Categories
Second Amendment rights

Yet He Broke No Laws

David Codrea, a gun rights columnist for Examiner.com, was alerted by a reader to the plight of Brian Aitkin, in a New Jersey jail “for seven years for owning legal guns.”

Codrea looked into it. And, unfortunately, it seems that Mr. Aitkin has indeed been incarcerated for the crime of . . . well, of driving from one place to another in a perfectly legal manner.

Aitkin’s real sin? Bad luck. The bad luck to be stopped on the road by police ignorant of or indifferent to the law. And the bad luck to have a judge knowledgeable about but indifferent to the law, and unwilling to tell jurors about it.

Also unluckily, his jurors reluctantly went along with the vicious charade even though they weren’t getting straight answers.

Atkins was moving from Colorado to New Jersey with firearms in his possession, and which he had purchased after passing relevant background checks. The firearms were disassembled and locked in his trunk in accordance with New Jersey state law. Atkins had even contacted the New Jersey State Police to make sure of his compliance. Alas, as reported at BrianDAtkin.com, “The jury returned from deliberation three times practically begging the judge to tell them the law that protects an individual’s rights to transport firearms — [but] the judge outright refused to tell them!”

There’s much more to learn about this disturbing case. Codrea has the links. And no corrupt judge can stop you from clicking on them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Ad Ad Hominem!

Early reports and predictions about political spending in this election cycle claim there’s a 30 percent increase over the last mid-term election. One figure hazards that this campaign will total out to around $3.7 billion. Spending on ads is said to be up 75 percent. Traditional spending via parties and party committees shows Democrats to have an edge over Republicans by about $20 million. Republicans are making up for it, we’re told, by newly re-legalized “outside” spending.

A CBS News report relates the conventional wisdom about this. Watchdog groups “say more ads and information can be good — but voters can’t judge their credibility when donors are secret.” One expert decries this, saying “We just cannot know and we’ll never know who is ponying up the money.”

I say, “so what?”

Information cannot be judged good or bad, nor facts or argument dismissed, depending on where the money comes from to distribute the information and argumentation. The classic fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem judges conclusions by the character of the speaker rather than the truth of the facts or the validity of arguments.

Its dominance in politics is a curse, not a blessing.

Demands for full transparency of citizen activism bolster the nasty politics of a logical fallacy. When we don’t know the economic provenance of an ad or a slogan or an argument, we’ll just have to decide the issue on its own merits.

Horrors!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Big Bucks to Promote Term Limits

Maybe you’re like me — you’d gladly ballyhoo term limits even if you don’t get handed $10,000. But if you want the ten grand, too, here’s your chance: An outfit called Our Generation is holding a video contest to find the best 60-second ad promoting congressional term limits. The deadline is December 1, 2010. Contest guidelines are posted at aboutourgeneration.org.

Here’s an idea you can use with my compliments: Attack the fallacies. Certain clichés about term limits get repeated so reflexively they sound more like mantras than arguments. Your ad could starkly juxtapose fallacy with reality, highlighting the silliness of the claims.

One such mantra is “We already have term limits, they’re called elections.”

Of course, elections too frequently prove hollow affairs, with incumbents standing for re-election, and standing again for re-election. Especially at district level, incumbents often suffer no major-party opposition or only nominal opposition. Your video could show clips of politicians asserting “We already have term limits, they’re called elections,” alternating with clips of reporters announcing that Congressman So-and-so is running unopposed. Back and forth, back and forth, faster, faster. You could probably squeeze at least 20 into a 60-second ad. Would take some research to get the clips, but the supply is endless.

We also hear a lot about how term limits eject experience. Experience doing what? What our Congress has been up to the last few years? Well, you take it from there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

The Tyranny Waiver

Democrats filled their 2000-page healthcare bill — rammed into law despite growing and vehement public opposition — with obscure but costly mandates. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confessed, Congress would have to pass the bill before we could learn what they were. After all, who, including congressmen, had time to actually read and assimilate the monstrosity?

Choke down first, chew later. That was the ordained (if unhealthy) order of things.

Now we suffer the consequences — at least insofar as we can’t wheedle special exemptions, loopholes, workarounds.

