Socialism has its black sheep. What cause has not? But that which fills me with grief is that it has so many white ones. The most miserable circumstance of our time is that much of its devotion and self-denial is running into Socialistic channels. It is this misdirected self-abnegation, characteristic of the Dark Ages, which is carrying us back to them.
Is the Internal Revenue Service inevitable?
I’ve often discussed the IRS’s ideologically motivated harassment of taxpayers as fostered by Lois “I Took the Fifth” Lerner (e.g., here and here and here and here). But typical nonpartisan forms of IRS harassment are also deplorable.
Consider the so-called “practice” audit, to which blogger Philip Hamburger was once subjected.
In any field, employees may presumably be sicced on a person primarily for training purposes. If you’re a new Spanish Inquisition employee, maybe you’re given somebody to flay and strangle not because he’s particularly heretical but just so you can hone the torture techniques. Seems wrong; but, you know, people have to be trained.
Same thing at IRS. Taxpayers sometimes get audited just so the new guy can fine-tune making taxpayers sweat over each deduction.
It’s why Hamburger got audited. When an IRS supervisor admitted that there was no problem with his small charitable deduction, that the point was only to enable an (absent) agent to practice auditing, our humble taxpayer almost blew up. Fortunately, his accountant intervened to ask, simply, whether the matter was now therefore closed. Yes, it was.
Year in, year out, the IRS causes millions of us to waste time and energy and to suffer angst thanks to the agency’s sundry demands. Solution: shut it down. No law of nature ordains that our income be federally taxed, and until 1913 it mostly wasn’t.
What prevents such urgently needed reform is only politics, not physics.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A few weeks ago, when the Ferguson, Missouri, protests were well underway, a few crucial facts emerged from the tumult.
A graph showed that Ferguson led the state — by a wide margin — in arrests per capita.
While it’s true that Ferguson could be that much more violent and criminal than every other city in the state, somehow that possibility doesn’t seem very plausible.
When we learned that “86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people — despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites)” … well, the whole thing stank of something other than a mere crime problem.
It’s a policing problem.
And, of course, a “war on drugs” problem.
Another fact, from the same source: “Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent.”
No way to run a government. Journalists and activists call such regimes “for-profit policing,” and cite the rise in civil forfeiture practices as encouraging and solidifying the method.
But “for-profit” is a bit of a misnomer.
It’s more like rapine (an old word you might most often see paired with “pillage”) than “for-profit.” It’s a looting system, while “for-profit” suggests selling a service freely on the market and earning rewards for filling consumer needs. Ferguson basically engages in shaking down a population of people, repeatedly profiling and harassing them, extracting as much of their wealth as can be had — Frédéric Bastiat’s “legal plunder” comes to mind — and leaves them to … protest, later.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Elevation of purpose, though a condition of the best achievements, is also a condition of the worst. The maximum of evil is never done save by the agency of men and women of disinterested lives and virtuous intentions.
Over at Townhall.com, the foreign policy prowess of the current president is called into question. Click on over, then back here.
BREAKING NEWS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.