Category: responsibility

national politics & policies responsibility

The Accelerators

“We can do $10 trillion,” declared Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑NY) last week.

“I know that may be an eye-popping figure for some people,” explained the photogenic pop-eyed pol, “but we need to understand that we are in a devastating economic moment, millions of people in the Unites States are unemployed, we have a truly crippled health-care system and a planetary crisis on our hands, and we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.”

In other words, the sky is falling … and we still have checks.

The Bronx congresswoman, described as “one of the most influential members” by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, trumpeted that tidy sum in response to last week’s “go big” proposal by President Joe Biden to spend a special new $2.2 trillion under the loose label of infrastructure, which AOC argued “is not nearly enough.”

This new two-tril spending bill is “a follow-up to the $1.9 trillion stimulus approved in March.” And just Part 1 of a two-package infrastructure and other stuff Biden plan.

“The White House is reportedly willing to spend $4 trillion across the two packages,” Business Insider reports, “a sum that would bring recovery spending under his term to nearly $6 trillion.”

Biden’s term has been only 76 days.

A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money … except under Modern Monetary Theory, which Ocasio-Cortez embraces. The idea being: government can print as much money as politicians want to spend.

While this road to bankruptcy has been paved with the partisan political intentions of big spending politicians of both major parties, right now it is the Democrats hitting the gas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bankruptcy, inflation, spending, taxes

ideological culture responsibility social media

Realtor Group Gag

The U.S. President, along with his most influential followers, has been banned from Twitter and from other social media while also facing yet another impeachment effort.

So who cares whether some silly realtor group imposes an anti-“hate speech” code on members?

Us.

We had better care.

Why?

Bureaucrats and politicians don’t act alone.

They are empowered by individuals who consent to, cheer for, do whatever they can to promote and enable repression. And by all the private organizations and institutions who do the same kind of enabling of repression.

The “hate speech” ban just imposed by the National Association of Realtors on its members to govern their conduct 24/7 (a “blacklisting,” says Reason’s Eugene Volokh) could impose fines up to $15,000 for violations. (I assume NAR would be unable to collect from members who don’t stick around to pay.)

The goal is to make at least the most submissive members struggle never to say anything that could offend some anti-speech client.

If you are a realtor with NAR: quit. Don’t cooperate. Don’t fund and don’t sanction these aspiring tyrants. You can find client leads another way. Join a competing organization that doesn’t ban speech. Or work with other realtors to form one.

Governments do not tyrannize in a social and cultural vacuum.

Do we want a world in which everyone who values freedom is silent — even “voluntarily” — for fear of “hatefully” offending the infinitely tender sensibilities of those who hate freedom of speech and any fundamental disagreement?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 1st Amendment, censorship, free speech

folly general freedom responsibility

Bath Tub Fails

“Barely one in 1,000 Britons has died from coronavirus,” states Tim Harford, in U.K.’s Daily Mail, “and yet the economy is in cardiac arrest, Government debt has run into hundreds of billions and many parents are terrified of sending their children to school.”

Trying to put the pandemic in context with actual numbers, to assess realistic risk, Harford goes on to argue that “given the current low risk of infection, combined with the low risk from the disease, a 30-year-old is far more at risk from riding a motorbike, going skiing or horse-riding — let alone sky-diving, rock-climbing or scuba-diving — than from the virus.”

He makes the startling claim that a trek outside, with possible SARS-CoV‑2 exposure, “is not much more serious than taking regular baths over a year.”

Harford makes many attempts not to minimize the danger, and assuage Brits’ past and present concerns, thus acknowledging that they weren’t exactly crazy, but in the end the situation is like this: “The prospect of bathtime tragedies has never shut the country down.”

People die of risky activities every day, and not just on slippery porcelain: we risk our lives on asphalt, staircases, and in the air. Yet we go on, plunging ahead.

Brave people, we?

Not now. The worldwide government response has been, with a few notable exceptions — Sweden and South Dakota, to name the two most famous for bucking panic and lockdowns and mask-wearing mandates — a pitch to people’s fears.

Maybe in Britain thought leaders and statesmen have praised valor and fortitude as well as caution and individual responsibility. But in America, calls to courage have been few and far between.

Hey: I just noticed something, “panic” is contained within the word “pandemic”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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nannyism responsibility too much government

It’s Never Too Late to Prep?

