Category: Common Sense

It’s in the nature of government to want to clamp down on information. You see it clearest in totalitarian systems. And in New York City.

The city’s deputy commissioner of counter-terrorism wants to clamp down the private ownership of devices that measure toxins. You know, like anthrax, asbestos, ragweed.

The mayor is all behind him. They have put forward a bill to license such devices.

Why? According to the Village Voice, after 9/11, lots of people bought toxin detectors. And “a lot of these machines didn’t work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.”

Scared now?

But the Village Voice went on to take it back as jest: “OK, none of that has actually happened.” That’s just what the regulators think might happen. The Voice was just having fun with its readers.

The scare scenario is just that, a cooked-up scenario.

At a public meeting it was noted that, soon after the catastrophe of 9/11, when the EPA said the air around Ground Zero was safe, it was privately held detectors that proved the EPA wrong. The commissioner did a little hemming and hawing. But when asked if the city really had to put unlicensed detector users in jail, this bozo said yes.

Remember folks: Fear is the great weapon of totalitarians. We have nothing to fear but fear of fear itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

We won. They lost.

I mean the February 5 defeat of Proposition 93 in California. Final tally: 46 percent Yes, 53 percent No. The end game of another huge effort by Golden State politicians, spending $17 million to trash term limits.

Most California voters like term limits, like how they rev electoral competition, stem corruption. So foes of term limits pretend to like them also. “They’re great,” they say. “Yippee for term limits! We just want to ’tweak’ them.”

A lie. They’d kill term limits altogether if they could.

Prop 93 would have boosted maximum tenure by 100 percent in the Assembly, 50 percent in the Senate. That was the point. Yet advocates said they wanted to cut term limits. Trim combined maximum legislative tenure, Assembly plus Senate, to twelve years, instead of 14.

Of course, lawmakers know that it’s lots easier to get re-elected as an incumbent than to win a new office in another chamber. For the vast majority, the new law would have meant a straight extension of tenure. And 14 years wasn’t even the real maximum either, given the measure’s generous transition period.

Last November in Maine, politicians brought a term limits extension to ballot — but admitted they actually wanted to lengthen their tenure. They also lost, of course.

California was a tougher battle. But it shows that even the most slick and brazen dirty tricks go only so far — when voters have a chance to hear the truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Pascal said that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

I’m thinking that the problem of politicians is that they cannot sit together without spending increasing amounts of money.

In his final State of the Union message, with Senators and Representatives gathered round, President Bush did what I’d hoped he’d do: Proclaiming he would issue an Executive Order to not spend the money directed by Congress’s earmarked pork spending.

But was that merely a sop to responsibility? The sum total of the rest of his suggested new spending netted out to nearly $135 billion. That is the most he’s ever proposed in a State of the Union address.

It’s still not half what Bill Clinton asked for in his final State of the Union speech, and Clinton didn’t have a wartime excuse. But do you see the pattern here?

The longer a president is in office, the more he wants to spend.

There’s something about sitting in a place of power that whispers to politicians one clear message: spend, spend, spend.

The longer in office, the more they obey that message.

Monks in monasteries talk about the need for spiritual discipline. Hmmm. What discipline might help politicians cope?

Well, the President serves under term limits. Increasing urges to spend get cut off at the end of the second term.

Too bad our Senators and Representatives don’t come up against a similar cutoff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A leading candidate for the presidency said recently, and I quote, “I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.”

Though I agree with the statement, the meaning meant is not the meaning I would intend were I saying it.

Let’s get this straight: Government has gotten way out of whack with markets. There’s too much government, which has grown ferociously in the past eight years.

The candidate in question, however, argued that we need more government taking a more active role, in part to address the “excesses” of the Bush Administration.

Puzzling. The excesses of the Bush administration have been in the area of government growth. Too much spending, too few vetoes.

Example? A new entitlement program, Medicare D, devised and pushed by the administration, now threatens to further destabilize our already over-regulated, over-subsidized health care system.

Here’s another: Mostly idiotic increases in regulation of business, in the wake of the Enron scandal, when the original trouble with Enron was a fraudulent accounting system approved by existing government regulators.

The candidate focused on Bush era tax relief, but tax cuts are not the chief problem with government today. Over-spending by Congress is.

As is weakness in presidential leadership to fight government imbalance.

Balance? Good.

More government to mess up where government has failed before? Bad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The proliferation of eminent domain abuse is depressing.

Fake reforms of eminent domain promoted by fans of that abuse are also depressing.

We the people demand positive news on this front. Which I guess means . . . we’ve got to make that news ourselves. As being done in California.

Californians for Property Rights Protection recently submitted more than one million signatures to qualify the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act for the June 2008 ballot.

The YesOnPropertyRights.com web site tells us: “Property rights are a fundamental, core value for all.” But, alas, government currently has the power “to take private property — our homes, family farms, mom-and-pop small businesses — to build a sports stadium, big-box chain store, or a hotel. Politically connected special interests use and abuse government’s power of eminent domain to take and develop private property.”

