Category: responsibility

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Accountability free trade & free markets government transparency ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies responsibility

A Diminishing Lagtime

Flint, water, crisis, government, austerity

The modern age sports an amazing feature that used to be hard to detect, because so drawn out: a shorter-than-ever-before lag between the proposal of some popular inanity and its complete debunking.

It used to take seemingly forever for a bad idea to be shown up, either in argument or evidence. Now it can be a matter of days or even hours. Call it the Buncombe/Debunking Lagtime.

Take the Flint, Michigan, water fiasco.

When the story hit the news cycle, almost immediately the progressive meme machinery began cranking out slogans imposed upon visuals — jpegs and gifs — to the effect that the poisoned water was the result of Republican “austerity” or (even) “libertarian” policy.

Somehow a Democratic mayor was less to blame than a more distant Republican governor, but in the minds of knee-jerk partisans, common sense is not as important as an in-your-face accusation.

But now, days and scant weeks into the story, it turns out that the story behind the story is not merely wrong, but entirely, upside-down wrong. The Flint water fiasco was caused by a stimulus project, and the switch from bad to worse water sources was made to promote “jobs”!

In the words of Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, “the Flint water crisis is the result of a Keynesian stimulus project gone wrong.”

Yes, another failed Big Government policy — just like progressives are always pushing.

And it didn’t take years for the truth to seep out.

Hooray for today’s accelerated history! Now, if we could only decrease the lagtime between lesson given and lesson learned.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets ideological culture meme moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Flint Water Crisis

Flint, water, crisis, poison, government, free market, austerity, failure, Common Sense, Meme, James Gill, Paul Jacob

Government failure checklist. . .

Reference:

The Government Poisoned Flint’s Water—
So Stop Blaming Everyone Else

Flint’s water crisis isn’t a failure of austerity. It’s a failure of government.

Click below for high resolution version of this image.

Flint, water, crisis, poison, government, free market, austerity, failure, Common Sense, Meme, James Gill, Paul Jacob

 

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers responsibility tax policy too much government

Berating Bernie?

Bernie Sanders, Glass Steagall, ratings, agency, Common Sense, illustration, Paul Jacob, James Gill

Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls. He may even beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus and primary contests for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A cause for celebration! Witnessing a huge hunk of Americans accept Mrs. Clinton, the consummate and corrupt insider, is too disheartening.

Bernie Sanders, for all his faults, is at least not an insider like Hillary.

And even when he’s obviously wrong, he’s a breath of fresh atmosphere. Take his recent call for turning the credit ratings institutions into non-profits, or into government-run bureaus. It’s good to hear someone on the left blame something other than the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall as the cause of the Crash of 2008, and (thus?) of the current “Great Recession.” Glass-Steagall was utterly irrelevant to the institutions that were hit hardest in 2008’s collapse; it has, nevertheless, served as leftists’ idée fixe for years now. Embarrassing.

The ratings agencies, on the other hand, did play a part in the crash.

Still, remember: their prominence and importance (and very existence) in financial sectors rests entirely upon one provision of FDR’s New Deal.

More importantly, Bernie’s favored solution — government bureaus — is no solution at all. Europe’s ratings system failed in 2008, too, as Mark A. Calabria has noted, and “it was the international financial regulators, not the rating agencies, who decided that Greek debt was ‘risk-free.’”

Earth to Bernie: government regulatory failure is normal.

Calabria agrees that we need to have a political conversation about the ratings agencies, but insists it be “based on facts,” not ideology.

I’m all for the facts, but ideologies are inevitable. And ideologies promoting Big Government inevitably fail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers responsibility tax policy

Bankrupt Leadership

national debt, debt, deficit, debate, Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, CommonSense

Sen. Rand Paul wasn’t the only thing absent from the GOP presidential stage last Thursday.

Also missing? Any meaningful talk about reducing federal spending and avoiding a sovereign debt crisis. The debt looms over all our heads. But you wouldn’t know it to listen to the GOP hopefuls. (And the same nearly goes without saying for the Democratic Party’s debt-denying presidential aspirants.)

Way back when the Bush Administration had lost America’s confidence, deficits and debts were a common concern. Much of the disgust that birthed the Tea Party movement was disgust at Republican over-spending, as well as at the bailouts that spurred the initial protests. And then came Obama, Obamacare, and a 70 percent increase in federal debt.

Why the silence now?

Nick Gillespie, of Reason, figures that Republicans don’t really care about deficits and debts.

