Categories
national politics & policies

With Precedents, Very Small

When you hear the word “unprecedented,” look for precedents.

It used to mean “lacking record of similar events in the past.” Now “unprecedented” seems to mean “very, very bad.”

A few months ago the President of the United States said of the Gulf Coast oil spill that “we’re dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”

Apparently, the Exxon Valdez fiasco wasn’t precedent enough.

But hey: When looking for precedents, look to nature. Oil exists in the Earth’s crust. It occasionally seeps out. Naturally.

How do we know this? I mean, besides the fact that oil seepages were historically recorded, and considered a bane until oil’s industrial utility was discovered, and then considered a boon?

Well, biologists have discovered microbes in the deep sea oil spills, vigilantly eating up oil. And it’s a new species. That is, new to us.

The AP reports how the microbe “thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 41 degrees Fahrenheit,” and goes on to say that one researcher speculates “that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.”

Happily, the bacteria does not appear to cause inordinate oxygen depletion (radically reduced oxygen in the seas could lead to massive death, including vast species extinctions).

Yes, folks: Evidence of a natural order. And something to adapt for our own efforts to clean up from this summer’s biggest government/business partnership mess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Philly Bloggers Beware

Do you live in Philadelphia? Do you blog? Have you earned a penny or more from your blog page? Then don’t click away!

Stick around a minute even if you blog in some other town, because today’s installment is about the lengths to which tax mongers might go to mulct or muzzle you.

The Philadelphia government has begun sending letters demanding dough to bloggers who report even trivial revenue from their blogs. The city wants $300 for “business privilege” licenses. Marilyn Bess is one recipient. Her blog MsPhilly Organic earned about $50 over the last few years.

Sean Barry also got the city’s letter. His own blog, Circle of Fits, has been deluged with some $11 in revenue over the last couple of years. He, too, had dutifully reported the blog-generated boodle on his tax returns.

What did these electron-stained opinion-purveyors do to deserve this special attention? Nothing but fail to read every last jot of the city’s tax code — and every last secret inter-department city government memo about when to go after local bloggers — before setting fingers to keys.

Philadelphia’s pursuit of imaginary scofflaws may amount to just an obtuse lunge for hitherto unextracted funds. But the new protocol is also a weapon that could be selectively deployed, now or later, to harass bloggers who publish inconvenient words. Wouldn’t be the first time in our history that the power to tax has been turned to such ends.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability First Amendment rights

What a Pile

Jarrod West has seen the other side of government. Instead of service with a smile, it’s no service, no smile and a slap at fundamental freedoms. He bought a house in Valley Center, Kansas, only to discover that his new neighborhood floods, regularly. It flooded again this June, long after having been promised help (he said) from the city administrator. So he put up a sign on his lawn, addressing the city:

Fix this problem
That’s what I pay taxes for.
PS. Joel This Means You!

City administrator Joel Pile was not amused. He convinced the city attorney to file defamation charges against West. Pile explained that “individuals have an absolute right to free speech. But however, when they do it and continue to do it within the realms of what we believe is actual malice for the purpose of holding me accountable to the public we believe that crosses a line. . . .”

You gotta love that “but however” segue, wherein “absolute rights” vanish after “a line” has been crossed. Plus, Pile objects to being held “accountable to the public.”

More pertinently, Pile claims that he’s not responsible, claiming that only the city council can rectify West’s flooding. That’s under dispute, and worth debating.

But if any line has been crossed, it’s been crossed by Pile and the city attorney. West ought to be free to speak, and criticize — even unjustly — his local government.

Why? That’s the foundation of a republican form of government, where citizens are in charge, and the employees are “public servants.”

Not rulers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Term Limits “versus” Informed Citizens?

In his commentary “Term Limits Are a Poor Substitute for an Informed Electorate,” blogger Andy Sochor repeats a familiar claim: That formally term-limiting political tenure implies the irrelevance of intelligent involvement in political life, and even discourages our participation in it.

