Categories
folly media and media people

A Brief Against Weiner

Congressman Anthony Weiner: Insert joke here.

Perhaps because I pronounced his name as “whiner” rather than “wiener,” I didn’t titter as much as the rest of America did upon the Twitter release of his notorious underpants photo.

Weiner stonewalled for as long as he could. Was the photo in question of his own dear, downstairs corporality? He couldn’t “say with certitude.”

Yesterday’s overdue confession that he’d fouled up a direct message on Twitter, sending it publicly, instead — and then lied about it — confirmed nearly everybody’s suspicions. (Everyone it seems except too many slanted lame-stream media folks, who instead attacked the now magnificently vindicated Andrew Breitbart.) Weiner admits to having sent inappropriate messages and photos to attractive, younger women.

But, alas, Weiner’s mea culpa was accompanied by his insistence that he would not resign.

For lying about his accounts being “hacked” — and thus cry-wolfishly raising national security issues — and for proving himself an utter idiot at a simple messaging system, he should. That is, he should resign for falsely reporting a crime (and it is a crime to hack someone else’s online accounts), and for utter, bumbling incompetence.

Demonstrating humiliating incompetence at Twitter should remain a prerogative of private citizens, not politicians.

And it’s not as if he couldn’t land on his, er, feet. He could join one of the newer news comment shows, become Eliot Spitzer’s new partner on, perhaps, Weiner/Spitzer.

It has a ring to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Hewitt-Romney Rationalization

Those who insist that RomneyCare isn’t as bad as ObamaCare need a reality check.

Both impose new price controls; both impose new taxpayer-funded subsidies; both force people to buy health insurance; both massively expand government interference in our lives.

Former Governor Mitt Romney seemed to acknowledge the similarities when he suggested, shortly after Obamacare had passed, that he’d “be happy to take credit” for the president’s accomplishment. Now, though, with the glaring parallels so politically inconvenient, he pretends that parsecs of distance separate the two plans.

RomneyCare apologist Hugh Hewitt says that RomneyCare’s mandate forcing people to buy health insurance offends only “a handful of libertarian purists.” (Which I’d submit is far better than being a pure socialist or even a half-and-half socialist.) According to Hewitt, if we have no great objection to, say, smog-emission mandates, what’s the big deal about being compelled to buy a product?! Anyway, he adds, states have the right to impose such mandates, whereas the federal government is constitutionally barred from doing so.

Regardless of how we assess particular attempts to combat pollution, pollution at least conceivably violates the rights of others. Your not buying something does not violate anybody else’s rights; being compelled to buy something does violate somebody’s rights — yours.

Sure, RomneyCare affects “only” 6.5 million people, whereas ObamaCare affects some 300 million. But expanding governmental interference in the medical industry and into the lives of everyone is, either way, destructive and immoral.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture media and media people too much government

Show Me the Way to the Next Hookah Bar

I could never emulate the economist Irving Fisher — and not just his use of index numbers. He was a perfervid purist. He didn’t just defend “the success” of Prohibition, he looked forward to the day when coffee, tea and bleached flour would be outlawed, too.

Hey, I love my coffee. You’ll have to pry my cup from my cold, dead fingers.

Of course, many forms of purism are obviously hygienic. But take purity beyond persuasion, into force, that’s not safe for anybody. And fraud? Weasel-wordy purists aren’t against lying for the cause, either.

Take the hookah.

Hookahs are to tobacco-smoking what bongs are to marijuana-smoking: A water-filtration-based, easy-to-share drug delivery system. In “Putting a Crimp on the Hookah,” the New York Times quotes one hookah smoker as saying he’s unconcerned about the health effects, since he only smokes it about once a month. The author then states “But in fact, hookahs are far from safe.” As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine points out, both can be true. Tobacco smoking isn’t exactly healthy. But occasional imbibing of water-filtered smoke is almost certainly better for you than regular cigarette use.

The New York Times focuses on the next leg of the “ever-shifting war on tobacco,” the prohibition of “hookah bars.” Though there’s some talk of protecting second-hand smoke victims, it’s pretty obvious that this war is really about squelching a “vice” by force.

Which is itself worse than vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

Commemorating Alan Bock

Journalist Alan Bock died in May after a long struggle with cancer.