One provision of the new law boosts the minimum annual benefit that companies must include in low-cost medical insurance plans given to low-wage employees. Many large employers contend that the new costs would force them to drop many employees from their insurance rolls. (So much for the Obama lie that “if you like the insurance coverage you have now,” you’d be able to keep it under Obamacare.)

Federal officials have blinked on this issue. The Department of Health and Human Services and Disservices is now granting waivers to many organizations so that their workers can retain coverage. McDonald’s and a New York teachers union are among the employers receiving the waivers.

This is such a great idea, let’s expand it! Give waivers to everybody for all the tyrannical provisions of the new law.

What the heck, distribute waivers for every single tyrannical mandate that governments have ever imposed on us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture U.S. Constitution

Potted Presence

The State of the Union Address has become political, said Justice Alito last week, so he will follow the lead of Justices Scalia and Thomas and not sit in Congress while the Commander in Chief intones his annual duty.

Last January, Alito objected to President Obama’s little stab at the Supreme Court when the prez decried the Citizens United decision. Obama said that the Court had “reversed a century of law” and would “open the floodgates of special interests . . . to spend without limit in our elections.” Alito mouthed the words “NOT TRUE.”

And Alito was right. The decision certainly did not overturn a century of law. Not even a teensy bit . . . Well, maybe a teensy-weensy bit, if we count Progressive’s wishes to run everything by bureaucracy and “experts.” (It’s worth remembering that Progressives had a populist wing, supporting initiative and referendum a century ago.) The Citizens United case was about the unfortunately successful censorship of a movie. About a Democrat, Hillary Clinton.

So you can see why politicians — especially, these days, some Democrats — might oppose free speech around election time. The better to control the opposition.

No wonder Alito won’t “be there in January.” He doesn’t want to serve as a “potted plant.”

Congress, of course, takes occasion to seem “potted” in another sense. Amidst congressional applause and shouts, there’s scant room for reason.

Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, merely sent his report to Congress. Obama should, too — and save Alito RSVP duty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

How They Did It

For 70 days, 33 Chilean miners were trapped a half mile below the surface of the earth —  “swallowed into the bowels of hell,” as one miner says — waiting for rescue. A billion viewers watched as they finally began to emerge to safety.

A fierce determination at both ends of the slowly constructed shaft aided the rescue. The miners had to outlast the first few weeks of despair, when they had scant information about the rescue mission. Throughout the ordeal they maintained the mine and their own morale. The rescuers had to figure out how to first get supplies to the miners and then create the narrow but stable shaft through which the miners could escape, as all 33 of them did.

A less-noted aspect of the story is that the rescue could not have happened without technology that did not exist even a quarter century ago. This included everything from the powerful drill bit donated by Center Rock Inc., a Pennsylvania company, to copper-fiber socks that consumed foot bacteria. But especially that drill bit.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger observes that Center Rock’s drill bit exists because of the firm’s pursuit of profit in an economy where pursuit of profit is possible. It exists because of what Henninger calls the “profit=innovation” dynamic. Indeed, capitalism saves lives every day; markets make our lives better and sometimes makes our lives possible.

You don’t have to mine very hard to get a moral out of the story.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Trading One Right for Another

Trades are not unheard of in politics, but somehow they rarely exhibit the up-front honesty and clarity of the trades that make up the bulk of our economic life. When I go to the super-market, or the record store, or Wal-Mart, I pretty much know what I’m getting and what I’m giving up.

Not so clear, though, in politics.

Take Arizona’s “Hunting and Fishing Amendment,” Proposition 109 on this November’s ballot. Much has been made of the first element of the ballot’s title, establishing a “constitutional right” to hunt and fish. Outdoorsmen love it.

But a second element gives to the state legislature “Exclusive authority” to regulate hunting and fishing, which may grant regulatory power to various wildlife commissions.

It basically disallows Arizona’s citizens from future influence through the initiative and referendum. That’s what citizens trade away for the first part. Citizens get a “right” to hunt and fish “lawfully,” a right they already have, but give up their current rights to influence what that “lawfully” means, via the ballot.

