police.

Some of them apparently believe it’s okay to steal if you can evade laws against the stealing.

New Hampshire’s recent reform of civil forfeiture laws requires criminal conviction of a person before there can be any forfeiture of his property. But a loophole enabled officers to grab $46,000 of Edward Phipps’s money — from his car, stopped on the road — even though he was never accused of a crime. 

How?

It seems that if state cops collaborate with the feds, safeguards established to prevent such abuse can be evaded.

To retrieve even a little of his money ($7,000), Mr. Phipps was forced to relinquish all claim to the balance ($39,000). Even if lawmakers close the loophole, as they should, the robber-cops will probably get away with this particular larceny. 

They shouldn’t.

That’s injustice, not common sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo Credit: N.H. State Police

 

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies property rights responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Trump Trade Enigma

Trump, worship, trade, trade war, tariff, free trade, trade deficit

President Donald J. Trump, former “reality TV” star, often seems merely to skirt reality.

“Our trade deficit ballooned to $817 billion,” President Trump exaggerated to the “men and women of U.S. Steel” last week. 

“Think of that. We lost $817 billion a year over the last number of years in trade,” he went on. 

“In other words, if we didn’t trade, we’d save a hell of a lot of money.”

This is the sort of dopey bunk a drunk at a bar might say, after the fourth shot had obliterated any remnant of economic understanding from his synapses.

But the president said this in Granite City, Illinois, in front of cameras, a live mic, and a cheering crowd.

And yet, as I wrote yesterday at Townhall, Donald Trump is now explicitly aiming at a worldwide free trade policy, negotiating to break down trade barriers and get rid of subsidies on . . . well, “non-automobile industrial goods.”

I’m almost afraid to ask him why not all industrial (and, for that matter, agricultural) products. Could one expect a coherent answer from someone who does not understand that an $817 billion “trade deficit” means that we, the consumers of the United States of America, got stuff from each billion spent? Each dollar?

And yet, if he pulls off worldwide free trade agreements — for whatever reason — he may almost be worth the attention that Bussa Krishna, of the southern state of Telangana, India, gives him.

The man set up a shrine to worship Donald Trump.

I will never do the same. But I’d tip my hat to almost anyone who fosters trade, and the peace and progress trade brings to the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard property rights responsibility too much government

Poison Is Poisonous

poison, inflation, Venezuela, socialism, free markets, capitalism

Venezuela’s socialist economy has been collapsing.

No big mystery. If, out of hostility to capitalism, a society keeps destroying everything that production, trade, and prosperity depend upon, the economy suffers. The benefits of markets don’t flow no matter what.

One assault has taken the form of hyperinflation — runaway printing of currency, done in part to dissolve government debt. Many Venezuelans are resorting to barter. It’s easy to understand why.

Or is it? A Reuters reporter says that economists say that “the central bank [of Venezuela] has not printed bills fast enough to keep up with inflation, which . . . reached an annual rate of almost 25,000 percent in May.”

So go faster!?

Dude. Dude. The massive expansion of Venezuela’s money supply is what’s causing massive jumps in prices. Just like any other economic good, the medium of exchange is subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Other things being equal, enormously increasing a supply of a good will enormously lower its market value or price. Money, too, has a price — in terms of the non-monetary goods being bought. If the pre-hyperinflation price of a dollar in terms of bread is one loaf and the post-hyperinflation price is one bread crumb, you won’t reverse the decline by printing even more dollars or bolívars even faster.

If you’re ingesting poison, you can’t fight the effects by being poisoned more and harder. The very first thing to do is stop ingesting the poison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility too much government

Working to Boost Unemployment

occupational licensing, hair braiding, permission, law, crime, employment, unemployment, control, health

Some government officials work overtime to throw people out of work.

What I’m referring to differs from losing your job or business because of slack performance or slackening sales. Instead, you lose the right to earn your living a certain way so that the government can benefit competitors at your expense.

