On Nov. 12, 1969, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke news of the My Lai Massacre with a report that “The Army says [Lt. William Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians.”
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Ammon Hennacy
“I’m not trying to change the world. I’m trying to stop the world from changing me.”
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Video: No Adoring Cheerleaders
Tim Eyman, Washington State’s most creative and dedicated initiative activist, summarizes his approach to politics and governance:
“Consent of the governed” may indicate legitimacy, but “dissent” makes possible efficacy.
Washington State activist Tim Eyman could celebrate election night. Several of his sponsored anti-red-light-camera initiatives won — in Bellingham and Longview and Monroe.
But his statewide initiative seems to be going down.
Eyman has become obsessed with transportation issues, and he’s receiving the usual push-back from insiders and editorialists. The Seattle Times proclaimed his I-1125 “anachronistic,” saying that Eyman
may have something to say about the scope of government. His anti-tax proposals fare well. But voters do not think much of his ideas for moving — or, more precisely, not moving — people around a busy metropolitan region.
A tad disingenuous. Washington’s voters received a barrage of advertising against the measure, but the campaign tended to ignore the measure’s main point, its attempt to strengthen the feedback systems of paying for (and developing) road projects. I-1125 would have kept politicians’ hands out of the road till, forcing them to leave money in road funds put there by fuel taxes and tolls and such.
Despite the negative campaign, on election night the measure was losing so narrowly that many deemed it “too close to call.”
Contrast this with the common anti-initiative complaint, that voting for them is driven by well-funded campaigns that overpower citizens’ reason. Well, Eyman’s initiative campaigns carry mainly on the written measures themselves: His group spends nothing on paid advertising, while his opponents splurge millions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Taxing Christmas and Common Sense
Joke writers received an early Christmas present this week when the Obama Administration announced plans to levy a tax on Christmas. Actually, the tax was not on Christmas, precisely, but on Christmas trees.
And not on all Christmas trees, just on real, “cut” Christmas trees as opposed to the artificial variety. Seems people prefer artificial trees. Sales of “fresh” trees have fallen significantly in recent years, while artificial tree sales nearly doubled from 2003 to 2007.
So, the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a 15-cent-per-tree tax on “producers and importers” of 500 trees or more. The money would go into an advertising campaign to promote freshly-cut real trees over artificial ones.
But is it even a tax?
“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees,” declared White House spokesman Matt Lehrich. “What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign . . .”
But Jim Harper of the Cato Institute asked and answered the essential question: “Do Christmas tree farmers go to jail if they refuse to pay? Yes. It’s a tax.”
Once joke writers and commentators and real people (as opposed to the artificial variety) got wind of it, the tax/non-tax was scuttled with an announcement that “USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”
Don’t bother. As Robert Childress of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association posits, “I feel that marketing for my products is my responsibility . . .”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Occupy the State of Nature
Ideas have consequences. That’s a famous maxim of conservative theorist Richard Weaver, a thinker who was big when I was little. He was right. Ideas do have consequences, and different ideas have distinct consequences.
One can sometimes judge ideas by the consequences of trying to articulate them and put them into practice.
A few weeks ago one of the more seemingly absurd statements about the Occupy movement, the “99 percenters,” went viral. Doug “Media Virus” Rushkoff argued that the movement should not be counted as “a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living.” He said that the prototypers (can’t call them “protestors,” now, can I?) “are actually forging a robust micro-society of working groups, each one developing new approaches — or reviving old approaches — to long running problems.”
Read his argument for yourself. To me, it seems a bit too much in the old Charles Reich/Theodore Roszak school of counterculture-pushing.
Worse yet, Rushkoff’s explanation doesn’t fit well with the facts on the ground. The movement has gotten increasingly ugly and violent, as has been widely reported, but which the folks at Reason.com handily synopsize . . . giving Shikha Dalmia an excuse to conjure up the Hobbesian specter of the life of man in a state of nature: nasty, brutish, and short.
And yet, evidence suggests that people do co-operate without oversight, at least during emergencies, pretty well.
