Category: Common Sense

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Accountability Common Sense incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility term limits

Agreeable America

term limits, Congress, 74%, polls, Rasmussen Poll

Americans actually agree on a lot of things; it’s a pity that today’s media and political debates play up the discord.

Or so argues A. Barton Hinkle at The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Sure, he admits, “[a] lot of people seem willing to tear your head off over the smallest thing.” But “on some topics, the public is of one mind, or as close to that as you can get.”

Hinkle notes that “Nine out of 10 Americans think a background check should be required for every firearm purchase.”  A few percentage points fewer wish to keep “Dreamers” in the country; a mere one point fewer disapprove of civil asset forfeiture. Medical marijuana is approved of by 83 percent of Americans.

Not on Hinkle’s list? American agreement on term limits. A year ago, a Rasmussen Poll found support for limiting congressional terms at 74 percent of likely voters, with only 13 percent opposed and 13 percent undecided. This overwhelming public support has been consistent for many decades.

But consistently ignored by Congress. Not so surprisingly.

Can Americans put their united oomph behind their overwhelming agreement? U.S. Term Limits thinks so.

The group isn’t depending on cajoling the Congress, either. They’re mobilizing concerned citizens to convince 34 state legislatures to call a Term Limits Convention.* The convention’s purpose is to propose a constitutional amendment for congressional term limits, which then still requires 38 states to ratify it.

Rather than brewing up a civil war over tweets and “microaggressions,” join the Term Limits Team.

Let’s agree to agree. And make our representatives agree, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As Article V of the U.S. Constitution states, “The Congress . . . on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states . . .”

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Accountability Common Sense folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility term limits too much government

It’s the Stupid Spending

debt, spending, Congress, term limits

These United States are approaching a crisis. Mounting debt seems increasingly unpayable. Sovereign default and financial chaos are “in the offing” — drifting from the (future) horizon to the (present) shore.

The costs of our debt load have been accommodated as astute economists predicted, with the weakest recovery in American history.

Seven years ago I wrote:

According to increasing numbers of Americans, it’s the level of spending by government that must decrease. We must balance budgets. Soon.

One could play sloganeer and say “It’s the spending, stupid”; or, twist that, to say “It’s the stupid spending.” But however you formulate the problem, what the new Republican House must do is find a way to cut spending.

They haven’t. Is there any reason, even with super-duper businessman Donald Trump riding herd, that they will make net cuts?

We can expect gross spending to increase and the debt to balloon even bigger.

Why?

Well, we are trapped.

Even the politicians themselves feel trapped.

You see, once the government begins a program, a constituency comes to depend upon it, and resists being “betrayed.” And the media supplies a steady stream of sob stories about the brutality of “austerity.” Politicians fear the passion of voters reacting to a specific hyped human need more than the general desire for less spending. So politicians increase the stupid spending.

Well, if the politicians are trapped, release them. Free them.

How? Term limits.

Congressional term limits would un-trap not just the pols — it’d free the voters, too. Let’s end the pretense that sending the same politicians to Washington term after term can produce local prosperity. Oh, the power of incumbency may lavish benefits on career congressmen, but it doesn’t pay off for the rest if us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It was President Harry Truman who said that term limits would “help to cure senility and seniority — both terrible legislative diseases.”

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Illustration: Gustave Doré, “Avaricious and Prodigal”

 

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Common Sense

The Immovable Non-movers

bureaucracy, bureaucrat, government, reform, interests

You can’t suspend the law of gravity. Nor, apparently, the laws of bureaucratic lethargy and inertia.

Diana Rickert was a policy analyst with the Illinois Policy Institute who accepted a job with the administration of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner.

She lasted six weeks.

The assignment: combine and streamline several governmental departments. After years of “railing against government,” she felt she must accept this opportunity to improve government from the inside. Or else forever wonder whether she might have made a difference.

She’s learned her answer. She could not. Not as an insider. Not without the authority, at a minimum, to fire useless employees, who abound in Illinois’s state government.

And whose uselessness doesn’t always preclude outrageous expectations about salary and position.

Whether trying to get working computers or to get workers to work on simple but unfamiliar tasks, Diana and the few others eager to get stuff done were constantly thwarted by the apathy and sense of entitlement of the majority — and by endless arcane and senseless rules. Rather than imply tacit acceptance of such a broken, unfixable system, she resigned.

