Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Backbreaking Spending

Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett, went into back surgery last week. The Pennsylvanians who voted him into office may be hoping he’s getting a backbone installed. But no such luck: Doctors call his treatment “routine.”

Too bad, for Corbett needs something to help him stick to his campaign promise of  “saying no” to spending.

Since taking office Corbett has  radically increased the salaries of his executive staff as well as stuck the state with another big sports stadium project.

Just what a cash-strapped state needs!

There’s a huge philosophical problem with forcing some folks (say, opera buffs) to pay for the entertainments of other folks (say, my fellow sports fans). It’s just not right. (It’s wrong the other way ’round, too.)

It’s also silly economics. And increasingly unpopular. People are “stadium fatigued,” according to Chris Friend in The Philly Post. Worse yet, the particular minor league stadium Corbett just pushed will accrue benefits chiefly to the New York Yankees, not the Philadelphia Phillies (or even the Pittsburgh Pirates). It’s a bizarre project, when you think about the cui bono of it.

Finally, when you think of who pays, the stadium’s $20 million price tag marks only a fraction of the cost, since the bond for that figure will balloon over time, with interest due.

Paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers.

I love sports. I look forward to the day when the industry is as self-sufficient as it ought to be, and people like Corbett have the spines to stay out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Freedom Is a Brown Bag

American society still features a fair degree of freedom and respect for the individual. We’d all be pretty shocked were a public-school bureaucrat to dredge up Plato’s old notion of forcibly removing babies from the care of their parents and letting the state raise them communally.

We’re not that far gone. Nobody advocates the utter communization of the care and feeding of the young.

Instead, we confront more incremental yet ever-bolder assaults on parental responsibility and rights in favor of such Grand Liberal Ideas as Puritanical State-Subsidized Nutrition. Thus, the educrats at a Chicago public school, Little Village Academy, prohibit kids from bringing lunch from home.

Yep. Not only are students prohibited from toting squirt guns and pictures of paper knives, at LVA they’re now also prohibited from importing such dangerous products as Coca Cola and Twinkies. It’s all about “healthier choices,” blathers a Chicago Public School spokeswoman, who stresses that it’s up to individual schools whether to adopt such bans. After all, what could be “healthier” than training families to be dependent on the state for homogenized sustenance?

Not surprisingly, some Little Village kids dislike the cafeteria food. Sometimes they throw it in the garbage. “We should bring out own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!” they shout when asked about the policy.

They should do more than chant. They should flout the ban en masse.

They can’t all be arrested for smuggling in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Io’s Vulcanism

Io is one of Jupiter’s four moons that Galileo Galilei discovered. Of those four, it is the nearest to the huge gas giant it revolves around, and it is the most violently and continuously volcanic.

Scientists now think they know why it’s so volcanic.

The tidal influence of Jupiter pulls at it constantly, and its internal solid matter — rock — gets squeezed and churned into magma. That magma layer may be quite large. So, no wonder lava keeps bubbling up and shooting out in the form of volcanic activity.

I bring this up not to extend the scope of Common Sense to astronomy and its subdivisions. Instead, I want to make an analogy.

The bigger government gets, and the closer it reaches into our lives, the more we are squeezed and churned — and so of course we get hotter.

And we will erupt . . . in the form of political activity.

Indeed, the Tea Party movement, and the underlying sentiments of distrust and disgust — as well as the rise of tax-and-spending-limiting initiative campaigns — can be understood as a natural result of letting government get too big. Jupiter-size. And we are too close to it for comfort.

Mavens who want a less volatile political culture might consider Io’s case, and see some good reason to shrink our “Jupiter.” There’s no easy way of moving us all out, into a more extended orbit from politics and bloated government. So shrinking our governing gas giant is key.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Pseudonymous Concerned Pseudo-Citizen

Is it wrong to admire a scoundrel, er, “W. Howard”?

In Everett, Washington, traffic enforcement cameras — so-called “red-light cameras” — have stirred up a lot of people, many airing their ideas or just venting on HeraldNet, the local paper’s website. Among the most persistent contributors to the comments/letters section has been “W. Howard.”

