Categories
video

Video: Saving a Bear

According to the citizens on this video, and scuttlebutt on the Net, government game officials wouldn’t do anything because the bear wasn’t harming anyone. Low-quality video of a high-quality, heroic rescue:

http://youtu.be/g6GfHRsBrUA

So why did this job devolve to regular folks? Why did not the government do its job?

Perhaps Herbert Spencer explained it best:

Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies — unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand — unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements.

The state can only take care of the bare necessities. Not, in this case, the necessities of a bear.

Categories
First Amendment rights incumbents

Congress Got Your Tongue?

Yesterday’s somber thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was marred by a brand new and savage act of violence against the very essence of America: the First Amendment.

Who orchestrated the attack? Responsibility was not claimed by ISIL or ISIS . . . or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un . . . or even Dennis Rodman.

The culprits? A majority of the United States Senate.

Fifty-four Democrats voted to scratch out the words “freedom of speech” from the First Amendment to be replaced by giving Congress new power to regulate the spending, and thereby the speech, in their own re-election campaigns.

Conflict of interest, s’il vous plaît?

The assault was only thwarted because a simple majority falls short of the two-thirds required to send the constitutional amendment to the House.

Dubbed the “Democracy for All Amendment,” supporters and their many cheerleaders in the media pretended Senate Joint Resolution 19 would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and get big money out of politics. Certainly an amendment could do that, explicitly, but this one would have done no such thing.

Instead, SJR 19 would have empowered our despised Congress to regulate as it pleased, with such sweeping power that the amendment’s authors felt the need to reassure supporters (such as the New York Times) by stating expressly in the amendment that, “Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.”

Let’s hope that, for the 54 Senators who voted to repeal freedom of speech, this goes down as a suicide attack . . . politically.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Michel Chevalier

If there be in political economy anything universally acknowledged, and with which intelligent governments are in accord, it is that the precious metals should be treated as merchandise, and left ot the free action of commerce, including, of course, the liberty of melting and all that appertains to it.

Categories
crime and punishment

Your Local Vortex of Despair

I don’t know about you, but through the years I’ve received my share of traffic tickets and parking citations. Minor stuff overall, seventy dollars here, a hundred bucks there, a couple hundred smackeroos if caught in the wrong speed trap.

Sometimes the cost made me say ouch. But like most folks I just pay the tickets. And try to slow down.

But if you are poor, struggling, climbing the ladder from one of the bottom rungs?

Different story. And a speed trap set up by your local police or the state troopers, then, has a much different punch to it.

Could traffic tickets be instruments of tyranny?

Well, the $150 some of us can pay with a mere wince another simply cannot pay, or can only pay at the expense of a child’s supper, or replacing a balding tire on the car, or . . . worse.

And those who cannot pay, despairingly, often shirk the “duties” they cannot perform. Like coming to court to pay the fines they can’t pay. And then they get arrested. And then serve time.

A few more “and thens” and their lives are wrecked. Along with the lives of their children.

Radley Balko tells several such stories in his recent article, “How municipalities in St. Louis, Mo., profit from poverty.” He explains the very human costs of speed traps and other penny ante scofflaw “services” the police inflict all around Ferguson, the scene of last month’s protests and violence.

Balko quotes one observer, who describes the whole system as a trap for the poor, sucking them into a “vortex of despair.”

Stop punishing the working poor with excessive fines. Vanquish the vortex!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Michel Chevalier, 1835

American liberty, as it now is, may be considered the result of a mixture, in unequal proportions, of the theories of Jefferson with the New England usages. From these dissimilar tendencies has resulted a series of contradictory measures, which have become strangely complicated with each other, and which might puzzle and deceive a careless observer. It is in consequence of these opposite influences in the bosom of American society, that such conflicting judgments have been passed upon it; it is because the Yankee type is at present the stronger, whilst the Virginian was superior in the period of the revolution, that the ideas which the sight of America now suggests, are so different from those which she inspired at the epoch of Independence.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government U.S. Constitution

Thieves With Badges

Civil forfeiture is the government practice of taking property from citizens without due process, but while pretending that it’s all above-board. When police say they suspect a crime, they can impound property associated with that crime. “Civil forfeiture” is the legal legerdemain: instead of suing the owner, the government sues (get this) the property itself.

And, because of this trickery, burden of proof is inverted: victims must prove their innocence and their right to the impounded property.

Generally, governments keep it. Some police departments are “rolling in the dough” they get from impounding property.

This has been known for some time; I’ve written about it before. But now the Washington Post has finally taken notice … and unearthed a new element to the story.

“Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of ‘highway interdiction’ to departments across the country,” the Post’s report relates. There’s even a private intelligence network, the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System, through which police “share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.”

Participating police officers compete to steal more and more booty from drivers and their passengers.

Yes, it is stealing. It is only nominally “legal.”

Unfortunately, it is only one practice among many that have turned local police departments into the moral equivalent of gangland robbers.

If you say you want limited government, this is an issue ripe for protest. And lobbying for reform. And citizen initiatives.

For starters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Michel Chevalier, 1835

The United States constitute a society which moves under the impulse and by the guidance of instinct, rather than according to any premeditated plan; it does know itself. It rejects the tyranny of a past, which is exclusively military in its character, and yet is deeply imbued with the sentiment of order. It has been nurtured in the hatred of the old political systems of Europe; but a feeling of the necessity of self-restraint runs through its veins. It is divided between its instinctive perceptions of the future and its aversion to the past; between its thirst after freedom, and its hunger for social order; between its religious veneration of experience, and its horror of the violence of past ages.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

The Uber Rebellion

Customers in Germany and elsewhere have flouted irrational attacks on the popular ride-sharing service Uber.

As I have explained before, Uber’s software lets passengers and drivers connect in a way that bypasses regularly regulated taxicabs. Cabbies don’t necessarily oppose the innovation. Many see Uber’s app as a nifty way to get customers. And, of course, many riders see it as a nifty way to get rides.

But taxi dispatchers? Well, that’s another story.

At least it is in Germany, where an organization for dispatchers called Taxi Deutschland has kvetched that the San Francisco company lacks the Necessary Permits to do electronic dispatching in Deutschland. Thanks to TD’s loud complaints, a German court issued a temporary injunction against Uber, prohibiting it from conjoining ride-seekers and ride-givers in happy synchrony.

Uber decided to keep operating in the country anyway, despite the threat of huge fines.

They’ve gotten lots of moral support. In response to the injunction, customers quietly but firmly told regulators “Laissez nous faire!” — a.k.a. “You’re not the boss of me!” — by doubling, tripling and even quintupling demand for Uber’s app. Matthew Feeney of Cato Institute points to jumps in signups in the days following the court’s order: in Frankfurt a 228 percent jump, Munich 329 percent, Hamburg 590 percent.

Last July, in the U.K., Brits surged their signups eight times over after protests against the company.

Keep up the good work, rebels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Yves Guyot

The interference of the State in matters of Economy by means of regulations, protective duties, monopolies, and imposts, rests on the old idea of the omnipotence and omniscience of the governor, and the incapacity and ignorance of the governed.

It is justified under a rule by divine right; it is inadmissible under a government by discussion.

It is always costly.

Categories
Thought

Yves Guyot

Government is rigid; it cannot accommodate itself to new wants and difficulties. In order to act with regularity, it has had to bind itself by fixed rules. It can only act in a given direction and in a given manner. The necessity for order has given the spirit of control the predominance of that of initiative.

When Government has once made a blunder, it perpetuates it indefinitely.