Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Nashville’s Trojan Horse

Beware of politicians bearing gifts.

The titans on the Metro Nashville Charter Revision Commission voted, last week, to recommend that a charter amendment be placed on the ballot, weakening term limits for the Metro Council and reducing representation on it.

“Taken together,” reports The Tennessean, “the proposed changes could throw the 2015 council elections into upheaval by eliminating one of every three seats while offering new political life to more than half of the current council.”Nashville Metro Council

The amendment now goes to the council, needing 27 of 40 members to vote yes. Almost that many are term-limited next year, so the measure may go on the ballot as early as August.

A former Metro law director on the Charter Revision Commission argued there shouldn’t be any term limits at all, but Councilwoman Emily Evans, the amendment’s sponsor, admitted to reporters that reducing the size of the council was likely the only way to get voters to agree to a weakening of term limits. She noted, “You have to give the public something.”

While voters tend to favor reducing legislative bodies, perhaps to save on costs and unnecessary drama, the other direction makes more sense: smaller districts, where each citizen is more important to his or her representative and that representative can accumulate less power.

A 2005 attempt to cut the size of the council was blocked by strong public opposition, so that may not be the sweetener the politicians think.

As for term limits, voters passed them in 1994 and have three times blocked council attempts to weaken or kill the limits.

Nashville voters know a Trojan Horse when they see it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

P. J. Proudhon

If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him.

Categories
Today

Portugal, Timor, May 20

French economist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Frédéric Passy was born on May 20, 1822. English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.

On May 20, 2002, Portugal recognized the independence of East Timor, formally ending 23 years of Indonesian rule and three years of provisional UN administration. Portugal was the former colonizer of East Timor until 1976.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Preparing for a Bailout

In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, “It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts and no cop-outs.”

Yes. He said that. But in reality, the handouts and cop-outs have kept on coming, like the solar wind.bucket for bailout

A Washington Examiner editorial notes that while “Obama blasted the influence of insurance lobbyists and vowed to take on the industry … as president, he passed a health care law that funnels more than $1 trillion in subsidies to insurers, and fines Americans who do not purchase their products.”

Go ahead: call that a handout.

But what about bailouts?

While newspapers like The Washington Post insist that Obamacare is exempt from such an eventuality, there remains the part of the Affordable Care Act known as the risk corridor programs. These reimburse “insurance plans for claims that cost significantly more than premiums that new subscribers paid in,” according to The Post’s Wonkblog. The goal is to protect health insurance companies from the risks they face in the new Obamacare exchange.

Companies that make money will pay into a fund that will be used to bail out companies that lose money. But, after obvious complaints about limits, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pushed a mandate that the program be revenue neutral, that the money paid out not exceed that paid in.

Last Friday, in 435 pages of regulations, CMS abandoned this call for budget neutrality. Instead, the regulation states, “In the unlikely event of a shortfall for the 2015 program year, HHS recognizes that the Affordable Care Act requires the secretary to make full payments to issuers.”

A taxpayer bailout: fully in place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

The 22 Franc Minimum Wage

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney agree with America’s progressives: raising the minimum wage is common sense.

The Swiss had a chance to prove their solidarity with that notion yesterday, when they voted on whether to establish a minimum wage in the country, a rather high one of 4000 francs per month (something close to 22 francs per hour). They voted the proposal down.

Overwhelmingly. By over 76 percent.Frederic Bastiat's classic essay, What Is Seen and What Is Unseen

Unlike in America, this minimum wage would have affected a huge hunk of the population. One out of ten Swiss workers earns less than the proposed minimum. In America, only about a single percentage of workers earns close to the national minimum.

This matters, as Frédéric Bastiat clearly explained, because price regulations can have two effects: a loss of production, or none at all — “either hurtful or superfluous.” No effect, when the price floor (as in a minimum wage) is set lower than the level most prices are already at (or, for which workers already work). But when the price floor gets set higher, goods go off the market — with too-high wage minimums, workers with low productivity cease to get hired.

Swiss voters could scarcely afford to risk the jobs of ten percent of the workforce.

In America, raising the minimum wage is usually a matter of sacrificing a few people (whom voters mostly don’t know — Bastiat’s “unseen”) while rejoicing in the higher wages of those workers retained (the “seen”).

In Switzerland, the government declared the down vote a victory for common sense.

Which it was.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

May 19, Oscar Wilde

On May 19, 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Prison. His “Ballad of Reading Gaol” would later become a classic, and his only great work following his imprisonment.

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Legislation that limits or hampers exchanges is always either hurtful or superfluous.
Governments that persuade themselves that nothing good can be done but through their instrumentality, refuse to acknowledge this harmonic law.
Exchange develops itself naturally until it becomes more onerous than useful, and at that point it naturally stops.

Categories
links

Townhall: An Alternate Political Program

What if the solution to the current political impasse would be to ignore party bosses and work with those with whom we disagree on so much? After all, we don’t disagree on everything. Click on over to Townhall.com, for this week’s Common Sense foray into political strategy. And back here, for more reading.

Categories
video

Video: The Freedom and Rights of Poor People

William Easterly looks at the inherent callousness at the heart of modern talk of “development.” His starting point, below, is the big difference in ideas between 1974’s dual winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Gunnar Myrdal and F.A. Hayek. Myrdal supported a double standard. Hayek did not.

Myrdal also promoted a huge assumption we still live with today: that of the benevolent dictator, the one who gets all the credit for progress. The common folk, you see, are just pawns in the dictator’s hands.

Categories
Today

May 17 Watergate

On May 17, 1973, televised hearings regarding the Watergate scandal began in the United States Senate.