All this sounds familiar, an inevitable feature of government bureaucracy with its glued-in vested interests and lack of market-style profit incentives. Old news if you’ve ever been to the DMV.

So what’s the answer? Give up?

No. Illinois is “ready for change,” Diana Rickert says. But it’s outsiders who will have to change it — from the outside . . . “because the insiders never will.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability Common Sense general freedom media and media people national politics & policies Regulating Protest responsibility

Time for Action

NFL, freedom, rights, football, Pence, Prison Reform

More protests during the national anthem; more opposition to those protests by the Trump administration; more recriminations about the administration’s opposition to the protests. Ah, modern times.

Let’s review:

  1. NFL players have a constitutional right to take a knee during the national anthem.
  2. NFL owners do have or could have (depending on who you believe) a contractual right to require players to stand for the national anthem or face action.
  3. Presidents have a right to suggest that owners fire NFL players who take a knee during the anthem, though I’d really prefer they not use the term SOB — though again they have a right to say it.  
  4. Vice-Presidents have a right to leave an NFL game if NFL players take a knee during the anthem or, believe it or not, for any reason they feel like. And under our free system, they can even go further, and plan their reaction ahead of time depending on what action players take.*
  5. NFL fans have a right to continue to be fans or not.

I love football, but haven’t followed the NFL for decades.

I love rights even more. And I think we certainly ought to be talking about and, more importantly, working on criminal justice reform. Let’s not lose sight of that in the controversy over the NFL protests.

Perhaps, the time for protest is ending. The time for action is now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Did Vice-President Mike Pence leave the Colts-49ers game as a PR stunt? Well, every move the president or the VP make is a public relations stunt. If that’s the primary attack on the VEEP’s actions, he has turned the corner and is in the clear.

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What Would George Orwell Have Thought of Antifa?

One of many questions asked of Mr. David Ramsay Steele, whose new book on the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four takes a thorough and gimlet-eyed view of Orwell’s worldview:

An excerpt (under 11 minutes) from the interview: “Orwell’s Anti-Fascism (David Ramsay Steele)”

Mr. Steele’s book on Amazon: Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab

The above interview on Vimeo: “Orwell’s Worldview on the Slab (David Ramsay Steele)”

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Common Sense folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Evil Capitalists Hook Brazil On Eating

Brazil, junk food, capitalism, free markets, New York Times, folly

Have you heard the latest?

More and more peoples around the world these days have the unfortunate misfortune of having adequate food — not merely vegetables either!! — thanks to the ruthlessly profit-seeking food producers and their unconscionable engagement in the division of labor, capital accumulation, and international trade.

It’s right there in The New York Times, which is, as you know, the paper of record.

“DealBook: How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.”

Dastardly! Those Big American Businessmen must have kidnapped the Brazilians, strapped them into chairs, and pumped Doritos into those poor souls with a syringe. Heaven knows, the fecklessly irresponsible Brazilians can’t be held responsible for their own diets.

How bad is it?

This bad: “As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.”

One expert quoted in the story (no hungry people consulted) says, “Part of the problem . . . is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.”

Worse than Hurricane Irma!

Thanks to the Times’s aggressive investigative journalism, we know that these brazenly food-selling companies do not even nag their international customers to be careful about their diets. Ergo, it’s chips and other indiscriminately convenient snacks for everybody, no strings attached.

It’s become all too easy to be well-fed and overfed and mis-fed.

Thanks a lot, capitalism.

Oh for the good old hunting-and-gathering days when human beings spent much of their time starving, and the world had the human population of Binghamton. No problem with anyone gorging on Twinkies and Doritos back then. No problem of epidemics of corpulence.

We’ve lost that swell paradise . . . perhaps forever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration based on original photo by David Goehring on Flickr.

 

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Common Sense

Townhall: Insider, Outsider, Upside Down

The weird world of Trump’s America: it must be frustrating to be an insider now, since all the old rules about loyalty, decency, and acceptability have been turned on their head. This has important consequences for future politics. Click on over to Townhall for the Common Sense of an uncommon age.

Then come back here, to carry on the conversation.

This column of August 27, 2017, will be available on this site on Tuesday.

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Common Sense ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The Underground Amphibian

Purple Pig-Nose Frog, Ghats mountain range in India, KEK, Kekistan, endangered

A new species of frog has been discovered, and I’m just happy it has nothing to do with online japes and jibes about Trump, social justice, or an ancient Egyptian deity. But before you can say “Praise Kek,” please note:

Sometimes a frog is just a frog.

