Categories
too much government

ATF Misfire

A machine gun is like obscenity: We can’t define what it is, but everyone says they know it when they see it.

Well, that appears to be the case with the agency of the federal government formerly called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, anyway. According to a statement issued yesterday by the Gun Owners of America (GOA), “The Bureau has never published a manual detailing how they determine what is, or is not, a machine gun.”

If your main reason for existence is controlling weaponry like machine guns, shouldn’t the criteria for determining what a machine gun is be publicly known?

But the reason for the bureau itself is a bit iffy. Known (un)popularly as the “ATF,” it’s been in operation (in one form or another) since 1886. Ronald Reagan infamously dubbed it a rogue agency. Since then, the ATF has slogged through multiple scandals, and a major umbrella department change, moving from Treasury to Justice. And that iffiness has been exacerbated by recent investigations by the House Oversight Committee.

Indeed, in part based on the results of those investigations, the GOA now advocates getting rid of the agency— you can read the details in yesterday’s communiqué.

The group has a point. Recent ATF activity includes another of its weird attempts at entrapment, which ended up supplying a huge amount of guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

Another federal agency doing the opposite of its mission?

Not unheard of. Call it a typical misfire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Are Canada a Thug Nation?

Has Canada crossed the line? Was the post-hockey rioting in Vancouver the last straw? Should we toss Canada in a cell and throw away the key?

Al Capone once famously claimed he didn’t “even know what street Canada is on.” But I think we know that, kidding aside, Canada is a big and populous place, having somewhere around 34 or 35 million people, almost as many as Binghamton.

At any time, some of these millions are behaving well, others badly. With perhaps a few exceptions that we can debate in psychology class, every individual human being is responsible primarily for his own conduct, not that of anyone else.

So why does a New York Times story, “Hockey Hangover Turns Into Riot Embarrassment,” report that after Canadian thugs went on a rampage when their team lost a hockey game, “a nation that takes pride in its reputation for peaceful coexistence wrestled with questions about possible flaws in the national character”?

First of all, “the nation” didn’t fret about this. Certain people did.

Second, thugs who use sports and team rivalries — or trade agreements or any other grievance — to rationalize random destruction are nothing new in the world. Journalist Bill Buford published a visceral account of the British soccer-thug scene. Read Among the Thugs and you’ll know that the conduct of the rampaging rioters has nothing to do with the “national character” of either most fans or the little old lady down the street.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

A Really Bad Sign

I’m traveling across California this week to raise awareness about a diaper load of legislation designed to restrict, thwart, inhibit, hamper, obstruct, impede, block and tackle California’s robust system of initiative and referendum.

Politicians know they cannot abolish voter initiatives outright. They’d need voter approval. Instead, they seek to rig the rules so that people are nonetheless prevented from exercising their rights.

At CitizensinCharge.org we’ve detailed the various legislative proposals, with one bill really standing out amidst the general stench: Senate Bill 448. Authored by State Senator Mark DeSaulnier, the bill has already passed the Senate and is pending in the State Assembly.

Sign of the Times

SB 448 would force any citizen gathering petitions to put an issue onto the ballot to wear a badge — really a small sign, with lettering the size I’m wearing in this picture. If the citizen petitions as a volunteer, the sign must read “VOLUNTEER SIGNATURE GATHERER”; if one is paid, then “PAID SIGNATURE GATHERER.”

The sign must also contain the California county in which one is registered, or read: “NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE.”

DeSaulnier touts his legislation as simply providing “a little transparency.” But for those in power to force citizens to wear a message that politicians dictate suggests that they think of petitioning government as a permitted privilege rather than an inalienable right.

Though it’s easy to bring up ugly historical parallels, that doesn’t make Sen. DeSaulnier and those supporting this bill redcoats or Nazis.

But they are petty, mean and unconstitutional.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Post-script: You can email Sen. DeSaulnier at: senator.desaulnier@sen.ca.gov

Categories
ideological culture

Fingernail Adjustment

The oldest method of fraud is the classic merchant’s trick of “putting finger to the scale,” in days before pre-packaging. Buy a pound of grain? Watch the seller’s hands, make sure they’re clear of the measurement device . . .

