Categories
general freedom too much government

The War Against an Infant Industry

In The Addams Family, young Wednesday sets up a sidewalk lemonade stand. A Girl Scout comes by and asks her if there are real lemons in her lemonade. After double assurances, the girl says she’ll buy Wednesday’s lemonade if Wednesday buys her cookies. Then comes the kicker: “Are they made from real Girl Scouts?”

The line works, in part, because of the historical setting. There is nothing more “American” than a kid selling lemonade by her home on a sunny day.

And yet, somehow, this traditional right of American life — a rite of passage — is under attack across the nation. Selling lemonade is a “business,” you see, which requires a license, and one may only engage in commercial enterprise in areas zoned for that, and . . . well, you get the idea.

Bureaucrats and over-policers feel it’s their duty to instruct the kiddies that they may only engage in nasty things like business with special permission.

Children must never see it as a right.

I know, there are problems (even in common law) about setting up a business in your home and stinking up the neighborhood or bringing in dangerous traffic. But, well, come on. Get real.

We’re talking lemonade stands!

So, a shout-out to Dave and Jenifer Roland and their Freedom Center of Missouri, for defending lemonade stands in their neck of the woods.

The issue may be more important than the size of the industry would suggest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

We Can All Get Along

Our country is divided politically — or so we hear — right from left, liberal from conservative, progressive from libertarian. Nothing new.

Yet, don’t we all agree on the main points? Certain truths remain self-evident:

  • Government must have the consent of the governed.
  • ‘We, the People’ are the boss.
  • Our votes should count.
  • Our constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness count even more.

At Townhall last Sunday, I wrote about a government (ours) that lacks the approval of the people. Even cynical moi is amazed that, in response to their sizzling disapproval ratings, our politicians seem intent on attacking our most fundamental democratic rights to actively disapprove. Freedom of Speech. Assembly. Petition.

On the first day of this month, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill he called a “dramatic” assault on the initiative rights of Californians. On the last day, another bill rests on the governor’s desk. It would force petition circulators to wear a sign on their chests, reading, “Paid Signature Gatherer,” if they receive any compensation at all for their work.

This “reform” is the zenith of wisdom among the Golden State’s great solons.

Our country’s problems with representative government cannot be solved by legislating away the rights of citizens to speak out and participate politically. And by “representative government” we mean not only that the job of a legislator is to represent us, but also that we reserve the right to represent ourselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Mann FOIA Dump

Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans was a great film.

But the work of Michael Mann the climatologist?

Quite another story.

He’s the biggest name behind the much-disputed “hockey stick” graph of world temperatures — the “hockey stick” being the shape of the upward temperature spike in recent times. Mann was also one of the biggest offenders in the Climategate scandal, where emails showed more politicking than objectivity going into how climate models were concocted and presented to the public.

In May, a Virginia state judge ordered the University of Virginia to release Mann’s data and emails under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute (ATI), smelling something fishy in Mann’s work, sued for access to the basic data. ATI now has a disk with info, saying the info dump is about a third of what they requested.

ATI folks haven’t had time to study the data.

Mann has been exonerated from the charge of “research misconduct” by the National Science Foundation — the organization found no “direct evidence” of “data fabrication or data falsification.” Still, Mann’s obvious bias continues to do more than raise eyebrows.

Ronald Bailey, who reports on all this for Reason, yearns to make FOIA battles superfluous. He urges “publicly funded researchers” to place their raw data up on the Internet for public testing — true transparency (and completely in the spirit of scientific method).

Well, that might happen . . . after a few more FOIA battles.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Forest for the Tyrannies

Traveling abroad? Don’t take your mandolin or guitar. Or, if you do, expect to hire a lawyer to fill out the paperwork.

It’s all about protected wood. The ebony of Madagascar, for instance, is legally protected. Anyone transporting wooden items across borders is supposed to fill out forms proving the provenance of each piece of wood. Make a mistake, go to jail. And pay a hefty fine.

And travelers aren’t the only targets. Gibson Guitar, a world-leading instrument maker, was raided by federal agents last week. The agents seized wood used in the manufacture of guitars — in a previous raid, they’d seized pallets of wood as well as guitars and electronic files. Apparently they are out to prove that Gibson has been knowingly purchasing illegal materials.

