Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Happy 100th, California

On this day a century ago — October 10, 1911 — California voters stormed to the polls and overwhelmingly enacted a measure establishing a statewide system of initiative and referendum. Through the years, Californians have used the initiative to enact for themselves many reforms their legislators refused to touch — from ending the poll tax in 1914 to term-limiting their legislature in 1990.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with any specific measure passed via initiative in the last century, the enormous impact of California’s initiative process can hardly be disputed. Perhaps the best known and most consequential initiative has been Proposition 13.

This measure cut and capped the state’s property taxes in 1978, saving the homes of many citizens on fixed incomes. At Cato.org, Steve Moore argues that “the anti-big-government tide in America began . . . with the passage of taxpayer advocate Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13.” In the two years following Prop 13’s passage, 42 other states passed some form of tax relief.

At an event today in Sacramento — the “100th Anniversary Celebration of California’s Initiative & Referendum” — a politically diverse group of initiative practitioners, journalists, academics and political leaders will discuss the impact of the past century of citizen-lawmaking and ways to improve the process.

Despite a century of change, two things remain the same:

  1. The politically powerful don’t like to be checked by citizens.
  2. Polls show that Californians today support initiative and referendum by the same three-to-one margin they passed it 100 years ago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Obscene Green

I don’t know about you, but when I want to invest my money, I don’t go the Department of Energy for advice.

There’s a reason for this. At their best, bureaucracies “lumber on,” to quote one sociologist’s analysis. They are, “by their nature . . . fitted only for average requirements.” Picking long shots? Not their strong suit.

And a long shot is what the government’s investment in Solyndra surely was. The more emails that are released, the more obvious this becomes. Even savvy folks within the administration knew was that Solyndra was a bad deal.

Yet President Obama says it seemed like a “good bet” at the time.

Why?

Politics. He needed to look good, and the easiest garb to grab was the garb of “green.”

That is, alternative energy — which is said to be our future. Undoubtedly some alternatives will dominate . . . that is, ones found on the market. The great gales of destructive creation that is the market process will eventually solve our “energy problem” . . . if only to create a new problem, requiring yet another solution. (In real life, there are rarely “solutions,” only trade-offs.)

There is something obscene in Obama’s “good bet,” for he was betting with other people’s money. Confiscated money.

At the very least, such funds must be treated carefully, not gambled.

To spend otherwise is to sully, for temporary gain, a sacred trust.

Of course, Americans are so used to such trust being desecrated that, sadly, the Solyndra scandal doesn’t quite seem like the enormity it truly is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement

A True Revolutionary

The key to success in business? Profitably serve as wide a customer base as possible. Mass production is the lynchpin. And it’s also at the heart of why many intellectuals hate capitalism: Serving the mass of mankind is “beneath” them. They have a higher calling. They serve Justice, or The Truth. Or, say, Beauty.

This curious by-product of capitalism is what Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises called “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality”: The tendency of intellectuals to react against the very instrument that serves the common man even while they ballyhoo the “cause” of the common man.

Mises and others focused on intellectuals’ envy as the reason for their strange, seemingly inexplicable “turn.” Why bite the hand that feeds so many? Because that hand doesn’t reward intellectuals enough!

F.A. Hayek added another reason: Incomprehension. How markets work is beyond the designs of any single mind. Intellectuals tend to be prejudiced in favor of singular minds. Theirs, at least.

The great revelation at the end of the last century followed from that: Command-and-control societies must fail. Regardless, though, “planning” does happen in a free society. Piecemeal. You plan. I plan. And entrepreneurs plan to serve us both.

And entrepreneurs of genius successfully serve millions, make a lot of money for all concerned, and find new ways to make life easier, more enjoyable.

Steve Jobs was such a man. He died yesterday, age 56. As head of Apple and Pixar, he changed society by serving the masses.

And even intellectuals approved.

A revolutionary, indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Blame China

The Great Depression was made “great” by government mismanagement.

