Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Occupy X Percent

By all accounts I’ve read, the 99 percenters in the “Occupy X” (fill in the “X” with your nearest protest city) movement seem obsessed with income inequality.

I, too, am concerned with the very rich — the bailouts of the very rich. I was against bailouts from the start. The moral hazard of a bailout mentality is extremely dangerous, inimical to a free society.

But that doesn’t make me a 99 percenter.

Why? Well, protestors on the streets believe — well, 49 percent of them believe — that the bailouts were necessary!

How odd. They distrust the rich. They want to tax the rich more. And yet, when the rich fail, they think it vital to “help the rich out.” Is this a result of simply believing in “helping people out in times of trouble”? Or do 49 percent of 99 percenters believe that the wealth of the well-to-do is so vital to the economy that their status as wealthy folks must be guaranteed?

I think it’s probably the latter. Leaning left, 99 percenters are committed to government “management” of the economy. And that includes bailing out unsuccessful rich folks as well as the unsuccessful poor and middle-class folks.

Were they really against inequality, wouldn’t they be happy now that the wealthy have taken a hit, and income inequality has been reduced? At least to a small, Schadenfreude extent?

Apparently, government being in control is the real bedrock issue. For X percent, anyway — X representing a shockingly high number of protestors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Nails & Ball-Peen Hammers

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When it comes to “jobs,” our politicians prove the truth of this adage over and over. They think that they have to “do something,” or at least “look busy” providing “leadership.”

Wrong — unless they take the lead to get out of the way.

Alas, few have the courage for that kind of leadership.

Republican politicians — fearing “looking bad” — are, even now, floating various “plans” to create “jobs.”

“I thought it was incumbent on me to at least say . . . ‘We’re working on a plan,’” says one incumbent.

Trouble is, whatever plan he or his colleagues put up to counter the president’s absurdities, odds are that it, too, will not work.

Why?

The trouble with markets right now is uncertainty. Several sectors went bust, and it’s not easy to get progress started again . . . especially when the government keeps cooking up game-changers. Solutions. “Fixes.” Political machinations — subsidies or regulations or any of the usual tools in the politicians’ tool belt — just increase uncertainty, muddying up the recovery.

The neat thing about markets is that none of us need to know how, exactly, to order the “economy” for order to be discovered. It works out. This is old wisdom, but even actual experimentation has shown that this is the case.

The economy is not a mess of boards half-nailed down. The last thing it needs is more hammering from politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Creepy Louisiana Law

Sometimes, the proper response to legislation is just “Huh?”

Too often, though, our incredulity reaches the shivering heights of repulsion. In those cases, we should challenge the legislators who proposed, promoted, and voted for the law. The challenge might as well be in the form of a question: “Don’t you feel creepy for sponsoring that kind of thing?”

I would have felt creepy even contemplating a vote on Louisiana’s HB 125, which, in the cause of preventing transfer of stolen property, prohibits people from buying stuff at Goodwill and similar secondhand stores with cash.

Yes, you read that right: CASH. Greenbacks. Federal Reserve Notes. “Legal tender.”

I’ve always associated such kinds of prohibitions — not allowing cash to leave the country, for example — with poor and/or socialist countries. Real backwaters. The Second or Third World.

But here it is, in Louisiana. A fully recognized state of the union (at least by everyone but FEMA).

The law passed — indeed, in the words of one report, “flew . . . under the radar” — so quickly that “most businesses don’t even know about it.”

Besides non-profit resellers like Goodwill, and garage sales, the language of the bill encompasses stores like the Pioneer Trading Post and flea markets.

Lawyer Thad Ackel Jr. feels the passage of this bill begins a slippery slope for economic freedom in the state.

“The government is placing a significant restriction on individuals transacting in their own private property,” says Ackel.

Somewhat inexplicably, pawn shops are exempted from the prohibition.

What a sorry state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling national politics & policies

Can Senators Learn?

