Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall links

Townhall: Freedom with an Exception Clause

It’s an old trick: make the exception clauses completely transform the principles involved.

In Colorado, a politician is trying mightily to transform the nature of citizen involvement in state government. She thinks she’s an angel, of course. But if you think of her as a devil, I’d completely understand.

Click on over to Townhall for this week’s Common Sense column. Come back here, of course, for a little more context.

For other recent Common Sense columns on Townhall, you can view them on this site, as well as on Townhall.com itself: click here for the index.

Categories
video

Videos: Heaven Knows Mr. Bloomberg

With Michael Bloomberg announcing his coming ascension into heaven, we offer a multimedia retrospective on the former mayor, now self-appointed saint.

CNBC: Michael Bloomberg Says He Has Earned His Place In Heaven

http://youtu.be/Y9hBIFXzrzI

Reason: The Mike Bloomberg Legacy: 12 Years of Little Tyrannies

Bloomberg’s record on term limits:

http://youtu.be/lsJmu8hk7DY

The Mayor won’t answer a question about term limits:

The Mayor is heckled: “Why are you here?”

NY Times: Bloomberg Wins 3rd Term as Mayor in Unexpectedly Close Race

The billionaire mayor had poured $90 million of his own fortune into the race, a sum without equal in the history of municipal politics that gave him a 14-to-1 advantage in campaign spending.

George Will on ABC’s “This Week”: Bloomberg thinks “we own you”

NT Times: Bloomberg’s Soda Ban Explained, Sort Of

Awkwafina: “Mayor Bloomberg (Giant Margaritas)”

http://youtu.be/YcphTuFGI40

Common Sense with Paul Jacob: Michael Bloomberg

Categories
national politics & policies property rights too much government

The Tiny State of Nevada

Nevada isn’t really that big of a state. Oh, sure, it appears large on the map.

But 81 percent of that land mass isn’t Nevada. It’s federal government property, run by various branches of the nation’s central government in Washington, D.C.

Much of the controversy surrounding the Cliven Bundy ranch, and the rustled cattle, and the standoff with the federales, has to do with federal government land.

From my reading of the Bundy family ranch affair, it appears that the legal question is not one of taxes, but of usage fees; not of endangered tortoises, but cattle. But mostly about land. My sympathies are with the Bundies. They seem to have a very old adverse possession case against the government.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that federal judges didn’t look very kindly to the Bundies’ customary rights. Federal judges prefer legislated law to common law. We’re a long way from our roots, folks.

But the issue lurking behind all other issues is the over-dominance of the federal government in twelve western states. Five of them have over half of their land titled to and run by the federal government: Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Utah and Nevada. This imbalance gives just too much power and purview to federal agencies, who are then tempted to run roughshod over locals. That is, state citizens.

Cliven Bundy may be dead wrong legally, but politically, he has a point.

The federal government should privatize all or most of its grazing lands and desert lands. Its forest lands should at least be “state-ized” — given back to the states.

This is a federal republic, right? Not an empire?

The states are not supposed to be mere conquered provinces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Bostonian rebellion, April 18

On April 18, 1689, Bostonians rebelled against the government of Sir Edmund Andros.

On this day in April, in 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States, split 5-4, upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

April 18 marks the 1772 birthday of David Ricardo, English political economist and one of the most influential thinkers in economic theory.

Categories
Today

Hamowy April 17

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Categories
Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Rand Paul’s No-Special-Deals Petition

Are you tired of members of the political class foisting burdensome laws on us from which they liberally exempt themselves? Sign the petition.

I mean the “No Special Deals” petition expressing support for “Senator Rand Paul’s Constitutional Amendment to stop Congress from passing legislation that doesn’t apply equally to U.S. citizens, the Executive Branch, Congress and the Supreme Court.”

This is one of those amendments with the job of shouting “Read and adhere to the document I’m attached to!!!!!!!” We need almost as many such amendments as there are constitutional provisions, considering how chronically the Constitution is violated.