In addition to many articles penned as an editorial writer for the Orange County Register as well as for various magazines, Bock also wrote four books: Ecology Action Guide, The Gospel Life of Hank Williams, Ambush at Ruby Ridge: How Government Agents Set Randy Weaver Up and Took His Family Down, and Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana. The last two deal trenchantly with government assaults on our liberty — assaults as foolish as they are destructive.

In his obituary for the Orange County Register, Greg Hardesty reports that Bock “cultivated a loyal following as a passionate defender of individual liberty and freedom.” He “cut a figure as a bookish intellect — yet one whose friendly, easygoing nature endeared him to family, friends and colleagues.”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher recalls that Bock “smiled every time he made a point that furthered his basic beliefs in freedom.”

His 25-year-old son Stephen Bock says that his father always had a smile on his face.

Decades ago, Alan met with me when I was facing prosecution for draft resistance, and subsequently wrote a great editorial defending me. We kept in touch in the years since. My own acquaintance confirms the consensus that he was a very learned, effective and happy warrior for freedom.

We talked politics many times, but I wish we’d found the time to talk about Hank Williams.

Alan Bock will be missed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

In the Money

The economy is down, but some businesses are still bustling. Take the business of running local government in Washington, D.C. Money must be rolling in. The mayor just asked the city council to raise the highest compensation level he is permitted to pay employees by $100,000.

No, not to $100,000. Mayor Vincent Gray wants to raise the top salary by $100,000 — from $179,000 to $279,000.

One council member called the new mayor “tone deaf”; another said the idea is DOA. “These [salaries] are in excess of federal Cabinet officials,” a third pointed out.

Sounds like the council is putting its collective feet down. It just isn’t going to overpay for manpower, right?

Well, not really.

The mayor stuck the new pay levels into a bill already asking the council to okay salaries for the police, fire and school system heads, all of which exceed the current legal limit. News reports say the council is “likely” to approve those.

That how DC “works.” Pay limits are set in law, and then, when the mayor wants to overpay, he has to get the council to approve the higher pay.

While allowing higher pay in some cases, the council is unlikely to make it easier for the mayor to overpay without their deliberated say-so. Why? To provide fiscal accountability? Or, more cynically, to give the council more political leverage to get more political spoils?

Did I mention that I’m pretty cynical about the motivations of politicians?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Eleven Fiftieths

Eleven states have “bottle bills,” legislation requiring vendors to collect a deposit on each container they sell of soda pop, iced tea, energy drinks, etc. It basically mimics the old, voluntary system of recycling, where bottling companies would pay people to return glass bottles, for reuse.

When I was a kid, cheaper materials (aluminum, plastic) made the old system uneconomical. So environmentalists pushed through legislation in Oregon, and then elsewhere, to create government-mandated recycling systems.

Oregon’s legislature just passed a “sweeping revision” of the bill, upping the deposit amount from five cents to ten and expanding the program. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute testified at a legislative hearing against the revision. According to Charles, bottle deposit recycling conflicts with curbside recycling, which Charles argues is far more efficient — or at least easier to use than lugging containers back to return centers, which are usually sticky, smelly, and. . . .

Well, Charles didn’t talk about the stink. One of my Washington State informers did.

You see, Washington not only lacks a bottle bill, such efforts fail with larger percentages each time one hits the state’s ballot. But the beverage containers sold in Washington have the same deposit/return guarantees as in Oregon. So some Washingtonians transport their in-state purchases — sans five-cent deposit — across the border for unearned returns.

You might think that fighting such cheating would be of more concern to Oregon lawmakers than making it even more lucrative to out-of-state profiteers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets individual achievement

Entrée “Preneurial”

Today is Memorial Day, but the larger season is one of graduations, from college and high school and even lower grades. It’s fitting, then, to take a step back and consider the philanthropy of Peter Thiel, who is working on a different course.

Thiel, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, made headlines last year as he began his anti-scholarship program, “20 Under 20.” He is giving $100,000 to 20 young people under 21, but on one condition — that they not go to college.

Instead, his bequests amount to angel seed money for young go-getters to do something original, entrepreneurial.

Now, Thiel has announced his first 20 recipients. An AP story by Marcus Wohlsen leads with the circumstances of one recipient, Nick Cammarata, a young genius programmer. Cammarata wasn’t one of those grade A students. Instead of studying hard, he did what he liked, including reading books on subjects he was interested in. And programming, which got him attention outside his school and town.

