“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
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Czech Communist Party
On Nov. 28, 1989, with communist regimes in neighboring countries collapsing and growing protests at home, Czechoslovakian Communist Party officials announced they would give up their monopoly on political power. Elections were held the following month ushering in the first non-communist government in over 40 years.
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Henry David Thoreau
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
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Vietnam troop increase
On Nov. 27, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was informed by the Pentagon that success in Vietnam would require increasing American troop strength there from 120,000 to 400,000. In 1968, the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam reached 543,000 – the highest level of the war.
Nobel Laureate economist explaining why drug prohibition makes no sense:
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Abraham Lincoln
“People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
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T.E. Lawrence reports
On Nov. 26, 1916, T.E. Lawrence, a junior member of the Britain’s Arab Bureau during World War I, published a detailed report praising Arab leader Sherif Hussein, while criticizing the effectiveness of his revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Within weeks, Lawrence joined Arab troops in the field and spent the rest of the war organizing various groups of tribesmen to fight the Turks, earning the name “Lawrence of Arabia.”
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Thomas Jefferson
“A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
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British Leave NYC
On Nov. 25, 1783, three months after the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the American Revolution, the last British soldiers left New York City, the last British military position in the United States. The city had been in British hands since its capture in September 1776.
“It is not necessary for park budgets to be threatened during state fiscal crises.”
Good news. The vast majority of states now endure tightened budgets and panicked scurrying to rescue their finances from frighteningly bloody conditions of red.
In this financial environment, cutting non-essential services sometimes seems like a no-brainer. Park funding tends to get hit hard.
A PERC Case Study by Holly L. Fretwell, Funding Parks: Political versus Private Choice — quoted above — looks into a solution that most politicians rarely consider: private management.
Not full privatization, mind you. That’s too tough for most people to take.
Private management of publicly owned parks, on the other hand, makes a kind of obvious sense.
Fretwell looks at Recreation Resource Management, the largest park management operation in the country. The company leases rights to run state and federal recreation sites, managing more than 175 such units in twelve states. In arrangements such as RRM’s, lessees pay “an annual lease, or rental fee, in addition to a percentage of the total fees earned.”
When run by businesses, parks “are not subject to the same political appropriations process” as government-run parks. By leveraging the profit motive — and its associated economies — parks can serve the public without over-taxing us at a time when we are sorely pressed for money. Contracts with private firms can avoid at least some of the problems of bureaucratic incentives.
The bottom line advantage, she insists, is “consistent, quality stewardship.”
Which is surely what we all want.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.