Common Sense with Paul Jacob

When in Rome

Italy, housing, corruption, government, bureaucracy

Americans concerned with government corruption really should study Italy.

Why?

“You know Italians,” septuagenarian Elio Ciampanella was quoted in the New York Times last week. “If there is a law, they will try to find ways to go around it!”

But it is not just ordinary citizens — the people — who are evading bad laws. It is government workers who won’t do their jobs, and who engage in a wide range of corrupt deals and shady incompetence.

I know, this seems awfully unfair to the Italians. What I’ve said is the case with governments around the world. But not equally. (Scandinavian countries have a long history of government worker probity, if not ultra-competence.) And Italians do have a well-earned reputation for government corruption.

Arguably, it’s the form freedom takes in Italy.

Be that true or not, Mr. Ciampanella’s story, as related in the Times, is a fascinating one. He asked for a government-subsidized apartment, and had to wait ten years to get one . . . only to discover the problem wasn’t a lack of apartments, but a surfeit.

Yes, the government owned too many apartments to keep track of!

And so they didn’t.

And gave special deals to “special people.”

In other words: incompetence and corruption as a way of life.

Market institutions that behave so chaotically and with so little attention to efficiency go out of business. But government? That’s “necessary,” so: too big to fail. And so, commonly excused.

No wonder, then, that the common-sense approach to government is to limit it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bureaucracy, corruption, housing, Italy

Today

Run for the border

On May 2, 1989, Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.

Thought

Benedetto Croce

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher and outspoken anti-fascist. He called his political philosophy “liberism.”

links

Townhall: Speaker of the Devil

Post author By Redactor
Post date May 1, 2016
No Comments on Townhall: Speaker of the Devil

Ah, what a difference an epithet can make! But, in the case of last week’s biggie, will the harsh words backfire?

A more extensive look at the logic of insider invective, at Townhall this weekend. Click on over, then come back here for kinder words:

Common Sense: The Most Hated
The Stanford Daily: John Boehner talks election, time in office
NBC News: Former Speaker Boehner calls Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh”
The Federalist: John Boehner – I Won’t Vote For Ted Cruz Over Hillary
Ted Cruz’s Tweet on Twitter
New York Times: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress
YouTube: Republican Minority Leader John Boehner explains why he handed out bribes on the House floor

Thought

Paul Gottfried

If you say ‘fascist’ it means ‘Hitler,’ although Hitler was probably more influenced by Stalin than by Mussolini — and ‘Hitler’ means ‘Auschwitz.’ So as soon as you disagree with the prevailing leftist culture or with either of our political parties and they want to call you a name, then you become a ‘fascist,’ which means you support the extermination of millions of people in a concentration camp.

Paul Gottfried, on the Tom Woods Show, April 28, 2016, a discussion of Gottfried’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (2016).

Today

Anti-Fascist Manifesto

The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, written by philosopher Benedetto Croce [pictured, above] in response to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals by Giovanni Gentile, sanctioned the unreconcilable split between the philosopher and the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, to which he had previously given a vote of confidence on October 31, 1922.

The manifesto was published by Il Mondo on May 1, 1925, which was Workers’ Day, symbolically responding to the publication of the Fascist manifesto on the Natale di Roma, the founding of Rome (celebrated on April 21). The Fascist press claimed that the Crocian manifesto was “more authoritarian” than its Fascist counterpart — a typical leftist dismissal of what used to be called “liberalism” — in Italian, liberismo — but which Croce dubbed liberism, to distinguish it from the dirigiste quasi-socialisms of self-described “liberals” of the time.

video

Video: A Republican Constitution

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 30, 2016
No Comments on Video: A Republican Constitution

Legal scholar Randy Barnett, as interviewed by Reason’s Nick Gillespie:

Thought

H. L. Mencken

If ‘economics tell us’ that our present army of workers, working half time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve and a half times as much as at present — well, then, it is high time to demand proofs. My personal view is that no such proofs exist. The whole idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence, than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes instead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at $8,000 a year.

H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).

Today

Nobel Laureate Economist

On April 30, 1902, economist Theodore W. Schultz was born. His work studying the quick post-war recovery in Germany and Japan led to his development of “human capital theory,” explicated in many books, including Investing in People (1981). He was co-winner (with William Arthur Lewis) of the 1979 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Schultz died in 1998.

Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

The Most Hated

Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Paul Jacob, hated, MOST HATED MAN , term limits , Bob Novack

I’ve been robbed!!!

By Ted Cruz, no less.

Yes, without so much as a passing “Howdy-do,” the Texas senator stole my cherished public mantel, simply waltzed in and snatched what was once my own special place in our nation’s capital.

You’ve heard it on the news, I’m sure. In a speech at Stanford University, former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner lit into Sen. Ted Cruz, referring to him as “Lucifer in the flesh.” And a “miserable S.O.B.” to boot.

Boehner vowed never to vote for Cruz, adding: “Over my dead body will he be president.”

Back in January, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, a 34-year Washington fixture, attacked Cruz, arguing his nomination would lead to “cataclysmic losses,” and that, in Washington, “Nobody likes him.”

Can’t. Ignore. Ugly. Truth. Must. Face. Facts. Unmistakably: Sen. Ted Cruz is today . . . the MOST HATED MAN IN WASHINGTON.

Once upon a time, back in the day, I was hated. A LOT. The most, arguably.

In 1995, I was running U.S. Term Limits, battling Republican congressional leaders (an oxymoron), who were playing games to block term limits. At a news conference, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, never a friend of term limits, went on a tirade. One of his more colorful slings was calling us “cannibals.”

Which turned out to be a great name for our softball team.

After the Speaker’s temper tantrum, the late, great Bob Novak told me I was “the most hated man in Washington.”

Now? Well . . . campaigning in Indiana, Sen. Cruz responded to Boehner’s attacks succinctly: “What made John Boehner mad is that I led a movement to hold Washington accountable.”

Yeah, sounds familiar.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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