Readers got suspicious. Once he said he was from Lynnwood; in another post he implied he lived in Everett. But no matter what town he was from, he was always for the cameras, which he claimed would prevent pedestrian deaths and save the children.

He thus bucked the stream in the growing controversy over the cameras, which seem so big-brotherish, so totalitarian. Even when one is caught red, er, lighted.

But, hey, learn your lesson. That’s what “W. Howard” said, anyway. Get over your paranoia.

The “paranoid” turned out to be right about W.H., though. The newspaper traced his posts to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., far from the Evergreen State in Scottsdale, Arizona — which just happened to make and sell the cameras under question — all the way back to Bill Kroske, vice president of business development.

That makes Kroske a Saul Alinsky of marketing.

But a scoundrel nonetheless, mimicking a Music Man-style pretense of being “part of the community” just to stir up business.

Thankfully, the scoundrel was revealed as such by a free press and in public debate. The First Amendment rides to the rescue!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Lawlessness, American-Style

When President Obama granted to himself the power to execute American citizens without due process, it wasn’t just Judge Napolitano who became alarmed. Now, citizen activists are honestly nervous, some now thinking that the government is targeting them with assassination.

Sounds paranoid. But, as is often said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Any one instance of paranoia may or may not be warranted, but the fact remains that the government is out to get some people without due process.

We can’t shrug that off with a “Ho, hum.”

Let’s also not ho-hum the FDA raiding a business, guns drawn, for selling raw milk, or a defendant facing “jail time of up to 65 years for helping people play cards over the Internet.”

That last quotation comes from Gene Healy, who chalks up our government’s over-lawed lawlessness to the subject of his recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, explaining that “[y]ou’re not a real president until you fight a metaphorical ‘war’ on a social problem. So, to LBJ’s ‘War on Poverty’ and Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs,’ add Obama’s ‘War on Fun.’”

But the problem, it seems to me, is not merely a “war on fun.” It’s a revamped war on citizens by disregarding limits on government required by the rule of law.

For example, to keep government going without a raised debt ceiling, Timothy Geithner took funds from federal employee pensions.

Crime, if you and I do it.

“Clever statesmanship” if Geithner does it.

Lawlessness, American-style.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Taste Racism

Bigotry and intolerance come in many forms. And they come around again and again. A bizarre New York Times “news story” demonstrates this:

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.

Ah, the last twist of the knife! After all the bloodshed and tyranny, Iraqis celebrate newness with color:

In downtown Baghdad, a police headquarters has been painted two shades of purple: lilac and grape. The central bank, a staid building in many countries, is coated in bright red candy cane stripes.

The reporters list many examples.

Matt Welch, at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run, has choice words for this particular article: “obnoxious” and “contemptible” and “latent ‘taste racism.’”

Put me in Matt’s camp. Aesthetic intolerance like this is ugly.

Contrary to the New York Times, the so-called color-crazed Iraqi people have latched onto a good thing: Property rights. You see, says a quoted expert, their mentality is “that you have to be the owner of your building, and you do what you want with it. But there are no government regulations like in Paris or Rome. It’s anarchy of taste.”

Oh, how shocking.

But is our tyranny of taste in towns and cities in the western world better? We have busybody City Councils and nasty neighbors telling you that you’ve painted your house the wrong shade of brown.

Freedom should be celebrated in many colors, including colors that annoy writers for the New York Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

A Bad Sign

A Centerville, Virginia, man made news when he agreed to his wife’s demand that he stand at a busy intersection wearing a sign emblazoned “I Cheated: This is My Punishment.” His merciful wife ended the punishment after just a couple hours.

In recent years, a few judges have sporadically sought to shame criminals in similar fashion. Back in 2007, several people convicted of shoplifting opted to avoid a longer jail sentence by donning a sign outside the store they had ripped off, which read, “I Am a Thief, I Stole from Wal-Mart.” But Wal-Mart soon opted out of such spectacle.

Now, the California State Senate has passed new legislation to force folks to wear similar signs. But not for committing any crime.

Unless petitioning one’s government is now criminal.

