Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Slow Times for a Fast Car

How economical are electric cars? It’s hard to know. We don’t have a free market setting in which to judge the question.

Their obvious advantage? They don’t pollute.

But, skeptics remind us, their electricity does have to be first produced, and the most likely additional source? Coal. Dirty coal.

In any case, electric tech’s progress (or lack thereof) remains fascinating. When I wrote about the Tesla Motors electric sports car back in 2006, I was enthusiastic. But since then the car has not exactly “taken off,” and the company has received a huge, huge hunk of money in the form of loans from the Department of Energy in 2009, so it looks like just another Solyndra-like boondoggle.

But wait: It turns out that the company has faced an uphill battle: government.

The states heavily regulate auto dealerships. You know, “for the consumer” (read: for a few privileged dealers). Indeed, this regulation at the state level has plagued America’s auto industry for years. And dealers, privileged by these protectionist laws, really, really hate Tesla Motors’ marketing model: direct-to-customer.

In Colorado, car dealers got the law changed to prohibit direct-to-customer auto sales.

I hope Tesla sues to overturn the state dealership laws as illegal under the Constitution — after all, they do precisely what the interstate commerce clause was designed to prevent.

More likely, though, Tesla will seek and get an exemption from the Energy Department. And American mercantilism will continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Image is anachronistic, and later appeared no this site to illustrate a very different Tesla story.

Tags subsidy, Tesla Motors

Thought

David Ricardo

The demand for money is regulated entirely by its value, and its value by its quantity.

Thought

David Ricardo

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Guns Grabbed in New York

Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.

However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.

“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-related disorders in the DSM-5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.

Ask David Lewis, a 35-year-old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.

A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.

Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.

Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.

Thus it begins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags David Lewis, gun confiscation, gun control

general freedom

Against Terrorism

It’s the business of reporters to report on events like the Boston bombings, and the business of commentators to explain them. But since we don’t have enough evidence, yet, about who did what, all commentators can do is speculate . . .

And that’s not very illuminating. Anyone can speculate.

Instead, let’s take a step back.

“Terrorism” is old. Anarchists at the end of the 19th century began their “propaganda by the deed” campaigns, eliciting from the U.S. government a vast repressive effort against anarchists (even peaceful, non-terrorist anarchists) and syndicalist unionism.

Striking out and terrifying a populace tends to unite that populace, making people more supportive of their government and its policies, not less. This has been observed from time immemorial. So anarchist terrorism was probably the dumbest terrorism in history.

An earlier bout of terrorism was the mob of “democrats” in France, during the late French Revolution. The furor to kill and dispossess got so out of hand that the French were prepared for a tyrant, Napoleon.

Not very effective there, either.

The most common form of terrorism in the last century was state terrorism, where governments brutalized their citizens, the better to solidify power. These regimes seem to succeed, sometimes for long periods. But people eventually turn on such tormenters, preferring peaceful life under a rule of law.

As Bostonians reel from the bizarre bombing, we should remember: the rule of law is better than terrorism. It’s plodding, yes. It is never ideally just, since it is run by human beings. But refusing to resort to indiscriminate violence to “obtain justice” or “make a point” or “get/maintain power” is the basic idea of civilization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags anarchism, civilization, state terror, terrorism

Thought

Ronald Hamowy

Ronald Hamowy The modern American “Right” was, in essence, a much-needed and healthy reaction against the New Deal, that revolution in domestic and foreign affairs wrought by Franklin D. Roosevelt which aimed at the radical transformation of the role of the State in American life and whose goal was the aggrandizement of government power at the expense of the individual. This modern Right represented the emerging opposition to such a shift and was, therefore, a movement stressing individual freedom. Domestically, the corollary of individual liberty was a call for free enterprise as against the socialist tendencies of the State; in foreign affairs, it stood for peace, neutrality, and isolationism as opposed to the Rooseveltian drive towards collective security, foreign entanglement, and war.

Thought

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

media and media people national politics & policies

The Infanticide Doctor and the Uneasy Silence

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 16, 2013
5 Comments on The Infanticide Doctor and the Uneasy Silence

Rare events often define our view of society and government. The regular slog of life we habitually forget and everyday crimes we let pass as if unnoticed. But a massacre, an assassination, or a big storm — these get a lot of coverage. And exercise our political imaginations.

Often unduly.

Yet, presently a rare-event story certainly qualifies as “newsworthy,” though almost no one talks about, and almost no media outlet covers: the serial infanticides of the abortion doctor currently on trial, Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

While media folks and political activists continue to publicize the Sandy Hooks shooting, on Gosnell’s bloody tale they remain silent. As Ed Krayewski notes at Reason.com, just as a rare shooting has served a political cause, so too could Gosnell’s grisly crimes. But from the president, no grand “it’s not about me” speeches. From his followers, no demands for instant action.

Why?

The question doesn’t need to be asked. It’s politically inconvenient for “pro-choicers” to confront the grotesque crimes of a doctor engaged in late-term abortions that often became postpartum infanticide. And grisly ones at that.

The pro-choice movement typically responds to abortion in the same fashion they accuse those at the NRA: give no inch. Abortion rights activists defend late-term abortions and argue that bringing up the killing of infants is just so “off-point.” But after reading about the Gosnell case, it’s not off-point at all.

Certainly, Dr. Gosnell’s alleged infanticide should be mentioned for the same reason that any big story deserves coverage. Should it lead to immediate calls for more government regulation of abortion? That’s debatable. Should it inform the debate?

Yes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags abortion, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, infanticide

national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

It’s Not About Responsibility

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 15, 2013
6 Comments on It’s Not About Responsibility

“It’s not about me,” insisted the President of these United States, before crowds in Hartford, Connecticut.

Barack Obama, in expert oratorical mode, elaborated: “Some in the Washington press suggest that what happens to gun violence legislation in Congress this week will either be a political victory or defeat for me.” After a long and impressive facial pause, he went on. “Connecticut, this is not about me; it’s not about politics. This is about doing the right thing. . . .” but he didn’t stop there. He listed the beneficiaries of “gun violence legislation”:

“for all the families who are here who have been torn apart by gun violence”;
“and all the families going forward . . . so we can prevent this from happening again”;
“it’s about the law enforcement professionals putting their lives at risk. . . .”

Not about politics? Sounds exactly like politics.

No discussion of the efficacy or practicality of what’s on the line, universal background checks on all gun sales. (Private trades in legal armaments now constitute a “loophole,” you see.) What evidence is there that universal background checks would have stopped the murderous Adam Lanza — or most such hard-to-predict murderers?

The Orator-in-Chief’s earlier emphasis on the ostensible fact of 90 percent American support for this rule is also political. You can bet that the pollsters did not probe very deeply into the nitty gritty of the issue by asking about increases in bureaucracy, paperwork, the regulation of law-abiding folk.

Or how to get criminals to comply.

None of that.

It is all politics. The feel-good politics of politicians claiming they are “doing something.”

That is not principle. Not philosophy. And certainly not responsible policy making.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.