Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Multiplication and Division

John Maynard Keynes’s most popular notion was his infamous “multiplier” effect. Spend some government (taxpayer) money, and the effects “multiply” in the economy, as if the Invisible Hand were on speed.

The truth is the reverse: “the divider” effect. Create government jobs and progress in the marketplace “divides” as a result of the increased taxes needed to support the jobs.

Our orator-in-chief also says he’s in the business of “saving jobs.” Like most politicians, he loves “multiplier” talk, because it gives him the green light to spend.

But, like the bank bailouts, what’s really happening with stimulus spending is that some people are getting raises and bonuses while the unemployment rate goes double-digit.

The actual multiplier effect regards talk. For every dollar government spends, politicians claim umpteen more jobs “saved.” It’s not reality. The multiplication effect occurs entirely in rhetoric and in PowerPoint presentations.

The New York Times tells us how “the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower” for a cemetery in Arkansas. Then, “a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.”

The magic of this sort of job creation doesn’t rest upon the logic of markets. Here the magic lies simply in the lying. The “multiplier” multiplies because politicians tell multiple lies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility too much government

$800 Billion Gorilla

It somehow didn’t come up.

Last week, when President Barack Obama met with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, there was reportedly no discussion of the fact that our country owes China over $800 billion.

Just suppose you owed someone $800 bucks . . . or $800,000. Do you think it could affect the relationship?

What about nearly a trillion dollars?

The Obama Administration just announced that American-Chinese relations are “at an all-time high.” But a story in the Washington Post compared our relationship with China to the nuclear stalemate of the Cold War, known as “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD. We’re dependent on them for future loans; they’re dependent on us to pay back old loans and new.

Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution explained that “the Chinese can pull the rug out from under our economy only if they want to pull the rug out from under themselves.”

Reassuring? Not very.

Why have we allowed a foreign power to gain such leverage over us?

Because our politicians cannot — will not — limit their yearly spending to the trillion-plus dollars in revenue from American taxpayers.

When it comes to debt, China’s tyrants  have taken better care of their country than our politicians have of ours. But we needn’t cede them control. Far better simply to stop borrowing billions from Beijing.

How? Slash spending. If our politicians can’t do it for us, maybe they can do it for their Chinese allies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

What Would Dixon Do?

Maybe it’s just me . . . and all other normal people. But I’m more worried about policemen who abuse authority than those too “culturally insensitive” in their cheerful greetings.

Yes, that’s the latest crisis: Bobbies who say “Good evenin’ all” as they walk the beat.

Or so says a police manual published in the English county of Warwickshire. The manual claims that this greeting is culturally confusing. Even if the beloved Dixon of Dixon of Dock Green, Britain’s long-running answer to The Andy Griffith Show, always opened with just those genial words.

A police spokesman explains that “‘afternoon’ and ‘evening’ are somewhat subjective in meaning. . . . In many cultures the term evening is linked to time of day when people have their main meal of the day.”

Someone’s gotta respond to this kind of concocted quandary, and a woman named Marie Clair of a group called the Plain English Campaign has taken on the chore. She asks: “Is anyone really going to be confused by [the word] ‘evening’? And if you can’t say what a lovely afternoon it is, what are you meant to say — what a lovely 3 PM?”

Other British agencies are targeting harmless words like “child” and “youngster.”

So, crime may be raging in the sceptered isle, but at least the bureaucratic monitors of politesse are bravely battling “insensitive” clarity and good will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom

Tough Medicine, Tough Luck

Don’t get sick in Union, Missouri. Not if you need Sudafed in a hurry.

Union is the second city in the nation to require a prescription for sales of medicine containing pseudoephedrine. This is an active ingredient in Sudafed, a drug that good-hearted and responsible people might take to relieve nasal congestion.

However, pseudoephedrine can also be used to make methamphetamine, a very popular and very strong (and very illegal) psychoactive drug.

The reasoning seems to be that if something used in a good thing can also be used in a bad thing, you can’t trust people to use the good thing without erecting blocks to said usage.

If applied consistently, such a regulatory principle would mean you’d have to get a prescription for 80 percent of the stuff in your home. Did you know that if you gargle with detergent, it can be injurious to your health? No wonder you need a doctor’s prescription.

Over at the Show-Me Institute’s blog, Sarah Brodsky notes that when sufferers have no good alternative to Sudafed, they must call in sick, “find time to go to the doctor’s office . . . or go to work unmedicated.” She adds that unmedicated allergy sufferers aren’t exactly at their best.

But hey. The important thing is politicians pretending to do good by making it harder for us to do good for ourselves. Right?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

When Your Bond Is Your Bond

Remember the Alliance for Bonded Term Limits?

I talked about the group last summer, when ABTL was little more than an idea. They were looking for candidates who would not only vow to limit their terms in office, but also agree to forfeit a big chunk of their assets if they break their word.

Sounds like a good idea — some vote-getters are quite skilled at sounding honest and sincere and rock-solid about principles they couldn’t care less about. Let them put their money where their mouths are if they’re truly serious about limiting their tenure in office.

And now someone has done just that: Will Breazeale, a North Carolina Republican. He’s seeking votes in next year’s election, hoping to represent the state’s seventh congressional district. In October, Mr. Breazeale formally executed a bond for $250,000 in a ceremony before the Board of Elections Office in New Hanover. If he tries to serve more than three consecutive terms, the money goes to charity.

At his website, Breazeale tells voters, “When I say that I will only serve three terms as your Congressman, I mean it; and I hope this promissory note will make my intentions clear.”

