In a national referendum, the Swiss just voted to ban the construction of any new minarets in the country.
Minarets are the onion-shaped crowned spires of Islamic mosques, from which Muslims are called to prayer five times each day.
At MarginalRevolution.com, economist Tyler Cowen’s first thought on the Swiss vote was, “Sooner or later an open referendum process will get even a very smart, well-educated country into trouble.”
Cowen doesn’t elaborate on what he means by “open.” But he does raise an important distinction between freedom and democracy.
I’m a huge fan of voter initiative and referendum, but a bigger fan of freedom of religion. Freedom for the individual must come first — no dictator has a right to deny it.
Nor does a revolutionary tribunal.
Neither does the Congress or a state legislature or city council. Or even a solid majority of voters in a referendum.
But Cowen misses something, too. The problem in Switzerland isn’t really their initiative and referendum. Legislators make mistakes, too . . . as do, of course, authoritarian regimes. We generally have far less to fear from government under such voter control.
In fact, though I deplore this vote, the ability of Swiss citizens to directly check the power of their government has helped make it one of the best places in the world to live. That is, one of the freest.
I’m not saying it will be easy. It won’t be easy. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
That’s why I applaud U.S. Senator Jim DeMint for introducing a constitutional amendment to term limit Congress. Three two-year terms maximum for House members, two six-year terms for senators. Says DeMint, “term limits are not enough, of course. . . . But term limits are a good start. Because if we really want reform, we all know it’s not enough just to change the congressmen — we have to change Congress itself.”
DeMint knows that most congressmen are not eager to restrict their own power. But he’s not giving up.
Should he? In his Best of the Web e-letter, James Taranto asks whether DeMint’s proposed amendment will “include a provision stipulating that any senator who reaches the limit automatically becomes president? Because that’s the only way that two thirds of them would ever vote for it.”
Maybe, James. It is easy to be negative about the prospects for implementing major political reforms. One will be right most of the time. But I say it’s better to be an optimistic warrior pushing for the hard-to-accomplish but important-to-accomplish reform. Someday we’ll find the tipping point; someday we’ll see our “representatives” realize they have no choice but to accept term limits.
As a candidate, Barack Obama promised that he would not raise taxes on any but the wealthiest Americans. Make less than $250,000 a year? You’re home free under his administration.
I mean, not counting current federal levies.
But President Obama has all the ambitions of a big-spending liberal. And “big-spending” translates pretty quickly into “big-taxing.”
One of these projects is a massive new federal takeover of the health care industry, in the name of “universal coverage.” New taxes would be imposed. For example, anyone who refuses to sign up for health insurance in the new regime would be slammed with a hefty tax.
Obama denies that such taxes would in fact be taxes. He even rebuked George Stephanopoulos for citing a dictionary definition of the word. Leaping to the president’s defense, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer agreed that the new taxes would not be taxes. “[W]hat we are saying,” Hoyer said, “is everybody will contribute . . . to making sure that health care options are available to all of our citizens.”
Try dispute that. It’s like arguing with fog. Columnist Jacob Sullum quotes Hoyer and observes, “So we’re talking about a legally required contribution that will be used to provide a government-arranged benefit. If only there were a shorter way of expressing that concept.”
Well, in searching for le mot juste, don’t tax yourself.
California voters love their state’s process for placing initiatives and referendums on the ballot.
Legislators? Most take a much dimmer view. This year they’ve been blaming voters for spending the state into bankruptcy through the initiative. Additionally — and please hold your laughter — they claim that initiatives have tied the hands of legislators who would otherwise have better managed the state’s finances.
Enter Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies. At a recent public hearing of the Senate and Assembly Select Committees on Improving State Government, Stern told legislators, “Most of the ballot-box budgeting has come from you.”
Stern was referring to a Center study that looked at all ballot measures over the last 20 years that required additional spending. Stern found that three out of four measures costing money were put on the ballot by legislators, not through the citizen initiative. He also found that the legislature’s own ballot measures cost the state $10 billion, while citizen initiatives cost only $2 billion.
Of course, an even bigger issue is the wild spending spree by California politicians with no ballot box input from voters at all. While state tax revenues have increased a whopping 167 percent over the last two decades, government spending shot up 181 percent.
Voters aren’t perfect, but anyone with a lick of common sense knows the answer to controlling government spending isn’t to free the politicians from voter restraint.
I have a very controversial position today. Sorry if you disagree, but I feel I must speak out.
Here goes: In my view, it is okay for boy scouts to do good deeds.
There, I said it. Sorry if you find my view repugnant. Eh? What’s that? You agree with me? Great! I always prefer it when you and I are on the same page.