Like other recipients of the Thiel hundred grand grant, he plans to parlay the money into a hopeful tech project.

The article dutifully quotes skeptics of Thiel’s program, and mentions the oft-quoted statistic that workers with college degrees have been laid off at a lower rate than non-degreed workers.

But this misses the main point of Thiel’s intent. He’s not interested in making “workers.” He’s interested in creating entrepreneurs. The people who hire workers.

A very different goal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Fly Him to the Moon

Some astronomers think of the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet,” our moon being so big and all. Undoubtedly, the Moon has been important for life on this planet, what with the amazing working of tidal effects — it may have even scooped up asteroids and other inter-planetary detritus, protecting our biosphere.

So “liking” the Moon, or wanting to know more about it, is not lunacy. (That “lunacy” derives from “Luna,” our natural satellite’s Latin name, is irrelevant. Really.) But sticking to the Bush-era “Constellation program,” a hopelessly expensive shoot-man-to-the-Moon-again project, long after it proved an idiotic waste of money, is lunatic. One of the great things about dropping the program has been witnessing Barack Obama talk up private enterprise in space. It’s always gratifying to hear the president speak something other than warmed-over socialism.

Enter Sen. Richard Shelby, of Alabama. He calls Obama’s plan to rely increasingly on private enterprise to send stuff into space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”

So, is this Republican stalwart thereby a strict free-marketeer, a laissez-faire “no subsidy” man?

No. His “Shelby provision” tacked onto an emergency military spending bill, last year, kept Constellation funding (but not the project itself) going to the tune of $1.4 million. Per day.

And it turns out that one of NASA’s main Constellation contractors hails from his home state, and contributes mightily to Shelby’s campaign coffers.

Worse than lunacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

For the Birds

Thanks to the intrepid action of swift-footed (and even swifter-brained) British bobbies in High Harrington, Cumbria, a dastardly mother-daughter duo was arrested and taken off the streets for several hours, time enough in the clink for cooler heels (and heads) to prevail.

The duo’s crime? Feeding pigeons. Monica and Janet McIntosh had a horrid habit of casting crumbs to Patagioenas panhandleria. Neighbors say the sky would blacken when the birds swooped to get their handouts. People couldn’t leave their homes when the critters came. It was like being in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Fed up with the feeding, Cumbrians called the cops. The Telegraph’s news story doesn’t report whether anybody first tried to speak to the McIntoshes. In any case, though, it’s what the police then did that’s really egregious here.

Officers phoned the women to say they’d be coming over to discuss the matter. And, presumably, a simple chat over tea and scones could have fixed the problem without any more feathers being ruffled. Instead, four officers arrested the pair. Not only that, they “seized house keys, bank statements and cheque books.” Huh? Let’s just say it ain’t Mayberry over there.

The women were let out on bail. Eventually, they were informed that no further action against them would be taken.

So this is what the world is coming to. You can feed pigeons, and apparently not be sent away for life. Can the sceptered isle ever be safe again?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

A Cool $90,000

Is American life now best described by the plot of a Nathanael West novel?

Maybe. In West’s A Cool Million, the young hero meets calamity after calamity, often at the hands of America’s authorities. I stopped after a prison official had all the hero’s teeth ripped out to “prevent infection.”

Most American punitive “overkill” is not as gruesomely funny. If you ask John Dollarhite, it’s not funny at all.

Dollarhite, who runs a computer store in Nixa, Missouri, inherited his son’s rabbit-breeding business, which Dollarhite describes as being on the order of a lemonade stand. When his son reached 18, Dollarhite took over Dollarvalue Rabbitry, and sold over 600 little furry creatures in the space of a year and a half.

He closed the business after the USDA got involved.

You see, the USDA licenses the selling of animals in this country. And neither Dollarhite nor his son were licensed to breed and sell rodents. Dollarhite says he wasn’t aware of such a requirement.

So, of course, the USDA came down. Hard. Like a starved puma on a vole.

The USDA demands he pay over $90,000 in penalties. Dollarhite says the government might as well demand a cool million — or, as he put it, a “$1000 or $100 million. I don’t have it.”

The blogosphere is up in arms about this, and rightly so.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking this isn’t American justice. More like that Nathanael West novel I never finished.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.