Political action, first under Hoover and then under FDR, made things a whole lot worse. And it wasn’t just the Democrats’ misguided New Deal barrage of regulation, cartelization, and general anti-business central planning. The Hoover Era Smoot-Hawley Tariff, a huge Republican reassertion of high-barrier protectionism, crippled international markets and devastated the one industry it was meant, especially, to help: agriculture.

Protectionism is the idea that government should outrageously harm domestic consumers to “protect” domestic producers. And politicians, often thinking they must “do something” (i.e., “anything”) often feel the push to “save us all” by erecting barriers to trade. Since the crash of 2008, I’ve kept an eye on our Washington insiders, to see if they’d try to revive Thirties-style self-destructive nostrums.

Well, we’ve got a sighting.

Congress is gearing up for some anti-Chinese protectionism. An unfortunately bipartisan movement is festering there, saying China’s yuan is too valuable, making trade “unfair” for American producers. The Senate seems bent on passing the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act.

But, according to Daniel Ikenson, what’s really going on is politics: Faced with “public approval ratings hovering in the low-to-mid teens, an embattled Congress is looking for plausible scapegoats for the dismal state of U.S. economic affairs.”

This is not sophisticated economic theory. It’s not conscientiously developed public policy.

It’s grasp-at-anything grandstanding.

And it could do a whole lot of harm.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

The Wrong Track

Most Americans believe our country is headed in the wrong direction. But there remain folks who would like to take us all the way into downtown Wrongville.

Two Sundays ago, in my column at Townhall.com, I expressed exasperation at the “prestigious” Think Long Committee’s recommendations to make it much tougher for California citizens to place issues on the ballot, to allow legislators to trump any citizen-enacted measures, and to empower an unelected council chosen by the governor and legislative leaders to place any measure they desire on the ballot.

Then North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue (D) told a Raleigh Rotary Club, “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.”

After taking some hits, the Governor’s press secretary claimed she “was obviously using hyperbole.” But that’s not the way the audio sounds.

Finally, a New Republic article by Peter Orzsag, former Obama Administration Director of the Office of Management and Budget and now Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup, calls for more reliance upon “automatic policies and depoliticized commissions” because “we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.”

This just after our infamous 535 representatives handed away their power to a “super-committee” of only twelve people.

A whole class of people see the road to Wrongville and hit the accelerator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people political challengers

The Big Christie Problem

The demands of media are not the demands of the American people. Everyone knows this.

Basically, journalists favor big, juicy stories. They like colorful characters and charisma. And they like puffing up some — inflating reputations as if they were balloons waiting for hot air — only to puncture them later on.

That’s what’s behind the continual discussion of Sarah Palin, the non-candidate.

She’s a media person herself. She’s the media’s No. 1 non-candidate.

The media’s No. 2 non-candidate? Gov. Chris Christie.

I’m a big fan of Christie, and I had positive things to say about Sarah Palin, very early in the last election cycle. But the attention given to these two, during the current campaign, has been mostly objectionable. It shows more what’s wrong with media folks than with the current slate of Republican presidential candidates.

Christie’s pluses — a no-nonsense limited government perspective from a successful state executive — are shared by at least one other candidate, former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson . . . who has been barred from most debates and virtually ignored by the media.

So why the fixation on Christie?

He makes for good story. He’s big. He fills the screen. And he’s more glib and polished than Johnson, or Paul or Bachmann or Perry.

In a perfect world, journalists would leave candidate selection to the parties and the people.

This is not a perfect world.

This, too, is not breaking news. But then, this is not reportage, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Ninety-Nine Percent Pure

Politics is dominated by pious, politic lies and half-truths. Every nation has them, and Turkey’s are most impressive.

Turkey has been a vanguard, in the Muslim world, of “Westernizing” and “modernizing” tendencies. But it still has one foot in the deep past. One of its great pious half-truths is that Turkey is “99 percent Muslim” yet possesses a “secular state” where “all religions are equal.”

