Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Unbelievable

There they go again!

You’d think after Nebraskans voted three separate times for eight-year legislative term limits that the state’s legislators would finally accept the vote of the people they claim to serve.

But you’d be wrong.

The limits passed in ’92 and ’94 were struck down in court rulings that re-wrote the state’s initiative petition requirements. Voters responded to that judicial tyranny by booting out a supreme court justice in a retention election for the very first time in state history. A second justice resigned the day after that 1996 spanking by voters.

In 2000, citizens gathered enough signatures to put the limits back on the ballot and again they passed.

But that hasn’t stopped State Sen. Tom Carlson and his fellow legislators from placing Amendment 3 on tomorrow’s ballot. If passed, Amendment 3 would allow Carlson & Co. to stay in office 50 percent longer.

Strange, we limit the president to eight years; George Washington stepped down after two four-year terms to set that example. But somehow eight years isn’t enough time for a state senator.

In a last minute radio ad campaign by a purposely mis-named Nebraskans to Preserve Term Limits, Sen. Carlson says that he and his gang “believe in term limits.” But seconds later Carlson mentions “coaches, teachers, doctors” and suggests, “It is unlikely we would consider limiting their service to eight years.”

Well, he’s right that we don’t limit brain surgeons to eight years. But then again, being a legislator isn’t brain surgery.

As Nebraska voters will remind members of the state’s Unicameral Legislature tomorrow — for a fourth time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Will Rogers

You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

Categories
Thought

Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Categories
video

Video: Nebraska’s Trojan Horse

What the people fight against in Nebraska, another Trojan Horse:

Categories
folly ideological culture responsibility

Judicial Temblor

A scientist does not kill anybody by failing to predict an imminent earthquake, even if he believes and says that it is unlikely to occur just before it does occur. Non-omniscient seismologists don’t kill people; earthquakes kill people.

Nevertheless, Judge Marco Billo sentenced six Italian scientists and a government official to six years in prison for manslaughter, and also billed them for court costs and damages to the tune of $10.2 million.

Some residents of the Italian town of d’Aquila applaud the penalties.

The seven defendants were members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risk, which had convened not long before the earthquake struck d’Aquila in April 2009, killing 309 people. Commission members did not issue a warning because the kind of small tremors that had been putting townsfolk on edge were, in their experience, not often the prelude to a major earthquake.

Their crime, then, was for uttering less-than-omniscient judgments in their field.

Suppose the defendants had instead determined that there should be an evacuation, that the town were then evacuated, and that a person died on the way out of town in a way directly attributable to the evacuation — but no earthquake then ensued. Also manslaughter?

If inability to eliminate uncertainty about future hazards is a crime, then we’re all guilty. But the real crime was committed by anyone having anything to do with this miscarriage of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Edmund Burke

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Categories
too much government

The Greek Misprize

Sometimes a great misunderestimation.

George W. Bush’s “misunderestimate” still has a jolly ring to it, in my ear, just as does the common barbarism “irregardless.” Yet I realize that, in both cases, the prefix adds no new meaning to the word it would seem to modify.

Regardless, underestimation is today’s theme.

Matthew Feeney, at Reason.com, notes the shock-without-awe of the Greek government’s 2013 budget, just released. “The budget is worse than the 2010 projections,” he notes. And that simple statement almost qualifies as understatement:

The IMF had been hoping that the Greeks would manage to get their debt to GDP down to 120 percent by 2020. Considering that the newest budget projects a debt to GDP rate of 184.9 percent in 2016 it is unlikely that this goal will be reached.

That 184.9 percent figure was revised up from previous estimates of 179.3 percent.

The amount of debt is now way beyond the country’s annual income, as measured by GDP. I’m not one to rely heavily on GDP figures, but we need some comparison, and a market/private sector income figure would not make the 2013 ratio look any better.

And this is not a new thing. The Greeks have been underestimating their debt-to-GDP ratio for years now, as a nifty graphic from Zerohedge shows.

When a country is as overladen with government workers and other tax consumers as Greece is, this is to be expected. Zerohedge was right in 2010, to note that “Greece just got bailed out so it can get into even more debt!” At some point, hope morphs into fantasy and misunderestimation of future insolvency becomes a way of life.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Edmund Burke

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Categories
Thought

Comte de Volney

When time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations.

Categories
general freedom

Libre from Cuba?

Some Cubans will soon be free to escape the Cuban dictatorship.

The Cuban government recently announced it would end exit visa requirements by mid-January. After which, Cubans wanting to go abroad will simply need a passport and a visa from the country they’re headed to.

Some of them, at least.

Cuba won’t simply let its people go. Emigration will remain a privilege — one more often accorded now, but still a privilege — not a right. A privilege the government may revoke at will by invoking, for example, “national security” to stop dissidents who might cause trouble abroad. Skilled professionals may be kept to “preserve the human capital created by the Revolution” — you know, on the “You Didn’t Build That” principle.

For a government (whether a dictatorship or a prelude to one) to treat rights as mere provisional gifts is nothing new. The Weimar constitution of 1919 held the rights of the individual to be “inviolable” — unless a law were passed to violate them. (Article 114.) The German’s home was “an asylum and inviolable” — unless a law were passed to violate it. (115.) Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc., were all guaranteed — except when the state deemed otherwise.

Yes, Cuba’s loosening of emigration rules will be a boon for those Cubans free to leave under the new rules. But the situation resembles that of a prison in which everybody is wrongly incarcerated, from which half the inmates are one day graciously released. Well, great, except . . . shouldn’t they all be released?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.