Occupational licensing is great at dis-employing people. The regulations are especially galling when the work being regulated obviously requires no formal training in order to be done well and safely.

Hair braiding, for example.

The Institute for Justice — which has done incredible work over the years representing victims of destructive government mandates — just won a victory for hair braiders in Iowa. Thanks to IJ’s efforts, a new law there exempts braiders from having to waste time and money getting a cosmetology license in order to practice their craft.

Such battles are never won permanently, of course. Washington, D.C., recently started requiring day care providers to get a college degree or lose their job. (As I have argued in a Townhall column, the same “logic” would justify forcing people to get college degrees to become parents.) IJ is helping affected parties to challenge the absurd law.

It is time for a new licensing requirement. Nobody gets to become a local, state or federal lawmaker unless he first writes a million times in a row, “I will never help violate the rights of any man or woman to earn an honest living.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people property rights Regulating Protest

Ortega’s Got to Go

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua, rebellion, atrocity, protest, violence

Sometimes “if it bleeds, it leads” fails us. Only a few news outlets have given much attention to Nicaragua’s ongoing atrocities.

Weeks ago, mothers of some of the 76 people, mainly students, already killed protesting despot Daniel Ortega, were leading a march demanding justice . . . “when gunmen opened fire on the crowd.” The Washington Post report continued, “Witnesses have accused police and their civilian allies of initiating the violence that left as many as 18 people dead and more than 200 wounded.”

The June 2 headline summed up the last seven weeks: “At least 100 killed in Nicaragua as political violence intensifies.”

But time and tyranny march on. “Every day they’re killing more people,” an attorney with the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights told the Post. Friday, the group updated the death toll to 137.

Then on Saturday, the English-language Today Nicaragua informed that a 60-year-old man was cut down by a government sniper in Masaya, the former Sandinista stronghold, which is “now under almost total rebel control.”

What can we do?

We can educate ourselves on what’s happening — and pester more news organizations to cover Nicaragua.

We can learn from the experiences in Cuba, in Venezuela, and now in Nicaragua, that leaders seeking awesome powers to remake society to supposedly benefit the poor are ultimately batting zero in helping the poor. Instead, they’re busy at the plate for themselves.

And we can add our voices to Amnesty International’s condemnation of what it calls “the systematic ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of President Ortega’s government.”

When governments open fire on peaceful protesters, it is past time for those governments to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom government transparency local leaders moral hazard nannyism porkbarrel politics privacy property rights responsibility tax policy too much government

Progress, DC-Style

gentrification, renewall, Washington D.C., corruption, crony capitalism, housing, dirigisme

Is the black, Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., actually a “racist”? What about the city council, which is 46 percent African-American, 85 percent Democrat, and 100 percent liberal/progressive?

That’s what a lawsuit argues — the DC ‘powers that be’ are racist in their development and housing policies. Filed on behalf of several African-American DC residents, it alleges that Mayor Muriel Bowser and the council have been striving mightily, as the Washington Post reported, “to ‘lighten’ African American neighborhoods and break up long-established communities.”

“Every city planning agency,” states the complaint, “. . . conspired to make D.C. very welcoming for preferred residents and sought to displace residents inimical to the creative economy.”

Nothing that a billion dollars couldn’t make right, of course — for which the plaintiffs ask.

But is gentrification a crime?

As American University professor Derek Hyra told the Post, “Developers want to maximize their return. This is not a conspiracy. This is capitalism.”

But no, this certainly isn’t laissez faire “capitalism.” It could be described as dirigisme — or “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism” or just a bad old-fashioned mercantilism, revised to work at the city level, where governments partner up with particular groups to extract as much wealth for the insiders as they can. Professor Hyra acknowledges that Bowser and the council were “providing subsidies” to bring in richer citizens and push out poorer ones.

Most importantly, we discover yet again that the power politicians claim they need to help the poor, is used to help the rich.

Way to go, “progressives.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Note: The mayor is a Democrat and the 13-member council is composed of eleven (11) Democrats and two (2) independents. There are no Republicans.

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