Some climate scientists might have been engaging in similar rigging of measurement, in this case of the sea’s much-prophesied rise, as FoxNews.com reports:

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters — or about the thickness of a fingernail — every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

So, instead of putting a finger on the scales, they’ve put a fingernail’s worth of bias to the data.

The scientists say they have to offset for other factors in the land-sea ratios, and, for all I know, they are correct. But in the context of the “global warming” debate it doesn’t look so good, especially when what we hear from climate change alarmists includes scant talk of complex, offsetting factors. Indeed, in that light, the repeated fingernail addition looks like a piling onto the data, to make the evidence match the prophecy.

Ideally, scientists would not ever dumb down their opinions — or skew their forecasts — to the point where we become suspicious of every complexity they add to their models.

But, as we have learned, we don’t live in an ideal world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Auto Bailouts & Obama Bombast

I never expected a Washington Post writer to so soundly assail a presidential stream of pro-bailout nonsense.

In a “Fact Checker” column entitled “President Obama’s phony accounting on the auto industry bailout,” Glenn Kessler concludes that a “virtually every claim” by the president in recent comments about the auto industry “needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.”

President Barack Obama says General Motors will rehire all workers laid off during the recession. But he’s referring to only a sliver of the 68,000 employees General Motors has dropped from its work force since 2006.

Obama says Chrysler has repaid “every dime” it got from taxpayers “during my presidency” — years ahead of schedule. But he omits four billion forked over to Chrysler during the last month of the Bush presidency! So . . . Chrysler has repaid every dime except four billion dollars. (That’s 40 billion dimes, by the way.)

And so forth. Kessler leaves the job of analyzing the wisdom of shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of failing firms to others. So he doesn’t observe that capital forcibly rerouted into “creating jobs” in foundering enterprises cannot be turned to more productive uses in the more successful enterprises from which the capital was grabbed. This is another fact Obama neglects.

It’s not the 2008 presidential campaign any more. Maybe the left-leaning press will no longer automatically bail out Obama when he distorts the truth?

Let’s see where we are in mid-2012.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Disarm Power-Trippy Bureau-Thugs

“This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society,” says Quin Hillyer at the Center for Individual Freedom site.

By “this . . . sort of thing” Hillyer means pre-dawn raids in which “thuggish bureaucrats . . . burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan payments.”

I’ve already commented on this vicious and stupid Department-of-Education-sponsored raid. I return to the story to echo Hillyer’s suggestions for reform.

He observes that such baseless assaults on innocent citizens are “an increasing problem. . . . [A] horrific number of similar stories [show] that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.” More and more commonly, agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board, which have no business having armed agents, nevertheless do.

Hillyer suggests that the SWAT-like raid teams and the people who order them should both be subject to imprisonment for these flagrant abuses of power. He also wants Congress to stop criminalizing mere clerical errors and to “de-arm federal agents.” The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, concurs, saying he’d “like to see some Tea Party members of Congress pass bills to disarm all non-law-enforcement agencies.”

Yes. Let the congressmen openly debate and vote whether rampant, arbitrary, armed raids of innocent citizens should or should not continue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

World Policeman on the Take?

The United States of America is at war in Afghanistan and Libya and has nearly 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq. We have 702 military bases in 63 countries around the world.

We’ve become the world’s policeman.

This mission comes with a hefty price tag — most importantly, in the lives of our soldiers. Secondarily, but not inconsequentially, in dollars. Last year, we spent $685 billion for our worldwide presence, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we’re adding Libya to the bill.

So, how do we pay for all this policing?

Over the weekend, in a visit to Iraq, U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher suggested, “We would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years.”

We can hope, but Sean Hannity went a misplaced step further: “We have every right to go in there [into Iraq and Kuwait] and, frankly, take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation.”