Sadly, though, the president of a Pennsylvania chapter of the Service Employees International Union does not agree. Nick Balzano is upset that 17-year-old Kevin Anderson cleared a path so people could better enjoy a river. Kevin is pursuing an Eagle Scout badge and did the work voluntarily.
Balzano threatened the city of Allentown because it had recently laid off some union workers. He thinks it’s a sin to not only reduce labor costs but also get some work done for free. I think Balzano should try for a couple merit badges of his own. Maybe a logic badge and a common sense badge, for starters.
Turns out a lot of people agree with me. Balzano has resigned in the wake of a firestorm of protest . . . without learning a thing, apparently. He insists he’s got nothing against boy scouts. He’s just “trying to protect my jobs.”
Let’s hope his union never gets a city contract to help little old ladies cross the street.
Hackers have released onto the Internet confidential emails of the CRU climatologists largely responsible for the “global warming” conclusions in the famous report by the International Panel on Climate Change, known as the IPCC.
The emails include ugly stuff, like researchers’ fantasies about beating up catastrophe skeptics. They also include the tricks catastrophists used to cook up their numbers.
In particular, scientists reported temperatures in the Medieval Warming Period as cooler than they were, and more recent cooling trends as warmer. Anthropogenic global warming catastrophists have engaged in a massive public fraud.
Now, you might not bat an eye were you to learn that economists associated with, say, our recent bailouts, had been fudging numbers. Trillions of dollars to spend!
But when climate scientists get caught lying — as well as conspiring to keep their basic data secret, and hijacking the peer review process — it’s hard not to feel a bit abused. Natural scientists are supposed to be above this.
Public, open criticism is the hallmark of science. Climate researchers who stonewalled to keep their actual data hidden from critics were scuttling science.
Quite a theory: No law is unfair if only that law is being followed.
According to an election board attorney in Howard County, Maryland, tossing 80 percent of the signatures on a voters’ petition does not add up to a “right-to-vote case” at all. Gerald Richman says the board merely “[carried] out the dictates of the law.” He denies that “fundamental fairness is an issue.”
The proposed referendum aimed to stop a rezoning in Howard Country permitting the building of larger grocery stores. I’m skeptical of zoning as an instrument to protect citizens and their property, so if I resided in Howard County, I would not likely vote Yes.
But as things stand now, I also would not be allowed to vote No.
Two months after the election board okayed the first batch of signatures, the board turned on a dime and began massively nullifying signatures, essentially killing petition rights unless voters can win them back in court.
Were the tossed signatures deemed fraudulent? No. The only “problem” is trivial variations between how voters signed their names on the petition and how their names are registered. Things like omitting a middle initial. An attorney for the residents notes that under such restrictive requirements, the signatures of Ben Franklin and John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence could not have been counted.
That notion of fairness is one King George would’ve been mad for.
The old guns in the major media marshal their resources as subtly as they can to turn minds their direction, usually leftward. That’s so obvious that I don’t talk about it much.
My regular listeners know that this is not a major obsession of mine. I comment on media bias only now and then. But when a spectacular, or just funny, example comes up, I do have to recognize it, right?
To not comment would be to ignore the wild donkey in the room.
The Associated Press fact checked the new Sarah Palin memoir, Going Rogue, finding a few errors, some self-serving spin. Mrs. Palin provocatively noted that the AP had devoted eleven reporters to attack her book, when they could have been fact checking health care reform costs, for instance.
She got that fact right — the AP did hire eleven “fact-checkers.” In contrast, the AP set not one reporter to check Joe Biden’s book, even after he received the VP slot nomination last year.
Yes, the Palin book merited AP coverage eleven-to-zero over the Biden book.
Liberal bias, anyone?
In the AP’s defense, one could say that Palin is good story . . . Biden? Not so much. True enough. But eleven-to-one better copy?
Well, maybe. But the AP fact-checked her book, and not books by the Clintons or Barack Obama. The press’s Palin obsession looks a little indecent.
What a difference a year makes. As I sit down to my Thanksgiving Day feast, that’s what I’m thinking.
And I certainly know I have a whole lot to be thankful for.
Let me start by thanking you. For caring about freedom and justice. For your critical support for this Common Sense program and for the Citizens in Charge Foundation — the nation’s only organization with the express purpose of defending the initiative and referendum rights of Americans.
Last year at this time, I still faced Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s politically-motivated persecution. I’ll never forget seeing the fear in the face of my then 9-year old daughter as I left for a trip to Oklahoma. That certainly wasn’t the America we know and love.
This year, as we enjoy Thanksgiving and prepare for the Christmas season, Lillie is wondering which Nintendo DS game she might score from Santa — not about her father being imprisoned 1,000 miles away from home.
As you know, the charges — that had threatened me with ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine —were dismissed many months ago. We won. The court even ordered that the indictment itself be expunged from the record.