Post author By Editor
Post date August 26, 2020
2 Comments on It’s Never Too Late to Prep?

That’s the theme of a discussion at reddit.com. “Someone told me it was too late last fall,” the original poster recalls. “I went on to build a moderate canned prep.… Someone told me it was too late to prep for the pandemic in February. I went on to gather [personal protective equipment] before the stores emptied.”

Most Redditors nodded. But one suggested that if things go kablooey and some products become scarce on shelves, “buying up those supplies is not being a prepper but being a hoarder.”

“Hoarding” is a word used to disparage somebody else’s foresight and concern for survival. If something you need is in short supply, it is reasonable to stock up, if you can. (Even if it’s toilet paper and comedians chortle.) If the market is allowed to function — so that sellers of highly demanded goods can charge what the market will bear — everyone who can scrape together the necessary extra dollars will be able to obtain those goods.

If a person buys up a supply only to resell it, not to restock his larder, he does us all a favor if the item is about to become desperately needed. He makes no money unless people can pay his price. But if we can afford the price, it is pointless to sputter about the extra expense — an expense we could have avoided had we prepared better for the future earlier on, saving more of the thing ourselves.

The cost of not being prepared can be quite high. Same with the value, hence purchase price, of necessities bought after disaster.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags hoarder, hoarding, prepper

general freedom ideological culture responsibility

Racism as Health Crisis?

George Floyd, race, racism, Covid, Coronavirus

How can you tell when people really care?

It is not when they mouth the right platitudes.

Or advance a carefully crafted political agenda.

What counts more? Something practical.

Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer cracked down further with COVID-related health care mitigation efforts this week. One stands out: on Wednesday she “declared racism a public health crisis, ordered implicit bias training for all state employees, and,” reports Paul Egan of the Detroit Free Press, “created a state advisory council to focus on issues affecting Black people in Michigan.”

“We have a lot of work to do to eliminate the systemic racism that Black Americans have experienced for generations,” the governor said.

Whitmer noted that black Michiganders are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white Michiganders — because, well, you probably do not need to read deeply into her communiqués or watch USA Today’s helpful video. The arguments are familiar.

And not completely without merit.

But notice what she did not say.

She did not advise darker-skinned people to take Vitamin D supplements and go outside and soak in more rays than they might, otherwise.

Vitamin D deficiency has been repeatedly linked as a co-factor for the development of severe COVID-19.

Race, not racism, may be what’s most relevant. Or, as the president might say, “it is what it is”: white skin more efficiently absorbs solar radiation to produce Vitamin D than higher-melaninned skin, an adaptation for northern climes where solar radiation is less intense than in the tropics.*

While this is certainly not the only factor in susceptibility to the virus’s worst effects, and it is still unproven — a word to the wise.

From the caring.

Not the politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “According to a CDC study published in 2006,” offered the Arizona Republic, “21% of non-Hispanic white people are at risk of having inadequate levels of vitamin D, versus 73% of Black people and 42% of Hispanic people.”

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government transparency national politics & policies responsibility

America Unmasked

For weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services told us not to wear face masks. The Surgeon General even warned that mass use of masks could “increase the spread of the coronavirus.”

“My nose tells me,” I posted on Facebook weeks ago, “that all the info about how we don’t need face-masks is to cover up for the lack of face-masks.”

My family is very grateful to a Taiwanese friend, who mailed me masks — not the N95 masks, which the Taiwanese government is donating in large quantities, but masks of excellent non-medical quality.

Last Wednesday, CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell noted that a large percentage of people spreading the virus are asymptomatic, meaning they don’t know they have it. She asked Dr. Anthony Fauci with the White House Coronavirus Taskforce: “Should we be advising people to wear masks?”

“The primary people who need masks are healthcare workers,” the doctor replied, before admitting that if supplies weren’t so limited, wearing a mask was “a potentially good way … you could have an impact with preventing transmission.”

Days later, President Trump passed on a CDC advisory to the same effect.

Americans had figured out the initial lie, and were already making their own and posting how to do so on social media. Now that’ll ramp up.

Initially, our leaders didn’t level with us. They could have. Americans seem amazingly cooperative, to say the least.

Government folks need to stop masking the truth from the public. That way they might earn more public trust.

Which sure can be useful during a crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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