Andrew Flowers, of FiveThirtyEightPolitics, wonders whether the GOP has abandoned the issue because Republicans don’t want to face the fact that Obama has, indeed, reduced deficits — though definitely not the debt, which has nearly doubled.

Alternative theory? Republicans have given up hope, because the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have successfully threatened government shutdown over even the itty bittiest spending cut, safe in the knowledge that the mainstream media’s full spin-cycle will be blaming conservatives.

This has made it easier for Big Government Republicans to embrace greater military funding and other spending programs, as Gillespie notes.

But real leadership recognizes the present danger of debt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom government transparency ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Ethics First

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The biggest problem facing Americans? According to a Gallup poll, for the second year in a row, it’s our government.

Maybe I should say “the government.” Few think it represents us. Which is sort of a big problem for a representative government.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump says our leaders are “stupid.” Were that the case, it’d be easier to correct. The reality is worse.

We have an ethical problem in government. Those entrusted to represent us represent, instead, themselves. And their cronies. And special interests.

Charged with creating a level playing field where we can all succeed through hard work, our elected officialdom have tilted that field. Oh, they’re doing just swell. The rest of us? Not so well.

Elected officials from Washington to state capitols have hiked up their pay, finagled perks, per diems and other bennies, and rewarded themselves with lavish pensions. Meanwhile, most Americans lack even a 401K to help save for retirement, much less a pension beyond a meager (and politician-imperiled) Social Security safety net.

Transparency? Well, it’s not just Hillary Clinton who has conducted public business privately. Even with her scandal looming in the headlines, Defense Secretary Ash Carter confidently did likewise.

Let’s end pensions for politicians, nudging them to return to our world. And let’s change the rules so they work serving the public, not for private gain.

Can we count on our elected representatives to rectify their ethical lapses? Not on your life. We need to do it ourselves, using ballot initiatives to put ethics first.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability Common Sense First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

re: Solutions

New Year, 2016, resolutions, Common Sense, illustration

Today’s the traditional day for New Year’s “Resolutions,” but instead of resolutions, how about some solutions?

Sure, Thomas Sowell has sagely reminded: there are no solutions in social life, only trade-offs.

But, utopian perfection aside, let’s agree that some changes would be better than others, and, let us resolve to solve some nagging problems — or at least trade up. And since the really nagging problems are political . . .

For Republicans: this could be the year to give up on government as society’s chief moral agent, empowered to regulate everybody’s medicine cabinets and bloodstreams. End the failed War on Drugs, with legalizing marijuana the simplest first step. Vice will continue, as it always has. But it’s another kind of vice to think that force, policing and imprisoning folks, will “solve” the problem. Much less even reduce the availability of drugs.

For Democrats: this could be the year to give up on government as micromanager of markets — and people’s marketplace choices. Face it: folks will make decisions that liberals don’t like. They’ll eat at McDonalds and buy large sodas — and the wrong stocks. And guns! But adding to the mass of regulations doesn’t make consumers choose better, it makes stuff more expensive and business less open to competition. Indeed, almost all the regulations designed to help “the little guy” backfire, helping big business by hobbling their upstart competitors.

Our leaders, at present, cannot even balance budgets. They are addicted to debt. To pretend we must have more and more government to prevent our addictions or save us from personal debt is ludicrous.

Can we resolve to stop pretending that bigger government is always the solution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture individual achievement national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Virus and Host

John McAfee, libertarian, presidential race, president, candidate

Presidential candidate John McAfee is an adventurer. Best known for founding the first successful anti-computer virus company, he has also been shot at in tropical jungles, by men trained by U. S. forces, with American-bought guns. This range of experience makes him the most interesting presidential hopeful, bar none.

His big issue is cyber-security. He thinks Americans have placed themselves in a too-precarious position. As he sees it, the war on terror has served as a grand distraction from the real threat, a prime example of doing foreign policy and national security completely upside-down wrong.

He has a point.

But he’s neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and not long ago he realized that his own Cyber Party didn’t have the oomph to get him on the ballot in enough states.

So he has announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination.

Why? He’s obviously not a libertarian in any strict capital-L sense. But the septuagenarian insists that he has been a libertarian at heart since before the word entered common use.

This is what the Libertarians get for their most obvious success: obtaining and keeping ballot status in more states for more election cycles than any other “minor party.”

Think of the Libertarian Party as the host, and one-time Republicans like former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson — and now McAfee — as viruses, aiming to commandeer the host’s operating system.

Of course, one might also view the LP as a virus attempting to do the same to the federal government.