Breazeale is the first candidate in the country to commit himself to limiting his own terms in office with a bonded pledge. Let us hope he’s the first of many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Gross Jobs

The president says he’s creating jobs. I’m skeptical. I guess there are some things government can do to ensure that jobs get created, out there in the bill-paying, profit-making world. But these do not include spending trillions of borrowed money.

And neither do they include simply giving more money to state and local governments.

The truth about Obama’s much-ballyhooed job creation is that more than half of his alleged new jobs turn out to be government jobs.

Government jobs don’t count, Mr. President.

Remember, many things governments do actually drain us. Jobs in the marketplace, on the other hand, serve real consumer demand, make us all better off. They also help pay the taxes for those government jobs. Employing more people in government means needing more real jobs to pay for the government ones.

And how much work do politicians cause us to engage in just to unbury ourselves from their silly, wealth-extracting regulations? I know, I know: Every time they add on some new complication to the tax code, jobs emerge in the accounting and tax-consulting industry. But this doesn’t exactly make us better off, does it? Not on net.

This lesson applies generally. Here’s the bottom line. Government can borrow and tax to spend to create “gross jobs.” Sure. But on net, after balancing the collective books, we’re not better off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
local leaders national politics & policies too much government

Tea Parties Still Going Strong

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a hulking health care bill bulging with burdensome new taxes and mandates. We can probably thank many well-attended Tea Party protests around the country that the vote was as narrow as it was, 220-215, mostly along party lines. Now it goes, weakly, to the Senate.

The New York Times says the legislation “would require most Americans to obtain health insurance or face penalties — an approach Republicans compared to government oppression.” Gee, I hope Republicans said such laws would be an example of oppression, not merely sorta like oppression.

All but one Republican and 39 Democrats voted No to the monstrosity. Maybe a few Democrats get the message that taxpayers are mad as heck and aren’t going to take it any more.

I like how the Cincinnati Tea Party activists are delivering this message. According to a participant’s report at InstaPundit, the group recently “organized an unprecedented four-day ‘We Surround Him’ demonstration” to show one Ohio congressman their commitment to liberty. For the first few days, the protestors strategically surrounded Congressman Steve Driehaus’s district to convey their message to voters.

Then they surrounded the congressman himself, stationing themselves around his office building. The protesters invited Driehaus to address them on the health care question, but he couldn’t be bothered. Perhaps he can be compared to a dead duck.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency responsibility

What Would Confucius Say?

House Resolution 784, proposed to honor the twenty-five-hundred-sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Confucius, received a No vote from Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake.

Why?

Honorable Flake say ‘He who spends time passing trivial legislation may find himself out of time to read healthcare bill.’

He has a point, and it’s worth than a fortune-cookie presentation.

I am pretty sure Master K’ung-tzu, whom we call Confucius, would side with Flake. It is more important actually to do good deeds than honor the ancient wisdom of a foreign culture, or its chief exemplar.

It’s not bad to honor such an ancient one as Master Kung. But if everything else you do rubs against the Confucian grain, what does that say?

Take just one issue. Congress continues to obsess about executive salaries, and in effect has given the current administration the green light to fix salaries.

But as economist Arnold Kling has noticed, this is all a distraction. ‘The substantive issue is the extent to which [recent market] losses were caused by political actions and the extent to which they are concentrated at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. . . . Given the large role of Freddie and Fannie, it makes sense for politicians to create as large a diversion as possible. Hence, the brouhaha over bonuses at bailed-out banks.’

Very un-Confucian, such shifting of blame.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall

Ionosphere Laughter

Government is a business — a big business, employing more people than any other. It dominates by regulating, restricting, taxing and subsidizing.

Government is also “too big to fail,” which is why, increasingly, politicians and public employee union bosses have ascended to the top of the heap of a growing army of competing lesser groups, always asking — no, demanding — more money.

This growing sector depends not on the decisions of dispersed customers and donors and investors, but on decisions concentrated in Washington, and, to a lesser extent, the state capital . . . and city hall.

The federal boys splurge far over their revenues — by the trillions, beyond the Ionosphere — courtesy of foreign creditors and the printing press. Governments at the state and local level tend to be more restrained, existing nearly on the same level as the rest of society, in a sort of Stratosphere (if not Troposphere) of finance.

Indeed, they are constitutionally forced to balance budgets, can be limited in their power to tax, and are not allowed to print money. Often, they must even ask voters for permission to borrow.

Add on the initiative and referendum, and we can gain some control over governments closest to home.

Not so at the federal level, where often the only effective response to government corruption and excess is a sort of recycling program by late-night comedians.

This makes our laughter at national politicians a tad bittersweet. Or just bitter.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
responsibility

Who’s Really Doing Science?

Recently, comedian and talk show host Bill Maher defended his questioning of the wisdom of mass vaccination by saying it’s “not settled science, like global warming.”

And, around the world, scientists and critical thinkers and just generally knowledgeable folks fell out of their chairs, like so many calving icebergs.

Climate science remains controversial. Maher’s trendy gambit claiming that the science has been “settled” is absurd.

To really settle the matter, a whole lot more scrutiny would be required. And the critics who have mounted attacks on the anthropogenic — “human-caused” — hypothesis for global climate change would have to have their work considered more openly to earn any credit for the now-dominant hypothesis.

Why? Because science is all about open, public testing. As Karl Popper explained, science is the process of conjecture and refutation. When those who criticize a theory are castigated as being unscientific simply because they criticize, science is no longer happening. Then we have pure ideology, non-science if not pure nonsense.

Though the critics of anthropogenic global warming catastrophism often get dubbed as kooks and crazies by current scientistic prophets of doom, they are, in fact, doing the work of science. Even if they are eventually proved wrong.

And Bill Maher is no more the judge of “settled science” than I am.

Full disclosure: I haven’t got my flu shot yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.