With some religions more equal than others.

An Alevi spokesman, Izzettin Dogan, charges that the country “is actually a Sunni Islamic state.” There are 30 million Alevis in Turkey, according to the New York Times, and they are not alone in getting the short end of the stick in “secular Turkey”:

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

Good question.

And it gets to the heart of one of the reasons I’m so happy to live in America. Our government may be a mess, but we still have some basic freedoms. We’ve long gotten over the ancient fixation on the union of religion and state.

In ancient empires, kings styled themselves as gods.

We know better.

And we know better than to subsidize religion — or use it as a branch of the government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly

Pension Reforms Un-Ravel?

Jerry Brown has done some good work as California’s governor. When he promised to take on the common practice of pension double-dipping, he spotted a problem and appeared to be on the right track.

But if you want to hire well-connected, experienced and (therefore, or presumably, competent) civil servants to help you in your crusade to save your state, what do you do?

Why, you hire retired civil servants. They each get their salaries — plus their pensions.

There may be something faulty in the above rationale. But that’s what happened.

Shane Goldmacher and Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times showed just how big this problem is, in a current exposé. They lead with the facts in the case of Ann Ravel, who “gets a paycheck from her salary as chairwoman of California’s ethics watchdog agency and a second, bigger check from her public pension as a retiree.” She makes a good living, since the two sources of income “total more than $305,000 a year.”

This is not a good policy. Marcia Fritz, president of California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, says such double dipping “violates the whole premise of having a retirement program.”

I see her point.

Still, it wouldn’t be an issue if pensioners received retirement payments not in amounts promised by politicians and guaranteed by taxpayers, but instead coming from actual investments — defined contributions, not defined benefits — in something like each one’s individual 401(k).

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

A Social Contract You Can’t Refuse

Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren really worked up “progressives” with a rant about “fair taxation.”

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

As A. Barton Hinkle points out, no one suggests otherwise. But the real meat of her argument is worth studying . . . for a peculiar pathology in logic:

You built a factory out there? . . . You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Upon this rests her case for ramped-up progressive tax rates.

Apparently, according to Ms. Warren, successful businessfolk are takers only. But all along the way, businesses pay for the services they hire. Indeed, they pay for roads, too. Truckers, for instance, pay special weight-rate taxes and licenses for carrying heavy loads across roadways.

Her “argument” no more justifies government taxing truckers or factories more than a similar argument, mutatis mutandis, would allow the kid who mows your lawn to reach into your wallet when you aren’t looking.

The social contract doesn’t originate the way Warren specifies. Her logic establishes only that she’s not thinking clearly about obligations and lacks an appreciation for making a business succeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Winners and Losers

California’s initiative process gets blamed for every political problem the state confronts . . . that is, by many legislators and political insiders.

Two measures receive the bulk of the ire: Proposition 13 and Proposition 98.

Liberals bemoan Prop 13’s requirement of a two-thirds legislative vote to raise taxes, preventing state government from getting “the proper revenues.” They are welcome to their opinion.

But 33 years ago, Californians passed the measure 65 to 35 percent. Last week, a Field Poll showed it just as popular today. Additionally, the pollsters reported, “In each of four previous Field Poll surveys conducted since its passage, Prop. 13 has been backed by Californians by double-digit margins.”

Conservatives oppose Prop 98, which passed very narrowly in 1988. It creates a floor for K-12 education spending of roughly 40 percent of the state budget.

That’s why some charge that initiatives dictate too much of the budget. But, were legislators otherwise planning to zero-out public school funding? I doubt it. Spending was around 40 percent before Prop 98.

One other thing: Prop 98 incorporated a provision allowing the legislature to suspend the 40 percent mandate. The legislature has done so twice.

I would have voted against it, but unless Californians who oppose 98 can put a repeal onto the ballot and convince the majority of their fellow voters to agree, well, they’ll have to live with it.

At least, until the next election.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.