Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Anti-Democratic Republicans?

political, politics, 2 Party Lockout, political party, politics, exclusion, elections, democracy, collage, photomontage

The Republican Party of Ohio paid lawyers $300,000 to keep a competitor off the ballot.

Typical two-party corruption. We can blame the party, yes — but also blame the system.

A “two-party system” is, mathematicians tell us, the logical result of simple plurality/winner-takes-all elections. That is, when the first candidate “past the post” wins enough votes to best any other, that candidate wins.

When you count votes like this, two parties emerge to dominate.

But to really rule the roost, those parties are incentivized to pile on . . . to make it hard for “minor-party” challengers. Ballot access becomes a nasty business.

Last year Charlie Earl ran for the governorship of Ohio as a Libertarian Party candidate. But he was blocked from the ballot. And when the Ohio LP “filed a federal lawsuit to try to force Earl’s name on the ballot,” Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges testified that his party had nothing to do with the legal maneuvers involved.

As Borges put it at the time, “Anyone who’s looking for the conspiracy behind it — it’s just not there.”

Now, it turns out, the conspiracy was there. His party paid the bills.

Whether Borges was lying or not — maybe he was clueless about these shenanigans — the deed got done.

More important than whether Borges himself can be held culpable for the ballot-access conspiracy, it’s the system that encourages such anti-democratic nonsense that needs changing. First-past-the-post elections must go. There are alternatives, as my friends at FairVote.org champion.

As Ohio GOP leaders stand shame-faced with the evidence of evildoing, it’s time to press such reforms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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2 Party Lockout

 

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Thought

Frédéric Passy

“The entire able-bodied population are preparing to massacre one another; though no one, it is true, wants to attack, and everybody protests his love of peace and determination to maintain it, yet the whole world feels that it only requires some unforeseen incident, some unpreventable accident, for the spark to fall in a flash . . . and blow all Europe sky-high.”

Frédéric Passy, February 4, 1895

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

Promises of Murder

Thought Crimes

Senator Lindsay Graham kills me.

The hawkish Republican from South Carolina isn’t exactly standing up for limited government. His latest oration, on the presidential stump in Iowa, warned Americans far and wide that, were he sitting in the White House with his finger poised above The Button and “you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State] — anybody thinking about that? — I’m not gonna call a judge.”

Adding mucho macho-flash: “I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.”

Like you, it never crossed my mind to join either the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. So, a big “meh,” eh?

Neh.

The attacks on civil liberties, committed under the cover of fighting terrorism, must end. I hope that Section 215 of the ridiculously-named USA Patriot Act will expire. I also want to halt the secret, process-less, law-less, global drone-strike program.

And I don’t think I am asking too much for the next president to not regularly threaten audiences with wider, more gleeful and less accountable use of drones.

Remember, Sen. Graham said “thinking about.”

Even with the NSA tracking our every key-stroke, government could still make a mistake about what we’re thinking.

Moreover, even if you disagree with me — perhaps wanting the War on Terror to be fought with more fury — it still seems counter-productive for the wannabe POTUS: (a) to imply that Americans must be bullied out of joining the latest jihadist gang in the Middle East and (b) to suggest the Prez has the dictatorial power to summarily execute an American on the mere suspicion of a thought crime.

Graham, president? Don’t die laughing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought Crimes

 

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Thought

Drew Carey

“It should be up to each bar owner and patron to decide if they want to smoke or not.”

Drew Carey served as initial video host of ReasonTV, helping debut the online freedom-oriented service in 2007.

Categories
general freedom

Rauner on a Roll

political, politics, Labor Unions, collage, photomontage, politics, protest, illustration, editorial, crowd

Last week I came not to bury a newly elected chief executive but to praise him — for not merely paying lip service to term limits, but for in fact making the passage of state legislative term limits a high-priority, line-in-the-sand policy goal.

I refer, of course, to Illinois’s new governor, Bruce Rauner.

Another controversy catching my attention pertains to union-bullying. Governor Rauner hopes to stop public-employee unions from extracting dues from the unwilling. These “fair share” dues are spent on bargaining strategies or political causes with which the dues-payer may be wholly unsympathetic. Why should workers be compelled to part with part of their income to support activities they don’t consider beneficial?

Rauner is using both an executive order and a lawsuit to try to outlaw coercive unionizing of public employees. (He has also acted to liberate private-sector employees from unions.) The order declares that dues may no longer be extracted from unwilling non-members. The complementary lawsuit is a preemptive bid to get the order judicially sanctioned as legal.

Governor Rauner is not a union member. He therefore lacks standing in the lawsuit, so three public union members have joined as plaintiffs. Representing them is Jacob Huebert, an attorney with the Liberty Justice Center (and author of the book Libertarianism Today).

Again, I say: Yes!

To be sure, I wouldn’t endorse everything that Rauner is saying or doing, even on issues where we’re simpatico. But when you’re right, you’re right. Good going, Governor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Labor Unions

 

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Thought

Frédéric Passy

“If there are still men behind the times whose ideal is force, men like Moltke, who think that war is good in itself as a useful stimulant, without which the world would become sickly, — these men see their numbers decreasing, and are no longer in a majority.”

Frédéric Passy, from a speech promoted widely in its day (late 19th century) by The Peace and Arbitration Society. “Moltke” likely refers to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German Field Marshall (1800 – 1891) who, for thirty years, served as chief of staff of the Prussian Army.

Categories
crime and punishment folly general freedom tax policy

Thieves Caught, Return Loot

Thieve's Loot

Lyndon McLellan, a convenience store owner, was robbed. The marauders took $107,000 of his honestly earned money.

We don’t need the police to find out who did it (and no, the police themselves are not the culprit, not this time). The IRS took the money, suspecting that he “structured” his bank deposits to avoid reporting requirements. McLellan’s niece, responsible for making deposits, had followed a teller’s (bad) advice to deposit the money in such a way as to avoid paperwork. The IRS noticed the “too small” deposits and looted the account despite having no indication that the funds were ill-gotten.

“It took me 13 years to save that much money,” McLellan says, “and it took fewer than 13 seconds for the government to take it away.”

This, even though the IRS had recently promised not to summarily nab account contents solely for alleged “structuring.”

At first, the government offered to settle with McLellan by returning one half the money, their standard (and outrageous) offer in such cases. But neither McLellan nor the Institute for Justice — the champions of property rights helping him with the case — accepted the government’s “deal.”

Last week, the IRS dropped the case and agreed to return their booty. But only the principal. No interest, no attorney fees (for McLellan’s first lawyer), none of the $19,000 McLellan paid an accountant to prove his innocence.

IJ will continue to litigate. We can hope that the IRS will continue to lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thieve's Loot

 

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Thought

Thomas Kyd

“Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.”

Thomas Kyd, “The Spanish Tragedy” (1592)

Categories
links term limits

Townhall: Democracy by Pretense

Insiders continue to chafe at the restraints imposed upon them by outsiders — that is, citizens. But citizens who keep their eyes on the prize can keep republican government democratic. Sometimes the outsiders just cave. Click on over to this weekend‘s Townhall column. And come back here for more information.

ERRATUM: The column incorrectly printed Mr. Ray Warrick’s name as “Ray Warren”; it has been corrected in the version that will be archived on this site in two days. Apologies to Mr. Warrick, and to our readers.

Oh, and did you catch last week’s Townhall column? Here it is on this site: “Minor Infraction, Felony Prosecution.”

Categories
Thought

P. J. O’Rourke

P.J. on Blame

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.”

P. J. O’Rourke,
Rolling Stone (November 30, 1989)

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P.J. on Blame