Common Sense with Paul Jacob

For and Against?

Bad ideas take a person only so far.

Proponents of a widely destructive policy may be loath to relinquish it altogether when destructive consequences loom. Yet they may also loathe to see it applied consistently — because of the pain it’ll cause their particular gang.

Harm to others inflicted by lousy ideas? Fine!

Harm to yourself? Not fine!

Hence the semi-reversal by Los Angeles union officials of their demand for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, recently approved by LA’s city council. Union leaders have been among the most ardent proponents of the new minimum, which until now they’ve insisted must be imposed equally, no exemptions for special hardship.

But now union reps like Rusty Hicks want exemptions for unionized companies so that unions are free to negotiate an agreement that, as Hicks puts it, “allows each party to prioritize what is important to them.” Wow! Sounds like he might favor free markets, in which parties to a trade participate, voluntarily, only when priorities are aligned and each expects to gain.

Many motives for Hicks’s contradictory stance are plausible. One is that the requested exception would encourage companies to unionize to escape burdensome new costs. Accept one burden to escape a worse one.

Instead of letting unions cripple all workplaces but their own, let’s “allow each party to prioritize what is important to them” across the board, by letting employers and employees negotiate without any political interference whatever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags labor unions, minimum wage

Today

June the Fourth

June 4 marks Finland’s Armed Forces Day, Tonga’s Emancipation [or Independence] Day (commemorating the abolition of serfdom in Tonga by King George Tupou in 1862, and the independence of Tonga from the British protectorate in 1970), Estonia’s Flag Day, and the international Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 Memorial Day.

Thought

Samuel Adams

“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man. ”

Samuel Adams, from an essay in The Advertiser (1748).

crime and punishment

Life in Prison [x 2]?

As I worried, this weekend, about Dr. Annette Bosworth, and her future sentencing for the “felonies” (minor infractions) she committed in South Dakota, others were similarly anguished about Ross Ulbricht.

A judge just gave him two life sentences in prison for setting up the “Dark Web” anonymous trading service “The Silk Road.” He begged for leniency — “just give me my old age,” the 31-years-old pled — but District Judge Katherine Forrest proclaimed “lawlessness must not be tolerated,” judging Ulbricht “no better a person than any other drug dealer.”

According to the BBC, “Prosecutors say that six people who died from overdoses bought drugs via the site and that such untraceable deals earned Ulbricht at least $18m.” This is supposed to make us hate him as a “drug dealer.”

Which he wasn’t. He set up a trading website — albeit a no-tax, black-market one. The actual trades were the responsibility of the traders. Like on eBay. Emptors caveated, knowing what they were doing.

Curiously, his site could only be accessed using software produced by the U. S. government. Using the judge’s rationale, maybe the federal government should be tried?

Some would say that drug overdoses are the responsibility of the drug users — but more to the point, the main factor in illegal drug overdoses remains their illegality. Not given the sunshine of a legit market, actual dosages are hard to manage: producers don’t usually bother with consistency, immune as they are to the reputation aspects of legal markets, not to mention any regulation or tort law influences that affect legal products’ safety.

In reality, those six deaths are more a result of the government than Mr. Ulbricht.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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Tags crime, Drug War, free trade, Ross Ulbricht

Today

New Constitution

On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.

Thought

David Crockett

“I know nothing, by experience, of party discipline. I would rather be a raccoon-dog, and belong to a Negro in the forest, than to belong to any party, further than to do justice to all, and to promote the interests of my country. The time will and must come, when honesty will receive its reward, and when the people of this nation will be brought to a sense of their duty, and will pause and reflect how much it cost us to redeem ourselves from the government of one man.”

David Crockett, after his electoral defeat in 1830, as quoted in David Crockett: His Life and Adventures (1875), by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, p. 294.

crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall

No Part Justice

Dr. Annette Bosworth was convicted last week on twelve felony counts. She now faces as many as 24 years in prison, $48,000 in fines . . . and the likely loss of her medical license.

Her crime? She circulated six nominating petitions to get on the South Dakota ballot in 2014. Thirty-seven people signed — at her medical office and at a Hutterite colony (where she sees patients) — while she was on a medical mission to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.

Dr. Bosworth’s sister was one.

But the affidavit on the petition reads that the circulator must actually witness each person’s signature being affixed. Bosworth should not have signed it.

Hence six counts of perjury and six more, one for each false document filed.

In court, Bosworth testified that her attorney — who legally notarized the petitions — told her she met the legal definition of a circulator.

Last month, I traveled to South Dakota to release a Citizens in Charge Foundation report on this prosecution. One key finding? While the threatened penalty is the most severe any American has ever faced in a petition-related case, Dr. Bosworth submitted signatures of people she knew and who very much did support her. No forgery, no fraud . . . against the voters.

In response, the state’s largest newspaper reported that, “[Attorney General Marty] Jackley said that it’s ‘well understood in state law’ that the offenses Bosworth faces are punishable by probation and not jail time.” Then after her conviction, Jackley suggested a presumption for “either no or limited actual jail time,” adding, “but that presumption can be overcome by a defendant’s conduct.”

Annette Bosworth should be held accountable. But aiming to ruin her life isn’t any part of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Annette Bosworth, Dr. Annette Bosworth, justice, law

Today

American citizenship

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

Thought

Samuel Adams

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams, Statement of the Rights of the Colonists, etc. (1772).

general freedom government transparency national politics & policies privacy too much government

Rand to the Rescue

Nothing gets done in Washington?

Tell that to Kentucky Senator and presidential hopeful Rand Paul. Last night, he single-handily “repealed” Section 215 of the Patriot Act, ending the federal government’s mass collection of our phone records.

At least, for the next few days.

On the floor of the Senate, Paul blocked the USA Freedom Act, a “compromise” bill passed by the House. It would’ve required private telecoms to keep the data, allowing the government to query that data with a warrant.

“I’m supportive of the part that ends the bulk collection by the government,” said Paul. “My concern is that we might be exchanging bulk collection by the government [with] bulk collection by the phone companies.”

In a Time magazine op-ed, he argued, “We should not be debating modifying an illegal program. We should simply end this illegal program.”

Also last week, the Tea Party Patriots joined the ACLU in agreeing with Paul’s position: the USA Freedom Act doesn’t go far enough . . . to protect our civil rights.

Others warn we aren’t safe without maximum snooping and info-scooping by government:

CIA Director John Brennan called the metadata program “integral to making sure that we’re able to stop terrorists in their tracks.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the expiration amounted to “a serious lapse.”
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence — most famous now for lying to Congress about the existence of the metadata program — declared we “would lose entirely an important capability that helps us identify potential U.S.-based associates of foreign terrorists.”

Yet, there’s not a single case where this bulk phone data helped capture a terrorist or stop an attack.

Sen. Paul believes “we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution.”

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