Categories
Thought

Milton Friedman

Nixon was a very, very smart person. In fact, he had one of the highest IQs of any public official I’ve met. The problem with Nixon was not intelligence and not prejudices. The problem with him was that he was willing to sacrifice principles too easily for political advantage. But at any rate, as I was getting up to leave, President Nixon said to me, “Don’t blame George for this silly business of wage and price controls,” meaning George Shultz. And I believe I said to him, I think I said to him, “Oh, no, Mr. President. I don’t blame George; I blame you!” And that, I think, was the last thing I said to him.

Categories
video

Video: Why Stockton Went Belly Up

We’ve discussed the Stockton, California, municipal bankruptcy. It was brought about by a number of factors, but the highlights are (1) lavish and totally unsustainable public employee pay and benefits, and (2) the recession. Here is a detailed explanation from Vice Mayor Kathy Miller:

This sort of disaster may be coming soon to a city near you.

Categories
Thought

Thomas Jefferson

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

Categories
national politics & policies

The Realpolitik of Illusion

It’s a race against time. Obamacare is going into effect, piece by piece, link by link, yard by yard.

The idea when legislating big programs such as this is to push up as many benefits as possible early in the timeline, and shove the burdens as far down the road as possible. The strategy depends on enough voters noticing the benefits before the extravagant costs become clear. (And the full costs never become clear.) Once the program has been around long enough, the benefits will turn enough voters into special interests, and the costs will remain dispersed enough to discourage over-burdened taxpayers from fighting the inertial mass of the program.null

About the only thing that can go wrong is that the costs become all-too-clear all-too-soon.

That’s Nancy Pelosi’s realpolitik, as she honestly explained in her proud defense of “the health care law” (as if there were only one!):

We think the more people know about this legislation, you see it has changed even in the past week, the support for it has increased and as people understand what we all heard here today — how it affects their lives directly — that will even grow. So as I’ve said before, the politics be damned. . . .

That line, “the politics be damned,” is disingenuous in the extreme. The politics, here, is everything. And the Democrats have big government’s “home court” advantage, the illusions of interest-group cost-benefit analysis.

And against them? A Republican presidential candidate who had previously supported the same kind of law, supported by the same kind of illusions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought Today

Mark Felt (Deep Throat)

Follow the money.

Categories
Thought

Henry David Thoreau

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Categories
Today

July 12

On July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born. He would go on to become one of the leading figures in America’s Transcendentalist movement, most famously writing Walden: or, Life in the Woods [cabin pictured]. His defense of John Brown deeply affected later interpretations of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and his “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” protesting the Mexican-American War, has become a classic not only of protest but of political theory.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Those Pesky Online Citizens

Are “the people” a problem for technology to solve?

One of the benefits of the Internet has been the increased ease with which citizens can learn about their governments. Just as important has been the increased opportunity to tell elected representatives and public officials, along with their hired guns in federal, state, and local bureaucracies, just what they think.

Technology has given democracy a second lease on life.

But that doesn’t mean that politicians aren’t fighting back. And finding service providers and consultants to help them.

According to Michael Cohen, co-founder of Peak Democracy, Inc., online public comment forums can have awful consequences for politicians. They may fall prey to the dreaded “Referendum Effect.” This malady, Cohen explains, is

the loss of decision-making autonomy that government leaders incur when a community expects decisions to be based solely on the majority opinion of public feedback. More specifically, the Referendum Effect occurs when public feedback usurps the decision-making independence of government leaders.

Note the assumption here: government leaders should be “independent” of the voters.

Another way he counsels the International City/County Management Association “to minimize the Referendum Effect is to exclude the word ‘vote’ from the user interface – as the ‘v-word’ can create an expectation that feedback with the most votes wins.”

Cohen ends with an offer: “To learn more about the Referendum Effect and ways to prevent it, contact Mike@PeakDemocracy.com.”

Cohen is more than willing to advise how to keep pesky citizens from actually having an effective voice online. If you want to keep yours, meet his e-realpolitik with e-vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Robert J. O’Neill, Jr. (roneill@icma.org) is the executive director of the International City/County Management Association, which published Cohen’s comments.

Categories
local leaders tax policy

CARE Wins

Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung was fond of quoting Laozi, who said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Dennis Collins is neither a Taoist philosopher nor a dictator. The physician’s assistant, husband and father from Jacksonville, Illinois, is fine with that. “I’m just a private citizen,” says Collins. “I saw something that I thought wasn’t right and needed to be righted and it worked out for us.”Dennis Collins VOTE NO TAX INCREASE

What Collins saw was a ballot referendum that would have raised the sales tax in his county. With his area facing a tough economy and job losses, he didn’t think raising taxes made any sense.

So he took the first step; he called some neighbors and, together, they formed “Morgan County CARE.” CARE stands for Citizens Acting for Responsible Education.

“We knew we were outgunned from the start, but we just did the best we could,” Collins recalls in a video produced by the Illinois Policy Institute.

On a budget of just $3,100 and shoe leather, group members went door-to-door and made countless phone calls. “We went out and gave an honest message,” Collins explains, “and ended up making a change.” They defeated the tax hike.

“When I go to the store and see the sales tax receipt it feels very good,” Collins explains after the victory at the polls. “I’m thinking about the less fortunate and the elderly that are on fixed incomes and knowing they aren’t going to have to struggle any more than they currently are.”

“Individual citizens do need to step up and try to make change,” says Collins. That’s not the voice of a history-making dictator or a philosopher, but a community-protecting American citizen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Alexander Hamilton

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.