But this frog is special, living most of its life underground. It is purple. And though this is not stressed in the reports, it’s markedly gelatinous.

In an article entitled “New Purple Pig-Nose Frog Found in Remote Mountains,” Jason Bittel explains that the frog comes above ground only when it rains — which in the Western Ghats mountain range in India is during monsoon season.

Named after the discovers’ late colleague, Dr. Subramaniam Bhupathy, it is dubbed Bhupathy’s purple frog (Nasikabatrachus bhupathi). I have to tip my hat to them, so to speak, for the herpetologist’s first name seems more fitting for a submerged-in-earth amphibian: “Subramaniam purple frog” would almost qualify as a pun. And, as readers of these Common Sense squibs will confirm, I am not always so valiant in resisting the art of the pun.

But you don’t read these commentaries for science news.

So, a moral.

Around the world, amphibians are disturbingly under threat. As Alex Jones hyperbolizes, “they’re turning the frogs gay!” But be that as it may (or, more likely, may not), even under greater threat is political common sense.

Let’s hope it, too, will emerge with the coming monsoon.

In India? Your neighborhood? Kekistan?

Probably not in Washington, D.C. But it’s Friday, we can at least hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Higher Ed Jubilee?

Student loans, bailout, bail out, loans, jubilee, banks, subsidies

“Everything is beautiful in its own way,” goes Ray Stevens’s hit song of 1970. But still, pay your bills. 

That’s what I thought reading a Fox Business story on a recent poll in which 42 percent of Americans, a plurality, thought that “President Trump’s administration should forgive all federal student debt in order to help stimulate the economy.”

Roughly 37 percent disagree, at least. Twenty-one percent were undecided.

For starters, justifying a huge financial giveaway to some citizens at the expense of other citizens as a way to help “stimulate the economy”? A sad commentary on the state of civic discussion.

Of course, this particular voter survey may have been concocted as nothing more than some capitalist PR plot by MoneyTips.com. Still, the numbers are believable, and with total student debt reaching $1.3 trillion — owed by some 44 million Americans — the subject is certain to come up again.

Let’s not forget, Bernie Sanders declared it a sin against public policy that Americans were not provided a free university-level education. I can hear his future oration, “We bailed out the banks for the one-percent. We can bail out the students!”

It should be a popular position on college campuses, cui bono and all.

“Drilling into the data, we found millennials (18-29) were especially passionate about student loan debt forgiveness, strongly agreeing with the idea nearly twice as much as those 50 and older,” confirmed MoneyTips co-founder Michael Dubrow. “Even if older people are still paying off their loans, younger people paid more and borrowed more for higher education.”

This sounds like a good reason to cut current subsidies, not increase them.

No. More. Bailouts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people responsibility

Vinland?

Portland, murder, Vinland, white supremacist, white nationalism, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein

Agreeing with a murderer is . . . uncomfortable. Even if the agreement is only in part.

Over the weekend, the news hit that one Jeremy Joseph Christian was in custody for a stabbing spree on one of Portland, Oregon’s MAX trains. According to reports, Christian had been yelling religious slurs at two hijab-wearing women when three men intervened in defense. Christian then stabbed the men . . . two to death.

The next day, quadrennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein politicized it in the now-de rigueur point-scoring manner: “Another heartbreaking tragedy in Trump’s America, as a white nationalist shouting anti-Islam slurs murders 2 on Portland, OR subway.”*

Immediately, other Twitterers (tweeters?) rushed to point the finger back at her. It turns out (investigation courtesy of BuzzFeed) the accused’s Facebook page showed the knife-wielder as supporting first Bernie Sanders and then . . . Dr. Stein herself.

But that is just the side story. Christian appears to have a long criminal record. It seems likely that he took to white nationalism as well as free speech — he brought a baseball bat to the recent Portland free speech rally I wrote about a few weeks ago, the police say, to “attack left-wing protestors” — and even progressive politics simply to fill his personal rage quota. The fact that he saluted Nazi-style, shouted “Hail Vinland,” and called himself a “nihilist” strongly suggest that he’s mostly unhinged.

You and I support free speech; he said he supported free speech. But free speech doesn’t include stabbing people. We can all agree that Stein is off the hook.

As is President Trump.

As are we.

We, after all, don’t support murder, heiling Hitler, or . . . Vinland?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Portland has no subway; MAX is an on-the-surface light rail system.

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