Categories
general freedom too much government

I Gave at the IRS

A friend of mine shared something Desire Street Ministries had posted to Facebook:

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Mother Teresa said that. It’s not something you’re likely to hear from the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors. From what I’ve heard, they tend to say that people are in poverty because of big, greedy corporations . . . or government not taking care of them. Mother Teresa was closer to a better explanation. After all, those of us eating and sleeping well weren’t handed bread and a front door key by the government or a corporation.

A deeper poverty lurks behind persistent financial poverty. Sometimes the problem is neglect or abuse, drug addiction or alcoholism. Love can conquer all, but the Department of Social Services and the DEA don’t dispense love very effectively.

My Facebook friend commented, “Non-profits do so much better of a job of helping the poor than big government can/will do.”

Why is that? It isn’t because social workers don’t care. It’s that government bureaucracies are ill-equipped to address individual needs, which go far beyond a bowl of soup and a bed or even a monthly check.

More training, regulations and new laws are hardly the solution.

We are the solution. But we won’t be if we hand the task to government and declare “I gave at the IRS.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

The Uncontroversial .45-Caliber Slug

Some legislation is “shoot from the hip” . . . not carefully thought out, but obviously echoing a not-uncommon sentiment, if not common sense itself.

Florida’s Representative Brad Drake (R-Eucheeanna) has concocted a fine example, HB 325.  He got the idea from an overheard conversation. He was in a Waffle House, and one of his constituents was chatting about the Manuel Valle case in the Supreme Court. The convicted murderer had appealed many times, and what the Supreme Court was mulling over was the Valle’s objection to the manner of capital punishment, particularly the drug used in the lethal injection, to which he had been sentenced.

“You know, they ought to just put them in the electric chair or line them up in front of a firing squad,” said the Floridian.

So Drake wrote up a bill to junk lethal injection, offering, instead, the electric chair as the standard method, with a “firing squad” option.

“There shouldn’t be anything controversial about a .45-caliber bullet,” Drake insists.

None of this addresses my big problem with capital punishment — our American states’ actual, sorry record on the issue. There have been far too many wrongfully convicted innocents.

I freely confess: If I had to be executed, I might prefer a firing squad.

But since I’d almost certainly be innocent, I’d rather not have to make any decision regarding my unjust killing.

Shoot-from-the-hip legislating is not the proper response to the death penalty controversy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies too much government

The Obama Betrayals

In one way, President Obama has had it hard: He inherited a mess.

In another, he has had it easy: His predecessor blew it big time.

As James Bovard put it in his 2004 book, The Bush Betrayal, “George W. Bush came to the presidency promising prosperity, peace, and humility. Instead, Bush . . . spawned record federal budget deficits, launched an unnecessary war, and made America the most hated nation in the world.”

The election of Obama turned foreign opinion around, but his actual policies have proved no advance over his predecessor’s.

Bush started the bailouts; Obama bailed out more.

Bush pushed through an under-funded entitlement, Medicare Part D. Obama leveraged his political capital to take an even bigger step towards socialized medicine.

Bush understandably undertook the Afghanistan venture — but the Iraq conquest and reconstruction betrayed his promise to forswear “nation-building.” Then Obama lingered in Iraq, upped the forces in Afghanistan — long after the rationale became murky — and also attacked a number of other countries, including Libya. So much for the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But when it comes to America’s misguided War on Drugs, Obama has been especially disappointing. No-one really expected much of Bush. But Obama? He said he’d reverse policy at least vis-à-vis the states that voted in medical marijuana. Yet federal agents continue targeting medical marijuana growers.

We aren’t being served well by the presidents we spend so much time thinking about.

Could it be because they don’t really think much about us?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

The End of an Era?

More than one person forecast the bursting of the Dot Com Bubble, twelve years ago. The Pets.com sock puppet wasn’t the only clue — the general enthusiasm for companies that had never, ever shown a profit proved signal enough. And then there was all the talk about how the stock market “could only go up.”

Soon after, it went down.

Then stocks rose again, in a Fed-induced bubble. And then collapsed again, along with the financial system.

Brace yourself for another rerun.

The Economist informs us that “European bankers have been saying things are fine for weeks now, even as their exposure to indebted euro-zone countries strangles their access to funding. . . . Fears of contagion from Europe have now infected America.”

The gloom and doom just rises from there.

The article is depressing for another reason, though — the assumption that governments must not let banks fail, making The Economist read like council for never-ending tax-funded bailouts. Which was the kind of thing actual economists used to warn governments against. (A long time ago . . . perhaps back when the science was called “political economy.”)

Times sure have changed, as The Economist admits. The three years since 2008 have made a difference: Now it is the governments that prove insolvent.

It’s time for The Economist to rethink its policy advice, time to call for a general overhaul of the international monetary system.

We must end the age of inflation-and-bailouts, before it ends us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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.