An 868-page bill said to be a fix for the loathed, landmark “No Child Left Behind,” was recently introduced allowing senators only 48 hours to read and consider it. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) objected, declaring, “This process is rotten from the top to the bottom.”

Sen. Paul called that a “tragedy.”

No senator could argue with his criticism of the process, of course, but Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado did take to the floor to argue it was an even bigger tragedy that so many children failed to reach proficiency in math and reading. He begged Sen. Paul to stop objecting so the bill could move forward and be passed.

Sound reasonable? Well, Bennett did not claim to have read the entire bill, only that (like so many other bills passed in recent years) the legislation is so desperately needed that no time  could be spared to actually read it and deliberate.

Sen. Paul also lambasted the idea that senators had not held hearings where they might listen to the teachers and administrators struggling to comply with the federal mandates in No Child Left Behind. “I’ve yet to meet one teacher who’s in favor of No Child Left Behind,” he offered. “They abhor it.”

For his efforts, Paul got a hearing on the legislation, scheduled for November 8. Now let’s hope he can get senators to sit up in their seats and pay attention.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government video

High Finance Q & A

This comedy routine from Australian television — sort of a take-off on the famous Abbott & Costello sketch “Who’s on First?” — may be more spot-on about the continuing financial crisis than it is ha-ha funny. Brew a strong cup of coffee, sit down in a very stable chair and watch:

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture incumbents term limits

Burial Rites

Libyan dictator Mu’ammer Gaddafi is dead. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez roams free.

Chavez recently returned to Venezuela from a cancer-fighting tour of Cuba, proclaiming that “there is not a malignant cell in this body.”

  1. This is almost certainly not true, but
  2. let’s pretend it is, and just say that Hugo reserves his malignancy for his politics.

Usually, I’d contrast the lives of these two headmen with the more peaceful careers of term-limited U.S. presidents. But if we stick to the news, to the very latest breaking stories, another contrast appears: The thousand-year-old Viking recently uncovered in Ardnamurchan, in the Scottish Highlands.

His burial was “high status,” we’re told. With him were his sword, his ax, his spear, and his shield. “He was somebody who had the capacity to do an awful lot of damage to people,” says one archaeologist.

In that way, the big-shot Viking was like Gaddafi and Chavez. But we’ll never know what this particular Viking did, in the way of harm. Of Gaddafi’s and Chavez’s crimes, we know all too well.

Gaddafi won’t likely receive as respectful a post-mortem treatment as the Viking received, at least if his “Weekend With Bernie” jaunt through Libyan streets is any indicator. It pays to die while still on top.

Which Chavez might be wise to ponder, instead of gloating about his cancer-free cellular composition.

Dictators might not be term-limited, but the ends of their careers tend to be pretty grim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Depression Low Notes

Though President Obama has a reputation amongst conservatives for being “soft” on illegal immigration, he has, in fact, presided over an administration that has sent record numbers of folks back to their countries of origin.

And this has hit the agricultural sector. Hard. The one fifth of Americans who are unemployed have, apparently, little interest in picking crops. Perhaps Tom Lehrer’s 1965 song about Sen. George Murphy explains the popular rationale most memorably:

Should Americans pick crops?
George says, “No,
“’Cause no one but a Mexican
“Would stoop so low.
“After all, even in Egypt, the Pharaohs
“Had to import Hebrew braceros.”

Apparently, native workers aren’t exactly desperate. Credit this to extended unemployment benefits?

Doug French, of the Mises Institute, notes that as supplies of produce come up short, food prices have risen. Without recent immigrants to pick crops, some farms have had to contract with prisons.

Things sure have changed since the days of the Great Depression. Back then, those looking for work took all sorts of jobs: menial labor, farm work, you-name-it.

Today? Apparently not.

Trust me, I don’t blame folks for avoiding back-breaking labor. About 30 years ago, I chopped tobacco. Soaking my sore muscles in the tub after the first day, I decided that surely I could find other work — and I did.

Still, someone has to pick the crops. Food prices are soaring. American citizens might rather be deported than have to labor in the fields.