This assessment would have surprised the Romans in their republican days or the Athenians in Greece’s golden age. Both polities imposed stringent term limits on political offices; and in both, citizens (non-slave adult males) actively participated in political life. It was willingness to flout traditional term limits that helped precipitate the collapse of the Roman republic and the rise of the emperors. Augustus, who took over after Julius Caesar was assassinated, ruled uninterruptedly for decades (even if we subtract the years he shared imperial power with Mark Antony).

Term limits in fact encourage citizens to participate in political life by fostering meaningful options at the polling booth. Incumbents enjoy enormous advantages over challengers, especially in district-level elections. These advantages often yield lopsided contests and even contests in which the incumbent faces no challenger at all.

What use is it to a voter to study up on which candidate is best when there’s only one candidate?

No single institutional feature of governance can conquer corruption in high places or ignorance in low places. But from what I’ve seen, voters become discouraged from learning about options when their options are reduced under incumbency-forever politics.

Under term limits, they have greater incentive to inform themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Talking the Non-Talk

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech. It says Congress “shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” etc.

The Founders assumed that individuals might sometimes combine to pursue common ends. Indeed, the First Amendment also safeguards our right of peaceable assembly, often called freedom of association. Obviously, we have this right not only up until the moment we assemble, but also even as we are assembling — even as we constitute a group pursuing a common cause.

In light of this, the gnashing of teeth over the Supreme Court’s expanding — really, recognizing — the right of persons in corporations to exercise freedom of speech seems silly. The rights of an individual, whether to utter a political thought, buy an ad or shop for groceries, do not disappear when he formally cooperates with others. But some persons regard corporations as such as morally suspect, and therefore properly subject to special restrictions.

An example is Bill de Blasio, Public Advocate of New York City. His official website lists non-media corporations that have not promised to gag themselves this campaign season. The website supplies the phone numbers of these companies so you can call to bemoan their offensive belief in reserving their rights.

Blogger Eugene Volokh has a different idea: Call de Blasio’s office to complain about his offensive belief in preemptive self-censorship. The number is (212) 669-7200. You can also send an email from the Public Advocate website.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies

Oppressors Triumphant

Richard Falkenrath is tired of all this civil rights nonsense.

Falkenrath is a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and now works for a consulting firm run by former Homeland Security honcho Michael Chertoff. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Falkenrath explains why a recent ban of the Blackberry by the United Arab Emirates was greeted “with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy” by “law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers” here in America.

The UAE banned the gizmo because its officials could not easily snoop on BlackBerry users. Falkenrath says the ban was justified because the BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, had “refused to modify its information architecture in a way that would enable authorities to intercept the communications of select subscribers.” Which “select subscribers”? Any subscribers the UAE government selected, of course. (RIM later cut a deal with UAE officials to restore service.)

Alas, because of legal obstacles in the U.S., “there remain a number of telecommunication methods that federal agencies cannot readily penetrate.” Falkenrath disparages the “liberal sensibilities” of those who wish to keep private communications private until a proper warrant is issued.

There’s a word for a government that can easily sidestep the rights of everyone in the name of national security: Dictatorship. Would Americans really be more “secure” if, like the United Arab Emirates, we lacked freedom of speech, freedom of association, democracy, and so forth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

He Lies!

A congressman yells “You lie!” during a State of the Union address and everybody blasts him for lapse of manners, failure to respect the office of the presidency. Less objectionable, presumably, is the statement itself. For President Obama and members of Congress do fib, misrepresent, lie: About this, about that, about the other. About a great many things.

We can safely say, I hope, that it is wrong to deliberately misrepresent any proposed policy for the sake of fooling people into supporting that policy.

Yet there are politically interested persons out there, men of good will in their own view, who not only endorse lying to advance “just” political causes but who even publicly defend such lying. Political writer Matt Yglesias doesn’t lie himself, he stresses. It’s the politicians, the activists who should lie. Yglesias has declared, for example, that it’s swell for proponents of government-funded rail to supply “unrealistically optimistic” estimates of ridership in order to secure government funding.