I might as well confess: I’m skeptical of the whole shebang, the protecting of wood by criminalizing sale and possession. Prohibition of the materials seems the wrong way to protect renewable resources, just as prohibition of the ownership and sales of elephant ivory has worked to the detriment of elephant populations. It’s where elephants are owned and their populations managed that elephant populations have stabilized, rather than shrunk.

I bet that private property in ebony forests would similarly preserve resources as well — if that property were defended by a rule of law so that the capital value of the land the forests sit upon, as well as the trees themselves, would figure into the accounting of entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, our federal government continues to prove its anti-Constitutional, pro-tyranny bent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Bright College Days

We parents worry when we send our kids off to college. But do we worry they’ll become terrorists?

No.

But a funny and slightly disturbing article by Colin Lidell in Taki’s Magazine takes notice of the deep connection between college life and terrorism. Indeed, “every major Islamist terrorist attack in Britain has been led by university students or recent graduates.”

Lidell makes a broader point, too, even with his title: “The Persistence of Bourgeois Radicalism.” Universities and colleges have long served as hotbeds of extremism:

Becoming “radicalized” — whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad — is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

The author concludes that the best cure for such radicalism is the requirement of work. He leaves that thought to linger in the readers’ minds, letting us extrapolate upon government subsidies to increase the rolls of college student bodies.

A related fact, uncovered by previous scholars of Islamic radicalism, is that the main subsidizer of Muslim radicals in the West have been the welfare states of those countries. It seems that the safety nets of British and European states (as well as Canadian and Australian governments) have funded quite a number of terrorist cells.

Perhaps one reason America has nurtured fewer home-grown terrorists is our tougher-to-obtain “welfare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Facebook Plus

Don’t call me a Luddite, but I still prefer meeting people one-to-one over any other form of interaction. Yet I can proudly say I have almost mastered the telephone, even its cellular incarnation.

Alas, my computer is almost a constant vexation — and I almost never use Skype. I even let my personal domain-name blog vanish from the Web.

So I tread into the eddies of modern innovative turbulence with more than a little trepidation.

I feel up-to-date enough by just being on Facebook.

This hasn’t stopped me from commenting on services like Facebook in the past, but, like any person who strays from his core competencies (yes, I’m on LinkedIn, too — did you detect the business lingo?), I often look to more with-it folks to spark some thoughts and keep track of many trends. (Don’t we all?)

On Reason’s Hit and Run, Katherine Mangu-Ward keenly observes that last year all sorts of people got really worked up about Facebook’s weird privacy-diminishing policies. There was hysteria in some quarters, talk of monopolies and even natural monopolies, or (in other words), treating Facebook as a “public utility.” You know, regulating it “in the public interest.”

So what happened?

Google launched Google+, which has a number of cool privacy features.

The result?

“Starting tomorrow,” Mangu-Ward writes, “Facebook will debut new, easier to use privacy settings with ‘a googley aftertaste’”. . .

Competition. It still works its wonders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Nab-N-Brag

Could America’s obsession with intellectual property be getting out of hand?

Congress has extended copyright protection for existing and old works as well as future works . . . which looks more like giveaways to major corporations than anything else. You know, like Disney, whose lawyers dread the day Mickey Mouse ever hits the public domain.

Now that patents have been taken out on “business procedures” and even strings of DNA, it seems that almost anything is up for grabs.

The easiest intellectual property to defend is the trademark, since unique identifiers are so important for both commerce and law. But even here there’s a lot of weirdness going on.

Take the recent lawsuit by In-N-Out Burgers against Grab-N-Go Burgers. The west coast outfit thinks the east coast outfit has, well, stolen its look. The Huffington Post calls it “copyright infringement,” but, in the first report I read, “the suit alleges that Grab-N-Go’s name and color schemes mirror In-N-Out’s signature style,” which sounds more like trademark. But the suit also mentions menu similarities.

Well, the names are similar, and the logos do resemble each other. But they seem quite distinct, and I would have thought common sense would judge Grab-N-Go as merely emulating In-N-Out, not infringing on rights. Businesses copy each other all the time. That’s capitalism.

