Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
Little things mean a lot. One, they add up. Two, they often express something big, like love between a married couple — or a bully’s determination to control your every move.
In the case of New York City’s impending ban on Big Soda, the something big is Big Brother’s claim of a right to regulate or outlaw everything that might somehow, someday harm somebody. Never mind how indirect or trivial the alleged harm may be. And never mind that such regulation inflicts far more grievous harm to the individual’s own ability to judge what is good for himself, and to act on that judgment in co-operation with others.
Mayor Bloomberg’s new nanny law prohibits restaurants, bars, and other food-serving establishments from selling sodas in containers of more than 16 ounces. That includes carafes served to tables of four, eight or ten. It includes two-liter bottles of soda that New Yorkers might want to order with their pizza. The law is stupid and tyrannical, and a vicious precedent.
Bold, fizzy action is called for. New Yorkers should defy the prohibition. Set up a test case, with the city imposing a fine on one or more businesses for continuing to sell large doses of carbonation. This would allow, then, the Institute for Justice, the ACLU or some other freedom-minded organization help fight the fine and the law in court.
And let there be protests in front of City Hall, peaceful and principled, with Big Soda served to all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Don’t mistake your purification rituals for progress….
Monday, I lamented our deeply-indebted federal government’s policy towards the states: Bribery.
It busily borrows more and more money to entice our more fiscally sound state governments into dramatically expanding Medicaid spending to ever less sustainable levels. I also noted that several Republican Governors who were long opposed to Obamacare are now taking the bribes.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker isn’t one of them, but he appeared on Fox News Sunday to speak with host Chris Wallace, who said:
“As you well know, seven Republican governors have agreed to the expansion of [Medicaid] to 133 percent of the poverty [line] . . . And they say they’re doing it because of, if you will, free money. . . . [C]ritics say that your decision is, one, going to cost your state millions of dollars and, two, going to mean a lot of people in Wisconsin are uninsured.”
“In our case,” explained Walker, “we actually reduced the number of uninsured, we reduced the number of people on Medicaid and we actually saved a little bit of money.”
Wallace then asked if he feared Congress wasn’t going to live up to its end of the bargain.
“No doubt about it,” Walker responded. “Just for my cost to continue Medicaid in the state of Wisconsin, without any expansion, it cost me $644 million more in this budget. Thirty-nine percent of that is because the federal government under the Affordable Care Act and other provisions is pulling back on their previous commitments. That’s today. That’s without the expansion. . . . If Congress can’t fulfill the commitments they’ve made, I’m concerned about where they’re going to be in the future.”
Wallace then asked Governor Markell (D-Delaware), “why is it that he doesn’t trust Washington and you do?”
That question went unanswered.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Bailouts aren’t just for big businesses any more.
Just a few years ago the “too big to fail” argument meant spending trillions on financial institutions and auto companies. Now it appears that rewarding failure — indeed, outright perverse dealing — has a new and eager beneficiary: the federal loot goes directly to unions.
Well, a union, at least. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers International, whose brinksmanship shut down Hostess, Inc., has former Twinkie techs pulling in money earmarked in a specific way:
This week, the Labor Department decided to shower Hostess workers with Trade Adjustment Assistance, a multibillion-dollar pork barrel program that was beefed up as a bone to Democrats, who were blocking passage of three free-trade treaties in Congress in 2012.
TAA is a lavish program doled out by the Labor Department for laid-off workers who’ve lost their jobs due to “global trade.”
Of course, those 18,500 Hostess jobs were not lost to global trade. They were lost to union pig-headedness. The AFL-CIO-affiliated union was warned that without some cuts, the company would go under. The Teamsters entreated the bakers’ union to play ball. But no deal happened. And Hostess went under.
If the union’s negotiation tactic appeared as risky as a banker’s credit default swap portfolio on mortgage-backed securities, it’s now proved to be as un-risky as the same. The union may not be “too big to fail,” but it appears to be “too well-connected to fail.” The Obama administration is intent on throwing money at the group’s outrageous folly.
And so we continue to reward idiocy, well into the 21st century.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When in the fight for liberty should one give up?
Never. Contrary to deterministic notions of social change, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about any loss of our freedom.
What then should we make of the words of Daily Debate scrivener Robert Tracinski? Noting criticism of Florida Governor Rick Scott for reversing his stand against the Democrats’ health care reform package, Tracinski, also a foe of Obamacare, asserts that the battle to either repeal or block it “was effectively over with November’s election, when Democrats retained the presidency and control of the Senate.”
A bad blow is not a permanent conquest, however.
Scott’s opposition was central to his 2010 campaign for governor. As governor, he led a lawsuit against Obamacare. After the Supreme Court’s anti-constitutional decision upholding it, he said he would keep fighting by declining federal funds to expand Medicaid.
Alas, Scott has now thrown in the towel. (We don’t know yet whether state lawmakers, whose acquiescence is also required, will similarly discard their drenched terrycloth.) Proponents of greater government hegemony over the medical industry crow that all other hitherto recalcitrant governors will, in the words of David Firestone, “soon knuckle under and do exactly the same thing. . . . By investing a relatively small amount of their own money to cover the poor, states get a huge increase in federal Medicaid funds.”
You see how the bribe to the states is made. Cave in to a usurpation, and some of the apparent increased burdens will be borne not at the state level, but by the already insolvent, debt-ridden, deficit-addicted federal government.
It’s a sick system. And I’m not talking about just Obamacare.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. The sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence.
Over at Townhall.com, find a longer report on the Maryland referendum hearing, briefly addressed here on Friday. And then come back here to check out these links:
Sen. Rand Paul puts the hoopla and angst about the sequester into perspective:
“Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.”