Categories
Ninth Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Two Words to Know and Share

Two old words, newly relevant: Federalism and nullification.

Last Sunday, on Townhall.com, I noted ten state ballot measures to watch. Third on my list was Colorado’s Amendment 63:

If swing-state voters in Colorado join Missouri voters, who in August enacted a state measure protecting citizens from being forced to purchase health insurance through the “Obamacare” mandate, it will go a long way in strengthening GOP backbone to repeal the mandate should Republicans regain control of Congress.

The surface issue is your right to contract, freely, with medical professionals. Or not.

Below the surface lie the doctrines of enumerated powers, individual rights, and state prerogatives. After all, the logic runs, the Constitution — a deal among the states — grants the federal government no power to regulate medicine. And nullification, one of Thomas Jefferson’s favored notions, promises to serve as an actual, effective check on out-of-control federal politicians.

A similar storm brews in California, where the state’s Regulate, Control and Tax Marijuana Act goes way beyond a narrow reading of “medical marijuana.” Flouting federal (and probably unconstitutional) law, this citizen initiative seeks to legalize the plant for recreational use.

At issue, really, is not drugs or medicine, but who’s in control: Distant and privileged politicians and bureaucrats, or the citizens of the states.

On the side of the citizens is the founder’s theory of federalism, with its corollary that the states should serve as experiments in legal innovation.

We sure need innovation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Swooning Over Citizen Control?

D. Dowd Muska attacks conservatives and libertarians for so strongly supporting voter initiative and referendum. From the august pages of the Hartford Business Journal, he writes that we’re “hopped up on the false notion that elected officials respond not to voters but the dictates of liberal elites.” It all started, he says, after passage of Proposition 13 in California, back in 1978: “America’s right swooned.”

Well, I plead guilty — for both swooning and then being “hopped up” on citizen access to a path to check their elected know-it-alls. Prop 13 not only saved Californians from losing their homes to exploding property taxes, it also touched off a nationwide revolt. Within two years, 43 states passed property tax relief and another 15 states (including California) enacted income tax cuts.

But Muska warns initiatives “have a mixed record.” He points to a number of measures, some initiatives and others placed on the ballot by legislators, which have expanded government spending or regulation.

Talk about astounding revelations! Of course voters aren’t going to always be right. They won’t agree with Muska 100 percent of the time. They won’t even acquiesce to my superior wisdom and vote my way every time.

Still, it seems to me that any decision legitimately the province of our government ought to be open to democratic oversight by citizens.

Others, like Muska, prefer that voters choose between candidates Tweedledum and Tweedledee — and then to butt out.

Real options work better. For everyone but insiders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Demolition Time!

The socialist party of Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, expects to lose seats in the next election. El Presidente pled with voters to not forsake the “revolution.” He dubbed the opposition — which last time around boycotted the elections — “Operation Demolition.”

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

Surely what we hope for in an opposition party, in South America or El Norte, is, in everything but the incendiary, literal sense, demolition.

Of expansive, intrusive, know-it-all government.

“Big” and “intrusive” are just two words that characterize what the GOP brought to America during its heyday. Others? Massive spending, a new medical “entitlement,” growing public debt, and — as a sort of crackpot coda — bailouts for rich people.

Same for united government under the Democrats: More uncontrolled spending, an even more massively expensive medical “entitlement,” ballooning public debt — and, as a variation on a theme — more bailouts yet.

Massive government with no limits. But we’re told we can’t call it socialism!

Reports from Venezuela say the opposition has shifted from hatred of Hugo to issues such as rising crime and cost of living. In America, Tea Party folks have gained most ground when they attack spendthrift and socialistic policies rather than demonizing President Obama.

In both cases, ordinary people’s everyday concerns — taxes, debt, inflation, thuggery, and all the other things that go along with socialist-leaning policies — trump the cult/anti-cult of personality as well as political theory, expressed by this ism or that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture too much government

Sir Terry Confesses to Forge-ry

Recently, two dreams came true for comic fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Yet, the final result was comic reality . . . Great Britain-style.

