Categories
Accountability Common Sense folly general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Republican-Required Referendum

Politicians in a jar

Last November, Nevada Republicans scored a “stunning” political sweep. The party’s incumbent governor rolled up a 40-point win, while the GOP gained majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — the first time Republicans have controlled all three since before the Great Depression.

At the same time, voters crushed a ballot measure to create a 2-percent gross receipts tax on businesses taking in over $1 million, by a whopping 78–22 percent. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and GOP legislators opposed the tax.

My tax-fighting friend Chuck Muth, president of Citizen Outreach, must be happy as a clam, living the easy life.

No?

Mere months after that vote, the solidly Republican state legislature passed — you guessed it — a gross receipts tax. And with it, for good measure, all stuffed into Senate Bill 483, the Republican majority also made permanent a whole slew of taxes passed as temporary measures back in 2009.

The total tax increase — ahem, to celebrate the Republican trouncing of Democrats — turned out to be the largest in Nevada history: $1.1 billion.

I wish this story of betrayal were shocking, not par for the course. But as we all know, the lack of surprise signals the depth of the problem.

Thankfully, Silver State citizens have what Ralph Nader calls the “ace in the hole”: statewide initiative and referendum.

Two referendum measures have been filed. One would repeal the gross receipts tax. The other, filed by Muth’s “We Decide Coalition,” places the entire billion-dollar-plus tax hike onto the ballot.

“It’s time for these elected elites to stop using Nevadans as ATM machines,” Muth recently wrote.

Yes, time for Nevadans to crank up the machinery of democracy . . . starting with 55,000 signatures on petitions for each measure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Politicians in a jar

 

Categories
Thought

Lao Tzu

Tom@HK - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gracewong/2175595214/sizes/o/ Statue of Lao Tzu (Laozi) in Quanzhou

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists,
not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
worst when they despise him.
Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you.
But of a good leader, who talks little,
when his work is done, his aims fulfilled,
they will all say,
‘We did this ourselves.’

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 17

Categories
ballot access Common Sense general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies responsibility term limits U.S. Constitution

The Quadrennial Distraction

Citizen Action

As the leading Republican candidate for the presidency ascends into the air in a helicopter filled with kids, and makes his most astute declaration yet — “I am Batman” — it becomes clearer than ever how distracting these presidential campaigns are.

Much of American Big League politics is theatrics, with some pandering for good measure. Of course, all people running for the presidency are by definition over their heads, at best . . . posturing attention-seekers at worst. Fretting about what they believe and “would do” if voted in as President of these United States is mostly a waste of time. Experience tells us that what they promise is perhaps the least likely outcome of all.

What is more effective? Affecting the political environment by getting together with like-minded folk to advance principled causes closer to home. As a side effect of your activism, a successful issue in a single city or region — especially one that spreads — can have a dramatic influence on present and future presidential wannabes.

With organization and consistent activity at the local level, your voice can be heard. But you have to do something. That activity doesn’t have to be to “run for office”; you can turn up the volume by proposing (and sometimes opposing) ballot initiatives, constitutional and charter amendments in the state, county and city where you live.

There is so much to be done at this level that could create political climate change, which in turn would invariably make federal-level candidates better, that it seems a shame to see us so focused on long shot bets.

Printable PDF

Citizen Action

 

Categories
Thought

Dante Alighieri

Alegorical portrait of Dante Alighieri, from Agnolo Bronzino, c. 1530. The book he holds is a copy of the Divine Comedy, open to Canto XXV of the Paradiso.

“The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed.”

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto V, lines 19-24

Categories
Common Sense crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism responsibility too much government

Must the War Go On and On?

Addiction

I was still a kid, but I remember: as the Vietnam War dragged on, and on, we Americans continued to receive hopeful missives about how the next assault, or regroup, or dedication of manpower and weaponry, would lead to better results.

That’s what came to mind as I read the latest dispatch from the War on Drugs, in the Los Angeles Times. “White House announces push to combat growing heroin epidemic,” ran the headline.

So, it’s growing again? Haven’t I read this about a thousand times?

Talk about a familiar story:

The path to heroin addiction and overdoses can begin when patients are legally prescribed drugs containing opium, said Dr. Walter Ling, professor of psychiatry and founding director of the Integrated Substance Abuse Program at UCLA. . . .

“Once they get hooked they find out it’s very expensive to get these medicines and it’s much cheaper on the street. . . . That leads to street heroin abuse, which leads to the increase in opium overdoses,” Ling said.

But the rest of the story? Not reported.

Oh, sure: we were regaled with how dangerous the cheap street drugs are, because of how they are diluted. What we are not told, though, is that this is not a characteristic of heroin, as such, but of illegal heroin.

Decriminalize it. Let the legitimate market do what black markets cannot: provide responsible information that would discourage accidental overdoses.

Instead, we have a new and futile $1.3 million plan.

We’re overdosing on government. The cure is to cut down government to the proper dose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Addiction

 

Categories
Thought

William Graham Sumner

We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.

William Graham Sumner, “The New Social Creed,” Earth-Hunger and Other Essays, p. 210 (1913).
Categories
Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Iconoclasm Spasms

Jefferson Davis

As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems . . . a tad . . . trivial.

First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.

He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.

And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861-1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.

Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”

I’m not convinced it did a thing.

And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.

Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Jefferson Davis

 

Categories
Thought

William Graham Sumner

“ man who started with the notion that the world owed him a living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.”

William Graham Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts” (1914)

Categories
links

Townhall: A Tree Fell on Campaign Trail 2015

Will anyone notice the huge event that marked the Bernie Sanders’s campaign? Will it matter to those on the left, who seem most enamored of the man? Click on over to Townhall. Then come back here for a bit more background.

First, read this story in The Seattle Times: “Black Lives Matter Activists protesters shut down Bernie Sanders; later rally draws 15,000.”

When I wrote about this last week, I linked to a video . . . that has been since taken down. But you can watch more than enough on this interesting video by young African-American YouTuber:

Donald Trump’s reaction:

https://youtu.be/2UhUio29PP4

And finally, a strange moment in Secretary of State John Kerry’s public history:

This column will be archived on this site on Tuesday.

 

Categories
Thought

Voltaire

“It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.”

Voltaire, Zadig (1747)