It’s even Aristotelian. Keyword: mimesis.

Even innovation is never ex nihilo creation. It’s copying plus modification.

It’s why I call this commentary “Common Sense” and not “Xbligigroobi Blubqui.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Dead Doctrine

Take off your hat, crank up a dirge, and get out the shovel, for it’s time to put the last bit of dirt over the Fairness Doctrine. It’s dead.

The FCC killed it on Monday. Buried it.

“Our extensive efforts to eliminate outdated regulations,” explained FCC Chairman Julias Genachowski, “are rooted in our commitment to ensure that FCC rules and policies promote a healthy climate for private investment and job creation.”

A total of 83 regulations were deleted in the efficiency-minded campaign.

And it’s nice to hear of it. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving . . . target.

Actually, it’s been a score of years since the old dinosaur of speech regulation “fell into desuetude,” as President Grover Cleveland might have put it. (Ol’ Grover was not exactly a punchy writer.) And hurray for its death and burial — let’s hope it shall not rise from its coffin, like Dracula in a cheap horror flick.

For the “Fairness Doctrine” was an attempt to regulate speech rather than let speech remain free. It  helped further solidify the two-party system in America, and the very idea that there were only “two sides” to any political question . . . when it is obvious that a whole spectrum of possibilities exists for nearly any proposal or issue.

The Founding Fathers were right: Congress should “make no law” abridging the freedom of speech.

Interestingly, the regulation received its death blow not from Congress, but from the Federal Communications Commission.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people

What the Media Misses

The big news story last week became the media’s non-coverage of the Ron Paul campaign. After Jon Stewart of The Daily Show successfully brought out the full nature of the media prejudice, it became the story.

That’s how bias backfires. Trying to keep Ron Paul out of the headlines led to putting Ron Paul in the headlines.

How easily a conspiracy of silence turns into a deafening noise.

Media bigots think they are doing a public service when they pick winners and throw out losers before almost anyone has even heard from the challengers. They consider it their job.

Undoubtedly they look at Ron Paul’s platform and say to themselves “This guy doesn’t fit into the normal left-right spectrum, or even neatly into his own party. That makes him unelectable. So we won’t talk about him.” This points to media’s true power: establishing what’s worth talking about.

Trouble is, by rushing to judgment against Paul, they miss the day’s major story: Paul’s appeal transcends usual party lines. It’s not just a tiny cadre of libertarians on his side, it’s conservatives and liberals and exes of both persuasions; it’s centrists who’ve never heard anyone talk about the Federal Reserve before; it’s peaceniks who are serious about ending America’s wars.

It might even be that strong core of American society that still respects honesty and consistency.

The media has missed this elsewhere, too: In repeated recalls and initiatives around the country.

Cover the big story, folks. Not just your own spin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture tax policy

Greed and Bigotry on the Campaign Trail

On the video page featuring Mitt Romney’s notorious “corporations are people” comment — the one I clicked to, anyway — every comment was negative, with jokes like “Did you hear that S&P downgraded the Tea Party credit grade to KK+?” and economically illiterate whoppers like “Corporations do not help anyone except those who own them or do what they say.” It’s saddening to see ignorance and bigotry so self-righteously maintained by everyday Americans.

Yes, bigotry.

For Romney was right: Corporations are made of people. Those who roil with hatred for corporations, singling them out for more regulation or greater taxation, are attacking actual living, breathing people, who, as Milton Friedman pointed out, are made up of three classes of just plain folks: the owners, the shareholders, who are people; the corporation’s hired workers and managers, who are people; and served customers, that is, people who have chosen, sans duress, to buy stuff from the corporations.

Economist Steven Horwitz, writing in the Buffalo News, cited one study that estimated that “45 percent to 75 percent of the burden of a corporate tax increase is borne by workers,” and noted that, if profits fall, fewer dividends would go to stockholders.

And “stockholders” are often nothing other than workers’ retirement funds.

Yeah, soak the older people. That should make corporation-haters feel good.

Setting aside “some other people” to hate is exactly what anti-corporatists are doing. It’s bigotry. And it’s ugly . . . and de-humanizing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.