State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier’s Senate Bill 448 seeks to harass and belittle the citizens who circulate petitions by making each wear a sign “on his or her chest” that reads “PAID SIGNATURE GATHERER” or “VOLUNTEER SIGNATURE GATHERER.” The sign would also inform the public which county the petitioner is registered to vote in, or must say, “NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE.” The lettering must be in at least 30-point type.

Sen. DeSaulnier calls this “transparency.” But transparency isn’t necessary for all petitioning, apparently: SB 448 doesn’t require those collecting signatures to put a state legislator on the ballot to wear such a sign.

It applies only to those who dare use the citizen initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

RomneyScare

As a candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney has a number of things going for him. He’s rich, handsome, and has a funny first name.

Perhaps more importantly, he’s neither Donald Trump nor Newt Gingrich.

But still, he does have a niggly problem: His experience. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a medical care reform law that provided the blueprint for the Democrats’ national version, now known (un)popularly as “ObamaCare.”

One of the best reasons to vote “Republican” next year would be to oust the politician who gave us such a bad bill. But, on matters of “health care,” Romney comes off as nothing less than the generic knock-off of Obama.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a critique of Romney’s Massachusetts fix, highlighting its “technocratic” (decidedly not “market-based”) nature, individual mandate, and consequent necessary government mandate to subsidize the uninsurable. Plus, of course, its spectacular lack of cost containment.

The one thing in the reform’s favor is that the ranks of those covered by medical insurance has grown.

But that the state’s pre-reform, utility-like regulation of the insurance industry had priced so many out of the market? That somehow doesn’t get addressed — most certainly not by the program’s defenders or by Romney himself. Or many others. Pity.

Mitt gave a major speech last night, defending his “RomneyCare,” saying that his position “is not going to satisfy everybody.”

How can it satisfy anyone but big-government partisans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy

An Attack on Private Pensions

We all know that America’s socialized pension system is, barring major reforms, doomed to undergo major default. But Americans should be nervous about their private pension funds and accounts, too.

Over at PensionTsunami.com, the folks at California Public Policy Center have their ears to the ground, listening for rumblings of the next market collapses, a huge bubble bursting in multiple forms of pension systems. A link from that site led me to a Bloomberg article, about Ireland’s bizarro response to that country’s downturn.

And the ominous portent it presents.

You see, Ireland’s politicians are so convinced that they have to “do something,” something big, to jumpstart the economy out of its current depression, that they’ve decided to levy a tax against pensions — a special tax designed to raise 470 million euros a year for four years, to pay for a massive new jobs program.

Forget that government jobs programs rarely do much good. Forget that it’s not government investment which accounts for market progress, but private investment, and that people will invest when they feel secure enough about the future to do so.

Forget that robbing people of their savings for the future tends to make investors less secure, less likely to invest — and thus put the economy in a bigger, longer-run fix.

Remember, instead, that to a politician nothing is sacred, nothing is out of bounds for a tax or control.

And that this kind of dangerous public thievery could happen here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Prize Optimist

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has awarded its annual Friedrich Hayek Lecture and Book Prize to Matt Ridley, for his book The Rational Optimist.

I wrote about the book last July, focusing on the title theme. The course of the last few hundred years gives us plenty of reasons for an upbeat long-term view, in part because a few revolutions have occurred over that time, giving us plenty of, well, plenty.

Ridley, a popular science writer, actually takes a longer view than that. He identifies the source of most progress in trade. He starts the book discussing human prehistory, noting the evidence that Cro-Magnon people traded widely, while Neanderthals did not. This probably explains why we descend from the former, not the latter. The traders won out, out-producing (out-surviving) the more “socialistic” folk with bigger brains.

The ability to trade gave our ancestors a huge comparative advantage — a key economic principle that Ridley ably explains.

Ridley and Hayek share a general outlook, so the award is fitting. It’s also fitting to learn of it during “Hayek Week” — what with the new, “definitive” edition of F.A. Hayek’s classic Constitution of Liberty out, receiving reviews in major papers.

Here’s hoping Ridley continues to echo Hayek’s success in the marketplace of ideas. His recent Wall Street Journal op-ed cheering on “the cheapeners and cost-cutters” (rather than the usual ballyhooed inventors) suggests that he will do just that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.