Yet, without the good work of so many people, from across the country and across the political spectrum, folks who helped me pay for my legal defense and who roared their disapproval online, on the airwaves, in print and in person to raise public awareness to the story of the Oklahoma-3, the ugly cloud of an indictment would likely still be hanging over our heads.
Oh, sure, we would have ultimately prevailed in court. We were innocent. But with Oklahoma’s Attorney General delaying at every turn, it might have taken several more years to ever get our day in court.
What made the difference? The AG had felt the sting of public attention. Oklahomans — and Americans everywhere — successfully focused their revulsion on him, and against his attack on us and on initiative rights.
Thank you for coming to the rescue. Thanks for helping protect my rights, as well as the rights of Oklahomans — and yours.
This year saw more than freedom and vindication for the Oklahoma-3. We gained a bigger victory, too: Dramatic reform for Oklahoma’s petition process. First, the state’s residency law was struck down in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment. Then, three important bills were passed through the state legislature to open up the nation’s toughest petition process.
For the first time in decades, a legislature enacted real reforms to enable citizens to use the initiative process, instead of passing restrictions designed to cripple its use.
How did it happen?
The prosecution of the Oklahoma 3 certainly galvanized a number of activists. But had there not been aggressive efforts to organize and mobilize supporters, the energy and urgency created by such an outrageous prosecution would have dissipated.
In November of last year, Citizens in Charge Foundation helped Oklahomans for Initiative Rights put on a Saturday forum in Oklahoma City to discuss Oklahoma’s initiative process and ways to reform it. Hoping to fill a meeting room for 35 to 40 people, over 100 people overflowed the room.
We then worked with two legislators, Sen. Randy Brogdon (now running for governor) and Rep. Randy Terrill, to help them propose legislation to (a) increase the time citizens have to gather petitions, (b) reform the process so that challenges to petition language come before and not after all the signatures are collected, and (c) lower the state’s onerous petition requirement.
A number of great Oklahomans and super organizations, most notably Oklahomans for Responsible Government and Oklahomans for Initiative Rights, came together to push these bills. They lobbied day after day in the capitol as well as launching a 70-city tour of the state to mobilize grassroots support.
Not surprising, hard work leads to success. But best of all, our Citizens in Charge campaign has spread far beyond Oklahoma — it’s all across the country.
We helped pass legislation in Virginia to protect petitioners from arbitrary judicial abuse, we worked to form broad-based coalitions in 14 states that in turn were able to stop a number of anti-initiative bills and, just weeks ago, I traveled throughout California to begin organizing groups there. Across the country, we face concerted attacks against the right of citizens to be heard.
The old saying is true: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Thank you for being a good person doing so much to help put citizens in charge. Where we get organized, when we stand up to fight, we citizens are able to battle back and win against entrenched special interests and power politics.
At Citizens in Charge Foundation, we’re re-doubling our national efforts to organize and mobilize grassroots Americans to protect initiative rights and insure that citizens are in charge. To continue to protect and defend the freedom for which we are so thankful today.
Your support — your contributions and your activism — made this year’s victories possible. On behalf of my family and myself, please accept my deepest appreciation. Have a great Thanksgiving.
Sincerely,
Paul Jacob
PAUL JACOB President, Citizens in Charge Foundation
P.S. I can’t wait until next year. Let us at ’em! Citizens in Charge Foundation has an aggressive campaign to defend the initiative process across the country and to turn the tide on the politicians and special interests in 2010. They seek to block us from checking government power. But we shall block them — through ballot initiatives and referendums and recalls. With your continued support, we’ll take names and . . . put citizens back in charge.
In a time of expanding surveillance and shrinking liberty, the citizens of Great Britain are now threatened with yet another massive assault on their rights and dignity.
A certain Lord Smith of Finsbury wants the government to lord it over Her Majesty’s subjects even more obnoxiously by slapping them with a “personal carbon allowance.”
This carbon allowance would be enforced by giving everybody a personal ID number. Britons would have to supply the number whenever they buy anything, from gas to airline tickets, affecting their carbon output. Presumably, vendors would check a customer’s newest proposed purchase against some database. Only so many logs you could toss on the fire and then you’re out of luck, unless you buy more carbon credits.
The proposal is vicious in itself. But the potential for “abuse” of such an abusive protocol is also massive. In an age of rampant credit card fraud and identity theft, how hard would it be for a sales clerk in the proposed regime who has used up his own quota to “borrow” somebody else’s carbon-permission ID number?
If the British government wields this latest Orwellian bludgeon and the citizens don’t rebel, they’ll accept anything. We Americans may shake our heads in disbelief, but we’re hardly immune to such eco-totalitarian trends.
It can happen here. After all, Lord Smith’s proposal merely takes the obsession over carbon emissions to its logical — and absurd — conclusion.