But not, I think, if their ideas scream out for special treatment and subsidy and against others’ success.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When the Obama Administration hit the ground running in 2009, one of its first “hopeful” and “audacious” programs was “Cash for Clunkers,” a sort of triple-action economic stimulus, carbon-emission reduction, and automaker bailout bill. Congress got on board, a lot of trades were made, billions spent. There was much brouhaha.
Skepticism should have been the order of the day, of course. So many things could have gone wrong.
And did.
Now, with the clarity of 20-20 hindsight, a consensus emerges: Cash for Clunkers was a clunker itself. An economic analysis from Resources for the Future is just the latest (mostly negative) judgment: “[T]he program increased new vehicle sales by about 0.36 million during July and August of 2009, implying that approximately 45 percent of the spending went to consumers who would have purchased a new vehicle anyway. Our results suggest no gain in sales beyond 2009 and hence no meaningful stimulus to the economy.”
Further, fuel economy gains and pollution reductions were minuscule.
The study is far from exhaustive. A lot of old cars were scrapped, recycled. Guess what this does to the used car and parts market? It’s been devastating.
Who’s hurt by supply reductions and consequent price rises? Cash-strapped folks, the kind of people who usually buy used cars, or keep old cars running — which is a lot of people during a depression.
I bet that Cash for Clunkers served, on net, to transfer wealth from the working poor to far wealthier individuals.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Too little, too late.” I am not alone to suspect that the Occupy movement — the 99 percenters — started its protest against corporate greed and government cronyism several years too late.
Where were the Occupiers when the Tea Party protests started?
Dancing in the streets over the Obama presidency? Many Occupiers may have lagged because they thought that “their man” could and would clean up corruption and make Washington work for the everyone — or at least the “middle class.”
The “too late” charge can be directed against the Tea Party, though — and has been, repeatedly. The Tea Partyers waited to organize until a liberal Democrat was in the White House, one who saw Bush’s big government and, well, raised it.
Many would admit, later, how not “theirs” Bush was. Still, few protested Bush’s big government push.
To the Tea Party’s credit, it was first — kicked off by Rick Santelli’s CNBC “tea party rant” in early 2009, against the upsurge of bailouts for banks, car companies, home-buyers, you name it, as well as the very idea of government stimulus. (Though I ranted earlier.)
The time to protest cronyism and corruption in American government? The moment one opens one’s eyes to political reality.
Maybe the great age of protest has finally come.
I hope it’s not too late.
It always seems like citizens should have stood up to abuse of power sooner, but being late to the action is no excuse not to stand up now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Video: My Friend Sarah
The world’s a complex place, and it takes some thought to make sense of it. One of the more useful tools for understanding the social world is economics. And, once you begin thinking in economic terms, there are consequences, as this delightful video from a few years ago neatly shows:
I’m impressed how a simple story line and touch of whimsy helps get the ideas across.
It’s hard to push string. That’s something the marionette masters in Washington are finding out. They’re used to dangling money in front of people. Watch the puppets leap!
But dangling money in front of folks in turn for votes and donations, that’s one thing. Investing in business? Quite another.
You see, businesses serve customers. While government can, indeed, invest in business, that investment doesn’t ensure success.
Developing and offering products on the market that people want to buy — that makes for success.
No matter how nifty something may seem to the investor, if it’s too costly for the targeted consumer — or simply fails to spark consumer fire — the company will not make a go of it, no matter how progressive the government doing the investing.
Sunday’s bankruptcy filing by Beacon Energy, a maker of an innovative flywheel electric energy storage system — energy storage being awfully important for that dubious future where we must rely more on unreliable and uncontrollable sources of energy, like wind and solar — is just another in a long history of failed government investments. In this case, other investors failed to come through.
On the bright side, this time the $43 million in loan guarantees, similar to those pushed to now bankrupt Solyndra, came with better collateral. Thus, this failure didn’t leave quite as big a hole for taxpayers.
Politicians like investing other people’s money (ours) . . . with their own political strings attached. But they hate that those strings lead right back to them when their corporate puppets wind up dead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.