First dream? He was knighted by the Queen.

Second? He forged a magic sword.

Well, he mined ore off his estate, and, with the help of a friend, smelted it using a hand-made kiln heated with sheep dung. Pratchett even added in meteoric iron to make his sword. The heavens-sent ore is called “thunderbolt iron.” Yes, that’s the “magic part.”

But perhaps more magical, really, is Pratchett’s personal hankering for a sword. Swords are out of fashion these days. But if you dream up Discworld, Pratchett’s comic magic domain, it makes some sense.

There is a sad tag to this story. Pratchett suffers from Alzheimer’s. That little tidbit, a terrible disease, lends a sort of strange discord that takes over the tale, if you let it.

Of course, there’s the ever-present political element. One is not allowed to carry around large knives, daggers and swords in England.

Pratchett says that it it annoys him that “knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords. That would be a knife crime.”

Normally, I’d agree with him. Knights should be able to carry around large blades. So should regular folk. It’s the criminals, who keep them hidden, who are the problem. Not the citizenry. And certainly not knights.

Still, should dementia hit him full, perhaps it’s just as well he’s hid his sword.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

The Bad Lesson

If you favor hiding evidence and quashing open inquiry with regard to public questions of the most urgent interest, what does that say about your philosophy of education?

Teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles have been in a tizzy because the Los Angeles Times, a liberal bastion, published a detailed series casting controversial light on the quality of public school education in the city. The articles include a database of scores assessing — gasp! — the effectiveness of teachers.

This is a disturbing development for union reps demanding ever greater pay and job security for even lackluster instructors. To be sure, it’s not the negative evaluations that most intensely disturb them, nor even any debatable aspect of the methodologies used to assess effectiveness. It’s that the data has been publicized and discussed at all. The Times should not have published the database, complained one union official, Randi Weingarten. Another union honcho, A.J. Duffy, even called for a boycott of the paper, as if it were morally turpitudinous to give parents even an inkling of teacher performance.

Slate.com contributor Jack Shafer concludes that the Times has “done its readers a great service” by exposing Duffy and his cronies as “enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable — essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools.”

Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism too much government

A Tour of Over-Regulation

Want a measure of the regulatory state run amok?

Recently in the Washington Post, Robert McNamara of the Institute for Justice informed us that “In the 1950s, only about one out of every 20 Americans needed a license to pursue the occupation of their choice. Today, that number is one out of every three.”

Wow. A lot more hoops to jump through to get a job or start a business.

Want to add insult to injury? The actual regulation McNamara was writing about makes it illegal — punishable by three months in the local jail in our nation’s capital — to “describe . . . any place or point of interest in the District to any person” as part of a tour without first getting a license.

And the license process is no picnic, either. Sure, this past summer the city did repeal the rule requiring a doctor’s certification that the aspiring guide is not a drunkard. But there remain plenty of stupid regulations, including new ones that require guides to be proficient in English. And yes, that applies even to guides who talk to those benighted folk who speak foreign languages.

Applicants must also pass a test on their knowledge of “various facets of Washington life, including architecture, history and regulations.”

Tour guides must be expert in “regulations.”

Even the Washington Post headlined its editorial, “Tour de farce,” suggesting that a system of “voluntary certification” would work better than big government rules.

Yes. That’s right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Ad Hominem Bias

Can you discredit an opponent’s opinion by demonizing the opponent or his or her supporters, rather than addressing the opinion itself?

The President recently spoke on the horrors of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, in which evil corporations retained (or regained) a right to support political speech. Obama hates the decision, but insists he’s no censor. What he really wants is to force supporters of political messages to disclose the financing used to promote said speech. Who it comes from.

The Disclose Act, currently working its way through Congress, aims to do just that.

The odd thing, as former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith relates, is that the legislation is, well, redundant. Corporations that spend money on political speech during final election blitz-time are now required to report their funding sources.

So why pile on?