Shall we root for the viruses, for once?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment responsibility

Do-It-Yourself Policing

New Orleans, crime, police, Common Sense, illustration

While crime was plummeting throughout the country, last year New Orleans experienced a surge — rapes up 39 percent and armed robberies up 37 percent.

Having reduced its police force by 500 officers due to budget problems, the Big Easy called in Louisiana State Troopers to assist a force “historically mired in corruption.” Yet, there was scant progress in keeping citizens safe.

Then crooks broke into Sidney Torrez’s home and Torrez, known as the “trash king” because he made a fortune hauling trash out of the city after Hurricane Katrina, responded with a $100,000 television ad campaign. “The French Quarter is under siege by criminals,” his TV spot declared; it encouraged citizens to “hold the administration accountable.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu wasn’t pleased, shooting back that, “If it’s so easy, maybe [Torrez] should just take some of that money and do it himself.”

So, Torrez did, teaming up with Bob Simms, a retired aerospace engineer.

In no time, they developed a downloadable app for smartphones, allowing folks to contact police much like we use Uber to contact a car ride. Torrez donated $500,000 and the Batman and Robin-esque duo hired off-duty policemen outfitted with Polaris golf carts to patrol the French Quarter, the city’s “golden goose.”

Other private donations arrived to support the effort. In just months, crime dropped 45 percent in the Quarter. Now the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau is paying the monthly cost.

Torrez notes that the effort allows “the community a way to self-police,” adding, “I think it can work anywhere.”

“It’s not rocket science,” says Bob Simms . . . the former rocket scientist.

It’s citizen-led government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture responsibility

Anti-Lynch Lynch Mob

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America’s worst racial and sexual injustices were institutionally addressed years ago, in the Sixties and soon after — by folks in the Civil Rights movement, everyday citizens, and their representatives.

So what do today’s earnest, Johnny-and-Jilly Come Lately “Social Justice Warriors” have left to complain about?

Why, building names, of course!

The local college in Annville, Pennsylvania, has been embroiled in a bizarre civil rights complaint about their Lynch Memorial Hall. Named after one Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, a Depression Era benefactor, some SJW students are demanding that it be changed, because of, get this, “associated racial connotations.”

“Lynch,” you see. It triggers them.

I kid you not.

Colin Deppen, writing last week on pennlive.com, explained how Dr. Lynch had nothing to do with the lynching of African-Americans in Jim Crow days. The extra-legal hanging tradition began much earlier, in the Revolutionary War, “with a Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia.” This fellow “headed a self-constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.”

Lynching’s origins? White-on-white violence, not white-on-black.

SJW students, mostly ignorant and incurious, prefer coming off as whiners or moral scolds than learn something.

Or let a coincidence go.

The problem is this: the closer some people get to reaching their goals, they have less and less to do. Yet many “late adopters” covet the moral authority of their predecessors. So they pack all their frustration and passion into making more and more unreasonable demands.

But this may be self-correcting. They look like idiots. And they have obtained our attention. This Lynch Mob nonsense could be the sign of their end times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies responsibility

Finland on 800-Euros-a-Month

Finland, Guaranteed Income, UBI, welfare, income, Common Sense, illustration

Some folks think the world owes them a living.

Must we appease them?

Should government hand every man, woman and child a check each month to make sure we’re all taken care of?

Finland is embracing this basic idea with a pilot program, providing everyone an “unconditional basic income” (UBI). Treating citizens equally is enshrined in Finland’s constitution, so every Finn will receive the same 800-euros a month without regard to income or lack thereof.

It sounds like Democrat George McGovern’s “guaranteed annual income,” which was mocked and ridiculed during the 1972 presidential campaign.

But you might be surprised who has supported the UBI: free-market economist Milton Friedman advanced the similar “negative income tax” back in 1962; Martin Luther King liked it; Austrian economist F. A. Hayek endorsed the concept; Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, has developed a version of the proposal.

The rationale? Save money by consolidating duplicative welfare programs. After all, the U.S. government runs 79 means-tested benefit programs, each with its costly, redundant bureaucracy.

Counter-intuitively, perhaps, Finland’s social engineers think the move will increase employment. Why? Because welfare benefits currently can be withdrawn when Finns gain employment and the attendant income, which discourages folks from risking their secure base benefits.

That’s the case here, too.

The government passing out money — our money — stinks. Folks should take care of themselves, or depend on charity — not confiscatory taxation. Yet, if this version of a safety net does indeed encourage industry, employment, and good old-fashioned money-making amongst the poor . . . it may very well be a step in the right direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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