Where on Earth would we find laborers who would feel differently?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people term limits

Corporate Domination?

While Californians celebrated the centennial of their initiative and referendum, the Associated Press pushed a story headlined, “Corporations, wealthy dominate initiative process.”

Reporter Judy Lin gave examples:

  • In 2010, Pacific Gas & Electric spent $46 million on a measure to make it more difficult for localities to go into the utility business — outspending the opposition by 161 to 1.
  • Another measure last year, to allow auto insurance discounts for continuous customers, was funded almost entirely by $14.6 million from Mercury Insurance.
  • In 2008, T. Boone Pickens’ company contributed over $22 million — outspending opponents 100-to-1 — on a measure to encourage use of natural gas . . . which would have benefited the billionaire’s business interests.
  • A 2006 ballot measure charging a severance tax on oil production to fund alternative energy programs was bankrolled with nearly $50 million dollars from real estate heir and Hollywood producer Steven Bing.

What Ms. Lin did not emphasize was that each of these big-spending corporate/rich-dude campaigns had the same result: The voters defeated their ballot measure.

The millions spent didn’t sway the people.

If special interests “dominated” the state legislature (or Congress) in this same way, we’d be dancing in the streets.

I spent the 1990s organizing petition drives to put term limits measures before voters — over 100 state and local initiatives — and virtually every single one passed, usually by large margins. No one ever charged that the term limits movement was “dominating” the initiative process.

Nice to know that I’m not plausibly demonizable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Renegade Regulatory Agencies

Americans often express astonishment when they learn that many of the nation’s laws — the bulk of its “regulations” — have not been written by Congress. Though the Constitution grants to Congress alone the power to legislate, Congress cedes most of that power to Executive Branch bureaucracies.

Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul hosted a panel on government regulatory abuse. Covering this “round table” discussion, Lou Dobbs, the Fox anchorman, interviewed Sen. Paul, and the two highlighted a number of regulatory horror stories:

  • A man from Hungary was put in jail for three years for cleaning up an illegal dump that had been put onto land that he had purchased.
  • A family was harassed for raising rabbits without a license — fined $3,000,000 but given the out of a mere $90,000 fine if they paid within 30 days by credit card.
  • Members of another family found themselves face to face with EPA bureaucrats, who halted their housing project, demanded costly site restoration, and charged them with criminal liability for not immediately complying.

The law that’s directed against this latter family, by the way, “is about wetlands,” which, Rand Paul informs us, Congress has never enacted laws about: “‘Wetlands’ is something defined into existence by regulatory agencies.”

In The Road to Serfdom F. A. Hayek showed how undemocratic and abusive “central planning” becomes. Apparently, even without a grand, overarching plan, regulation of the micro-managing kind navigates the same path.

Demand more “regulation”? Expect arbitrary judgment and unreasonable requirements — tyranny — as the result.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

The Ism in Need of a Schism

The “Occupy Wall Street” protestors seem, mostly, to be against rich people.

But it’s not wealth as such that sparked the protests, is it? The ranks of the self-proclaimed 99-percenters may be filled with miseducated anti-capitalists, but the occasion of their ire seems fairly clear:

  • It’s the depression, stupid — or the stupid depression. The enduring character of it.
  • It’s the bailouts. A lot of borrowed money was thrown at “successful” people to make sure they remained “successful.”
  • It’s the frightening instability of our basic institutions, including government itself.

So of course folks protest.

Too bad they have barely two clues to rub together.

The general cluelessness does not end at the overflowing toilets and excrement-stained police vehicles. When the protests went global, the New York Times reported on the “thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.”

Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute expressed his incredulity:

A government-created institution that creates a government-issued paper currency that is a shabby piece of paper thanks to government intervention in order to bail out government-subsidized and government-sustained institutions. And they call this a capitalist symbol?

Obviously, “capitalism” today means “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism,” not laissez-faire. That some folks still think we live in a “free market” — and blame everything now not working on that system — demonstrates the need for careful distinctions from those of us who know better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.