Perhaps the President and his confrères see disclosure as less about information and more about blocking the message by taking up half of a 30-second television spot with the names of various corporate executives.

But the stated rationale bespeaks of an underlying belief that arguments for or against something stand or fall depending on who supports them. It’s the argument ad hominem all over again. Someone for policy X? If A or B supports it, that’s bad; if C or D supports it, that’s good.

And that’s a fallacy. And evidence of a certain simple-minded partisanship, giving voters less credit than they are due.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access general freedom

Sore Winners?

In 2009, Washington state voters considered a ballot question, Referendum 71, on whether to uphold a new law expanding domestic partnership rights. The referendum was the work of opponents of the controversial law; supporters, obviously, would have been happy to see it enacted without challenge.

Some 138,000 Washingtonians signed the petition to post the question. But they failed to prevent the law from taking effect: It was approved last November 53 percent to 47 percent.

Now there’s controversy about whether publicly releasing the names of petition signers can be justified in the name of transparency.

Of course, this is transparency not of government — allowing civic monitoring of power and purse — but of citizens’ political acts. Those eager to see the names mostly claim they want to make sure the signatures are valid. But with 47 percent of the electorate having voted No, is there really any doubt that opposition was widespread enough to yield the required number of petition signatures?

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that petition signers enjoy no First-Amendment-implied right to anonymity. But the court suggested that disclosure of the petitioners’ names might be blocked on the grounds of a plausible threat that signers would be harassed, as some foes of the law have been already.

So a group called Protect Marriage Washington has secured a court order to keep the names sealed until it can argue in court that intimidation of petition signers is indeed likely.

Stay tuned.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Academically Free to Leave

One goal of academic freedom is to protect inquiry from the guardians of orthodoxy, the machinations of those who resent any articulation of an alternate view.

Administrators at UCLA don’t seem to be fans of this goal.

James Enstrom has been at UCLA for 36 years. He lacks tenure, and his contract is not being renewed because, according to the school, his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department.

The professor was booted soon after coauthoring a piece at Forbes.com, disputing the relationship between diesel soot and deaths in California. According to Enstrom, in 1998 regulators “declared diesel exhaust a toxic substance based on studying truckers and railroaders from back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when emissions were much higher. They never factored in . . . that a very high percentage of truckers are also smokers . . . yet they were using this research to declare that all diesel exhaust is a toxic substance.”

Even colleagues who disagree with Enstrom worry about the implications for academic freedom. Michael Siegel at Boston University notes that the mission of Enstrom’s department is “to study the impacts of the environment on human health, and that’s exactly what Enstrom does. . . .”

The department apparently objects not to “the nature of his research but the nature of his findings.”

UCLA says chucking Enstrom has nothing to do with his conclusions, but won’t comment further. If there’s nothing to hide, why are they hiding it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture incumbents political challengers

Establishment Out

Another one bites the dust: Nine-term Congressman Mike Castle was defeated in Delaware’s primary by Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell.

Weeks ago, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski was bested in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, also Tea Party-supported. Before that Utah Senator Robert Bennett lost his re-nomination bid.

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, who has actively assisted the insurgent Republicans, clarifies: “The GOP establishment is out.”

Media folks love talking about the angry mood throughout the land. The bad economic times have made people upset, they say — the supposition being that this rage is irrational, aimed indiscriminately at those in government, no matter how well they may have performed.

But the mainstream media hypothesis is wrong on both counts. First, the anger at career politicians isn’t new. Four years ago, long before the recession, Alaska GOP voters tossed out their incumbent governor, one Frank Murkowski, in favor of Sarah Palin. Voters have long disapproved of the way career politicians have wrecked our country. At some point, “enough” has morphed to “too much,” hence the current large-scale revolt.

Further, voters are clearly discriminating, not taking their ire out on all incumbents, just those they feel have not represented their interests.

That’s why we have elections: to hold elected officials accountable.

We ought not bemoan that citizens are boiling mad, but that it takes so much bad behavior by politicians to raise this righteous fury.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.