If you habitually support policies that rob people of their wealth and freedom, I guess you might not hesitate to lie about what you’re doing. You might be quite eager to deceive as many people as possible as much as possible. To insist, for example, that Obamacare will “save money” and “reduce the deficit” and “enhance competition.”

Yglesias says it’s okay to fight “dishonesty with dishonesty.”

But if you have truth on your side, you really don’t need to lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Social Security Beyond Retirement Age

Social Security turned 75 last week, and yet I saw few demands to retire the program.

Instead, pundits like Paul Krugman took the occasion to praise the septuagenarian boondoggle.

Krugman started boldly, saying that the program “brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.” Huh? Social Security has indeed brought a steady income to retired Americans, many of whom would have had to rely on their children’s help to live out their last years. But Krugman doesn’t say that. Instead he implies that, before Social Security, old folks led indecent and base lives.

But think about this: Saving for yourself and living on a limited means is indecent? It lacks dignity?

Krugman also talks about the economics of the program, defending, for instance, its dual accounting method in a bizarre way. But mostly he steps carefully around Social Security’s biggest failings, which include the intergenerational swindle, providing bigger rewards-over-contributions to earlier retirees than to current recipients, and, by its nature, will take more from, and give less to, future retirees.

Most shockingly, though, he says this: “Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund.”

Krugman does all but state that the special account has money in it.

It doesn’t. The “trust fund” consists of IOUs from Congress. That’s it.

I guess Social Security is a program too important to Krugman to tell the truth about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary

Rights and Democracy

Democracy and constitutional rights fit together better than some people think.

Most people don’t think of democracy as some hyper-pure system where two wolves and a lamb decide whom to eat for dinner. They envision a constitutional republic that protects fundamental rights while also democratically controlling government’s legitimate decisions and policies.

Increasingly, our representative bodies — from city councils to Congress — have attacked both our rights and our votes.

We need a direct democratic check on government; we need voter initiative and referendum.

Yet, even when citizens vote directly on an issue, the courts remain there to provide an additional check. Recently, Federal Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California’s Prop 8, a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He said the measure violates the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “equal protection of the laws.”

Controversial? Yes. Sensible? Also yes.

Not so sensible, though, have been some criticisms.

My friend Joe Mathews, no initiative enthusiast he, wrote in the Washington Post: “Perhaps the spectacle of a federal judge overruling such a momentous electoral result will force Californians to reckon with the fact that their initiative process is at odds with norms of American civil rights and government.”

But this is about rights, not procedures. The vast majority of states have bans just like California’s. Banning same-sex marriage has been popular with both legislatures and voters.

Politicians can be wrong. Voters can be wrong. Judges can be wrong. But with each checking the others, we will be better off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability local leaders too much government

Ed Koch’s Friends and Enemies

Ed Koch has an enemies list. He also has a friends list.

Now in his mid-80s, the former New York City mayor has emerged from political retirement to take arms against the sea of troubles flowing from the dysfunctional New York State legislature.

A few months back, the octogenarian citizen activist founded New York Uprising, which asks lawmakers to sign three pledges committing themselves to major political reform. One pledge focuses on toughening up ethics regulations, another on reforming the state’s budget process, a third on putting an end to gerrymandering.

Any state lawmaker who fails to sign is, to Koch, a “bum”: “Throw the bums out!” is the electoral fate for non-signers and pledge-breakers that he enjoins upon New Yorkers. Reviewing the details of the pledges, I’m not sure that if I were a candidate I’d endorse every provision myself. Maybe I’d sign two out of the three pledges, or something. And I wish Koch were promoting state legislative term limits and voter initiative and referendum as well.

So far, 91 lawmakers have signed on, 210 have declined. But the campaign has been getting decent coverage in the media, including a recent article in the New York Times. One thin-skinned assemblywoman threatened to sue in response to being called an “enemy of reform,” which is the kind of publicity you can’t buy.

Reforming Albany was never going to be easy. But the iron is hot. Good luck, Mr. Koch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.