The spur is Obamacare, the latest package of law and politics to combine crippling mandates for most of us with special deals for those with political pull. Some people are deemed more equal than others when it comes to “equal protection of the laws” and so forth.

The rationale for equally applying laws that are tyrannical? To discourage tyrants loathe to be battered by their own bludgeons. And to disallow their divide and conquer gambits.

That’s the hope, anyway.

But if officeholders find a way to tyrannize to begin with, and don’t hesitate to tyrannize, will any formally enshrined demand for equality of tyranny serve to deter them?

No, sadly, Sen. Paul’s amendment won’t prevent assaults on our rights that aren’t already supposed to be prohibited by the rest of the Constitution. Not by itself. But the amendment could help and certainly can’t hurt.

(Hurt us, that is —  if it hurts our lawmakers, that’s the idea.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Albert Jay Nock

Every government that has cheapened its currency has been knavishly false to a trust; so have those which, like ours, use public funds to subsidize large-scale gambling and swindling.

Categories
Today

De Tocqueville, MLK letter, April 16

April 16 marks the 1859 death of Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and sociologist, author “Democracy in America.”

On April 16, 1945, the United States Army liberated Nazi high security prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting against segregation, on April 16, 1963.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Free Money

If an email popped up offering free money, what would you do?

Delete it? And wonder how it got past your spam filter?

Me, too.

Well, some Washington wags — call them re-distribution professionals — say we’re crazy.

As are Republicans in the 19 states that have refused to expand their states’ Medicaid rolls as part of Obamacare, and in the five states — Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia — still debating whether to do so.

Republicans are “rejecting what is more or less nearly free money from the federal government,” says a baffled Josh Barro of the New York Times.

Karen Finney, host of MSNBC’s Disrupt, sneers that these GOP-led states are “leaving money on the table.”

“It’s free money!” exclaims an exasperated Joan Walsh of Salon.com, adding that, “It’s stimulative money.”

Under Obamacare, the federal government first demanded and now urges states to expand the Medicaid rolls well beyond those at the poverty line, with our central government generously offering to pay the cost for the massive expansion fully for three years . . . and then 90 percent after that.

One local newspaper identified one major issue, trust: “The trademark of Obamacare is broken promises.”

Will the federal government keep paying nearly all the cost? In Virginia, before any expansion, Medicaid already accounts for nearly one out of every four dollars in state spending.

“This is another picture of how extreme this Republican Party has become,” according to Walsh, “that you had this organized backlash to taking money that once would have been a no-brainer.”

This is the new GOP extremism, refusing to be bought off?

It’s no vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

This Is the Government We Pay For

We live in a time when the governing political party and the dominant strain in the major media constantly harp on two themes:

  1. Capitalism is wasteful, not environmentally sound, and
  2. We need more regulation from government.

So, it is especially droll to witness the Food and Drug Administration pounce upon an age-old recycling practice between breweries and farms. In the name of “better regulation,” and “safety,” of course.

For well over a century beer brewers have disposed of their spent grain product — the non-beer product of the beer-making process — by giving or selling it cheaply to farmers, who feed it to livestock.

It would cost a lot to dispose of this in landfills, so brewers save money by letting farmers take the dregs off their hands.

But now the FDA, in a new set of proposed rules (proposed not by Congress, by the way), wants to protect cattle’s food supply by requiring brewers to dry the spent grain before shipping it off.

That’s a killer cost. One Oregonian brewer referred to it as an “enormous burden,” and warned that higher consumer prices would be the result.

I’m with Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D), who demands that the agency go back to the drawing board.

“I don’t know everything about beer,” Wyden has been quoted, “but I do know when a federal agency acts like it has had one too many.”

For my part, I don’t see this as aberrant behavior from a federal agency. I see it as typical.

Typically drunk on power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.