According to Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, the ballot measure would explicitly protect “all California property owners. Never again will government use eminent domain to destroy a person’s home and livelihood.”

Here’s a sample provision of the measure: “State and local governments may not use their power to take or damage property for the benefit of any private person or entity.”

YesOnPropertyRights.com has the text of the Protection Act. Take a look. Especially if you live in California.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Power corrupts. Petty power corrupts . . . pettily?

Some time back I told you about Diane Pharr, whose son’s school records — his private school records — were publicized by the school board . . . just out of petty vindictiveness for her wanting to learn more about the board’s budget.

Now, in Fairfax County, Virginia, public school officials similarly act out. Hunter Mill School Board member Stuart Gibson was forced by the Virginia Board of Education to publicly apologize. That board sided with a local parent defending her son, whose special education history was released by Gibson during — get this — a political campaign. The boy’s father happened to be Gibson’s opponent.

We’ve got to watch out for our rights from local officials just as much as from the big boys.

Vienna, Virginia resident Bruce Bennett was twice forcibly removed from public meetings of the Fairfax County School Board. He had tried to tape the events, you see. The officials said that wasn’t allowed.

Funny thing is, Virginia, like many states — and the federal government — requires open meetings. Mr. Bennett was entirely within his rights. But he was ousted anyway, and a school district spokesman gave a lot of hooey defending those forced ejections.

These are all developments occurring not far from where I live. I bet, if you checked into your local politics, you’d find similar trouble.

So, if you want to make a difference, get involved. There’s somebody’s rights you can defend . . . if only your own.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

What’s the difference between a reporter and a pundit? The reporter looks behind the obvious. All pundits do, most of the time, is belabor the obvious.

Alas, sometimes what seems obvious happens to be false.

Take Charles Gibson, TV journalist. He sort of pretends to be a reporter, right? But when he asked questions, recently, of GOP candidates, he made a statement that set him squarely in the pundit class. And proved him wrong.

He said that “intellectual honesty” required just plain admitting that oil prices can only go up.

Yup, only up.

He thought “honesty” demanded such a statement of the obvious.

But I get the feeling that all Good Ol’ Charlie has proved is he doesn’t have one ounce of skepticism in his head . . . or any decent economic perspective.

Why say this? Well, though it may seem we’ve entered a time of “peak oil” production, much of today’s scarcity has little to do with normal production, but with war and the limitations of supply and delivery caused by war.

Further, throughout much of the world the price of oil has been pretty flat. But because the value of the dollar has plummeted, the prices we Americans have to pay for oil have shot up.

If we weren’t at war, and our government weren’t horribly in debt, the dollar would be better, supplies would be better, and Charlie Gibson would widely be seen as wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said property owners suffer double jeopardy from eminent domain abuse, as I argued in a recent episode of Common Sense. More like triple. Even quadruple.

Until recently in New York State, for example, government officials did not even bother to inform property owners that an eminent domain action was being undertaken against them. Instead they just put a classified notice in micro-print in some newspaper. Thanks to citizen activist Bill Brody, officials must now inform owners directly of plans to rob them.

Add to such willful violation of due process the fact that you might not get a “just” compensation for the lost property either, and that’s triple jeopardy for property owners.

Now add harassment. It seems some officials are willing to actively persecute you if you want to keep your property. Wyoming rancher Harvey Robbins refused to play along with the Bureau of Land Management’s demand for his land. Bureau officials warned him things could “get ugly.” Then things got ugly. His business permit was revoked, his permit for livestock grazing was revoked. His right of
way on federal land was cancelled, a bogus criminal prosecution was launched.

Robbins sued the agency for violating his property rights, among other things. The case is now in the Supreme Court.

So. Four major ways, at least, government is willing to wantonly violate your rights if they want your property and you don’t want to give it to them. Four too many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The more we sit in front of visual display monitors, the fatter we get. And kids, who increasingly substitute more and more of their play time outdoors for time indoors with their computers and video games, are especially at risk.

It’s a real problem. But do we need a grand program to solve the problem?

In New Mexico, environmental groups are suggesting busing public school kids to under-visited state parks, forcing them to play in the great outdoors.

And since this costs money, add a “sin tax” to sales of new televisions and video games.

There’s symmetry to the idea, so it almost seems responsible. But it seems something else, too: regimenting kids into play is the kind of thing a popular German enviro-political group instituted in the 1920s and ’30s. It kind of gives me the creeps.

The natural playground for kids is nature — where I spent a huge hunk of my time, as a kid. Kids nowadays suffer from what the professionals call “Nature Deficit Disorder.” Parks provide nature and order in a neat little mix. But a freer mix would work better: letting the kids out again, to play near ponds, in creeks, culverts, and briar patches.

This is something parents should think about.

Meanwhile, a cheaper get-kids-walking program would be to park buses half a block further down from the school door. No new tax or grand scheme necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.