Prop 109 also declares that hunting and fishing would be the preferred means of controlling wildlife, and it says that “no law shall be enacted” that “unreasonably restricts” hunting and fishing, etc.

Of course, constitutions can say “no law” all they want. History shows legislatures don’t abide by that prohibition. Neither do courts.

Just read the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and consider . . . and cringe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Brains in Crisis

The Atlantic offers a fascinating portrait of the Honorable Ron Paul in “The Tea Party’s Brain.” Its blurb neatly explains the subject’s significance: “One way to measure the surprising . . . rise of the Tea Party is to chart the relative position of Ron Paul, who has never flinched from his beliefs. He’s not alone anymore.”

But I want to focus not on writer Joshua Green’s take on Ron Paul but on Austrian economics — which Rep. Paul, almost alone in Washington, supports — and economic policy regarding crises:

The Austrian school . . . had fallen away after the Great Depression, which it claimed was caused by an expansion of the money supply and could be met only with chastened submission as the market corrected itself. Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, offered similar counsel, famously urging Hoover to “liquidate” and “purge the rottenness out of the system.” But this failed to stop the catastrophe.

From Green’s statement you would think that President Hoover had accepted Mellon’s advice. He had not. Hoover often took pride in the fact that he did all sorts of things to prevent prices from coming down — from “liquidating” — after 1929.

Green followed the above-quoted passage with a plug for strong, activist government to pry the economy out of crisis. In light of the facts? Not so persuasive.

A truth for Tea Party brains: The Great Depression featured a spendthrift, meddling Republican prez followed by an even more spendthrift, more meddlesome Democrat.

A pattern history now repeats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling

Diminishing Diminishing Returns

In late September, President Obama announced a goal. Noting that American students average out in the middle of the pack, vis-à-vis students worldwide, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), he pledged to recruit 10,000 STEM teachers over the next two years.

This was put in proper context by Andrew J. Coulson, on a Cato website. He displayed two graphs. One compared employment rates versus enrollment rates in public schools. The enrollment rates have slightly risen since 1970, while the employment rate has skyrocketed. In the other graph, the inflation-adjusted cost of a K-12 education contrasts with achievement scores for reading, math, and science during the same period. The costs skyrocketed, while the test scores had barely moved.

Perhaps students should be encouraged to apply a little math to this.

From economics we have the concept of diminishing returns. For each expenditure of input, smaller increases are expected of output. So, if we’ve been increasing teachers and administrators during this period, but the scores have neither diminished nor increased, this suggests a number of things, chief being that, well, expenditure of funds on public schooling is not the chief variable in improving knowledge or achievement. Not now, anyway.

So why would we increase expenditures?

Could the expected returns be political rather than academic? Could President Obama care more about teacher union support, say, than what kids actually learn?

Far be it for me to suggest this. Let the data alone do that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

The Election Addiction Fiction

Poor Willie Brown. Ever since California slapped term limits on state lawmakers, Brown’s lacked a permanent perch in power.

For many, Brown’s 15-year reign as speaker serves as Exhibit A in the case against unlimited terms. Brown himself bragged that he had been the “Ayatollah” of the assembly — though later he seemed to repent of his support for untrammeled spending in that role.

He next lathered patronage as mayor of San Francisco. But this was another term-limited post, so he couldn’t barnacle himself there either.

It still bothers Brown how voters limited tenures. He’s always opposed term limits. And now the papers quote him telling a Republican political club that term limits are a “disaster. . . . We’ve allowed ourselves to become addicted to elections.” (You guessed it: He disdains citizen initiative rights too.)

Elections, an addiction? Like heroin? Of course, we’re “addicted” to everything these days. Obama says we’re “addicted” to oil (as did Bush). We’d all admit a compulsion to consume food and oxygen.

To learn what weaning ourselves off term limits might be like, check Ballotpedia, which reports that even in this roiling political year, only 19 incumbent state senators out of 1,167 running for re-election lost their primaries. Less than 40 percent — the exact number is 459 — even faced an opponent. In general elections, incumbent re-election rates typically exceed 90 percent, even in tough political times.

That’s fine with politicians like Brown, who always crave another fix — of political power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.