The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Categories
Categories
Eugene McCarthy
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
The current issue of The National Interest contains a perceptive essay by former Senator Jim Webb, “Congressional Abdication.” George F. Will echoes Webb’s arguments at The Washington Post, in “A bipartisan abdication.”
So, some abdication has occurred. Of what?
A congressional role in making U.S. foreign policy:
When it comes to the long-term commitments that our country makes in the international arena, ours can be a complicated and sometimes frustrating process. But our Founding Fathers deliberately placed checks and counterchecks into our constitutional system for exactly that purpose. The congressional “nuisance factor” is supposed to act as a valuable tool to ensure that our leaders — and especially our commander in chief — do not succumb to the emotions of the moment or the persuasions of a very few.
The problem, Webb argues, is that Congress has given up most of its power and authority, just letting presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama do pretty much whatever they want. And recently it’s gotten much worse. “President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress,” writes Webb, “at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”
Will summarizes the problem thusly: “Imperial presidents and invertebrate legislators of both parties have produced what Webb correctly calls ‘a breakdown of our constitutional process.’ Syria may be the next such bipartisan episode” of undeclared war . . . where the Congress merely sits on its hands and waits for the CNN reports.
The imperial nature of our system has been a long time emerging. As with ancient Rome, Big Men usurped power, and legislative bodies ceded authority, step by step, over time — becoming less republican.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Mario Vargas Llosa
Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
While the Supreme Court’s hearings on gay marriage stole the headlines, Senator Rand Paul was doing something interesting in the Senate. Teaming up with his fellow Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell along with Oregon’s Democratic delegation, the increasingly influential senator pushed S.359, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013.
Together with its twin in the House, sponsored by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, the bills seek to amend the Controlled Substances Act, which has outright prohibited the domestic raising of industrial hemp since 1970.
Hemp is marijuana, but grown for its fiber. And not potent in THC, so its recreational and medicinal value is nil. It was raised in colonial days, and by several of the Founding Fathers. I learned about it in Third Grade History. You probably did, too.
I wasn’t told that, if carefully cultivated, the same plant served other uses. There’s scant evidence that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — two enthusiastic if not completely successful hemp growers — exhibited any interest other than curiosity and acquisitiveness in their hemp growing.
The legalization move in Congress is about, pardon the expression, high time. Hemp is a great product, and the idea that, for the convenience of suppressing its cultivation as a psychoactive substance, not only a whole species but a whole industry would be suppressed is typical federal overreach.
Why the concentrated Kentucky interest? Well, it was the Bluegrass State where hemp was historically grown after the Civil War.
The Oregon angle? You’d have to ask Senators Wyden and Merkley. But I’ve known a number of Oregonian cannabis activists who’ve talked as much about the virtues of industrial hemp as the delights of their “grass.” Perhaps the idea is blowing in Oregon winds.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Lech Wałęsa
It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.
“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the mortgage/financial/intervention-induced crisis of 2008. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”
The “important things” most politicians want to do usually involve more government controls. Post-crisis, they hurry to expand the state’s power over us before crisis-bred emotions like panic and anger can fade.
In doing so, they often blindly ignore relevant facts that even a little time for discussion would bring to light. That’s why Glenn Reynolds argues for a “Waiting period for laws, not guns” in a recent USA Today column.
Efforts to push legislation through while emotions are high mean that the legislation doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that legislation is supposed to get. Laws are dangerous instruments, too, and legislators seem highly prone to sudden fits of hysteria.
Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg now says we must “start thinking a little bit more about the implications of things before we rush to legislate.” That’s “a bit rich” for Reynolds, since Bloomberg had PR men on standby to exploit the latest mass shooting as quickly as possible.
Still, if even Bloomberg is okay with hitting the pause button, “maybe the next time politicians want to rush a bill through without sufficient deliberation, others will have the fortitude to slow things down, read the bill and inform the public.”
This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposal. In many cities and states, today, an informed public can even petition a hastily enacted law onto the ballot for a referendum, at least when legislators don’t slap on a phony “emergency clause” to speed their worst enactments past the people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not breaking his term limits pledge like a dictator, he’s outlawing soft drinks like a nanny.
Now he’s trying to undermine our Second Amendment rights, spending $12 million of his reported $27 billion net worth to run television spots in 13 states. Those advertisements aim to rile up the public and encourage folks to pressure their U.S. Senators into supporting gun control legislation.
Hey, da mayor’s just not my kind of guy. Except in one respect: His spending of $12 million . . . of his own money.
I admire that.
And, even with his $27 billion set against my . . . well, er . . . I’m not scared of his wealth advantage. I welcome his speech. Because my best chance to prevail politically is for all voices to be free to speak.
Plus, as National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre ably put it last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Bloomberg “can’t buy America.”
In fact, I don’t think the mayor harbors any such illusions. Bloomberg’s savvy enough to know that his rented megaphone won’t necessarily convince Americans . . . who are not mindless automatons programmed by 30-second television ads.
We make up our own minds.
Too bad he doesn’t extend this notion across the board. You know, to soda drinks and such.
So, regardless of Bloomberg’s inconsistencies and indecencies, let’s welcome folks like him who finance causes they believe in. They provide the venture capital for informed citizen decision-making.
We could use a few more billionaires giving on the side of freedom and responsibility, though. Any takers? I mean, givers?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Elbridge Gerry
What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Now, it must be evident, that, under this provision, together with their other powers, Congress could take such measures with respect to a militia, as to make a standing army necessary. Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.
Categories
War Costs Ever Mount
War has costs . . . and prices. The costs include everything we give up to wage it, and everything taken away by the violence: lives, property, and (sometimes) sacred honor. The prices include the monetary expenditures that keep on adding up.
A recent Associated Press story warns us that the “Costs of Wars Linger for Over 100 Years.” The U.S. government is still paying for World War I, costing taxpayers $20 million per year. Spending on veterans of World War II peaked in 1991, while the Vietnam conflict still soaks up taxpayer dollars:
A congressional analysis estimated the cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the post-war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some $270 billion since 1970. . . .
We can expect the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to take money for scores of years after the cessation of fighting — and let’s hope it does cease, some day.
How long can we continue to pay? Very:
There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee — each for $876 per year.
This may seem idiotic, but it’s inevitable.
One element of the story, not mentioned in the reportage, is something I hear from friends: The Veterans Administration more than accommodates increasing its rolls not merely of the recent wounded, but from ancient veterans who received no war wounds. It’s part of the natural expansion of bureaucracy.
The price of war just goes on and on, and up and up.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.