Heavens! Rescuing someone doesn’t give us the right to take others’ money or oil or anything else.

Now, were a liberated nation to choose to repay us, that’d be nice. Kuwait did actually pay more of the financial cost of the Gulf War than we did.

But face it: Policing the world is just not cost-effective. Making it pay by turning a liberation crusade into an excuse for looting? That’s not police activity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Explaining the Next Bust

Is the long-cycle “higher education boom” now beginning to go bust?

Like financial bubbles fed by subsidy and the Federal Reserve’s limbo-low interest rates, American colleges and universities are plagued with too much government attention —particularly by policy that says “everybody should go to college.”

But common sense tells us that not everybody profits by going to college, that sending ill-prepared, unqualified and even uninterested young non-scholars to college, largely so they can “earn higher incomes” is absurd. Pushing the vast majority of American humanity through the university mill cannot ineluctably yield increasing returns. With diminishing returns, increasing government attention can only feed a dangerously unsustainable bubble.

And once it bursts, Americans will demand explanations.

Look to the theory of “signaling,” which posits that a (or the) chief use for schooling is not learning but a demonstration: Getting a college degree shows (“signals”) employers that the persevering student possesses virtues useful in “the real world.”

We’ve come to rely on those crude signals, but as economist Bryan Caplan argues, businesses could adapt to a very different information market: “Ending government subsidies for education wouldn’t create a new working-class generation; it would lead businesses to massively expand the employment of interns to take advantage of the large pool of talented, young people who can’t afford tuition.”

Gee, learning one’s trade for free sounds better than going into debt to “signal” employers that one would likely be able to produce for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom

Here to Raid You

Government agents: Here to help? Or to break in, drag you out of your house by the scruff of your neck, throw you to the ground, handcuff you, and stuff you into a patrol car before finally releasing you six hours later?

That’s what happened to “Stockton man” Kenneth Wright, as witnessed by the neighbors and his kids. According to News 10, “After the Department of Education raided the home of a Stockton man Tuesday morning, officials said the search was part of an ongoing investigation into financial aid fraud.” Wright wasn’t even the subject of their investigation — that would be his estranged wife.

So . . . an “investigation” into “financial aid fraud” warrants smashing in someone’s door and treating him like an escaped axe murderer? Not this side of the portal to Bizarro World.

The raid wasn’t even triggered by an unsubstantiated tip about a medicinal-marijuana stash. No need any more to use the drug war as an excuse to assault peaceful citizens. Now any old “investigation” warrants outrageous assaults, and any government department can commission them. Not so long ago I spoke of raids on barber shops suspected of unlicensed scissor use.

Such abuse of power is becoming the norm. If America is not quite yet a full-fledged police state, it’s sure starting to smell like one.

Wright says: “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.” That’s not enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism too much government

The Propaganda Diet

When the federal government gave up its goofy “food pyramid,” I thought it might be a sign that the USDA had given up. We’re not so lucky. The USDA just announced its new diet propaganda campaign, trading in the pyramid for a pie chart.

But, as noticed on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, there’s no pie.

Actually, the graphic’s in the shape of a plate, with four categories broken down in pie-chart fashion: Fruits, grains, vegetables, and proteins. In a separate element to the side, a “cup” labeled “dairy” serves as a fifth food group.

The “eat your vegetables” mantra we’ve been hearing all our lives is now reinforced by the command to make half our “plate” (the graphic is available at ChooseMyPlate.gov) fresh fruits and vegetables, take half our grains as whole grains, avoid salt, and switch our milk to skim or 1 percent. Oh, and avoid sugary drinks; drink water instead. And eat less overall.

Good advice, I suppose, but at this point if the government tells me that the unclouded sky is blue, I’d check to verify, first.

And regarding our diets, “check to verify” is probably a good idea. We can hardly trust even the so-called experts without applying our own critical intelligence. Our eating habits are ours. And much of what the government’s said in the past has been nonsense.

As for me, I’d like to cut down on government itself. This campaign seems the place to start.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.