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

Gore’s Gas-Based Admission

Al Gore gives the impression of someone never willing to acknowledge error if said error happens to be self-serving.

This impression is wrong.

If I have ever suggested that Gore never admits self-serving mistakes, I hereby rescind and repudiate that suggestion. He appears more than willing to retire a dishonest assertion . . . so long as he has another dishonest assertion to replace it with.

Ed Morrissey tells the tale at Hot Air, opining that Al Gore’s revised opinion about the virtue of government subsidies for corn-based ethanol seems just a little too convenient.

Gore now acknowledges that the energy-conversion ratios of first-generation ethanol “are at best very small,” and that corn subsidies probably bid up food prices. He even admits that he pushed for the funding to help farmers in states like Tennessee and Iowa. So it came to pass that taxpayers paid billions, in part to help Gore run for president.

Wait, there’s more.

Having recanted his support for “first-generation” ethanol, Gore now wants to use wood and grass to make ethanol. A new and better way, n’est-ce pas? No. There’s this small detail: Grass etc.-based ethanol is even more inefficient than corn-based ethanol.

Why top a bad blunder at taxpayer expense with an even worse blunder at taxpayer expense? Could this have anything to do with Al Gore’s investment in Abengoa Bioenergy, a firm begging for government subsidies for second-generation ethanol?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Citizen’s Stop Sign

What an election year. It’s not just the drubbing dealt to many statist incumbents that warrants a little triumphalism. We can also cheer about ballot measures whose passage means the defeat of very specific attacks on the citizenry.

Several local referendums targeted all those ticket-triggering red-light cameras that have been popping up. The main purpose of the gotcha-gizmos seems to be lunging for the wallets of hapless motorists, not enhancing anybody’s safety.

Voters are rejecting this fancy tax on driving. In Houston, a group called Citizens Against Red Light Cameras pushed for a ballot question to chuck the cameras. Voters passed it, despite the apoplectic opposition of the city council and the company operating the cameras, American Traffic Solutions. Camera ordinances were also felled in two Ohio towns, Chillicothe and Heath, and in College Station, Texas. In Anaheim, California, 73 percent said Yes to banning red-light cameras.

It was a tougher battle in Mukilteo, Washington, where ATS tried to stop voters from deciding on the cameras. Citizen activist Tim Eyman, who also has a slew of successful tax-limitation initiatives under his belt, led the effort to combat that obstructionism, and the state supreme court ordered ATS to back off. The kill-the-cameras measure went on to pass by 70 percent.

It’s great whenever voters call a halt to political predation. By no method can they do so more directly and effectively than via the right of initiative and referendum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Chimp-o-nomics

Government is almost defined by one kind of business it runs: The last-use-of-force business, such as police and courts and military. Since we don’t pay for these services in fees, contracts, and sales — we’re taxed, instead — we don’t usually call them “businesses.”

But governments have gotten involved in a lot of other more business-like businesses: Roads, libraries, mass transit, waterworks, garbage collection, etc. Of course, government being government, it supports most such enterprises largely with taxes, not fees for services rendered.

Yet there are exceptions.

Take Jackson, Michigan. It runs a number of swimming pools, and charges for usage. The pools lose money. Which taxpayers subsidize. Typical. But Jackson also runs a putt-putt golf course. And it makes money at that business.

All to the good? A government business that actually comes out in the black — what a deal!

Well, Bill Chrysan, proprietor of Putterz Golf & Games in nearby Ypsilanti, doesn’t think so. He notes that the government golf course doesn’t pay property taxes and has its maintenance done at taxpayer expense. With advantages like this, it’s hard to compete against — and it hardly pays its way like other businesses.

For that and other reasons, this one putt-putt course provides no model. Governments shouldn’t run businesses, says James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, for the “[s]ame reason that chimps shouldn’t drive. Just because some can do it doesn’t mean that it should be encouraged.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom

Thank You, Joe Blow

Psychological research has unearthed a completely unsensational truth: Expressing gratitude makes you happier.

What the research shows, I’m told, is that it doesn’t matter to whom one gives thanks. Just expressing it does the trick.

Of course, offering thanks to people you really care about, or who helped you in some extraordinary way, must make some other kind of difference. Still, there’s more than a little sense in being thankful for the people you walk by on the street — and expressing it here:

  • That fellow, the other day? He didn’t mug me. Ah, indifference! It’s better than malevolence.
  • That nice woman with the odd hair, some time back? She gave an encouraging smile when I dropped something. She didn’t have to say anything. I understood: “We all drop things, now and then.” No biggie. A little kindness goes a long way.
  • All the people who took my money and gave me what I wanted in return. Without you, my life would be impoverished. Whether you are selling me fruits or nuts or lattes or bread, I live because you work. And I work, too, to help you live.

In one of my favorite movies, Brazil, the Robert De Niro character encourages our embattled hero with a simple “We’re all in this together.” Actually, much of the time we’re all in this separately. But the connections we make are vitally important, and work remarkably well — for more than our feelings.

Even in tough times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

The Murky, Muddled Middle

We’ve seen a lot of insightful reflection about what the recent elections say about the prospects for liberty and the efforts of many Americans to fight for endangered liberties.

One lesson I hope we’re on the way to unlearning is how allegedly “praiseworthy” it is to evade any clear-cut defense of fundamental political principle. How allegedly “critical” it is to compromise not only on the details of a program that does advance one principles, but also on the basic principles themselves.

In a recent communiqué, Representative Ed Emery rejects the notion that “moderates” lost, sometimes spectacularly, because voters “weren’t thinking.” No, “Moderates lost because voters woke up to the truth that lukewarm does not protect personal liberties; it compromises them [and] protects the status quo. . . .”

But not even the status quo is protected by huddling in the middle of the road. The premier beneficiaries of the worship of the muddled middle are those who do advocate certain fundamental (and poisonous) ideological principles but who succeed in posing as practitioners of “moderation.” Today, the radical left calls itself “the center” and screams bloody murder about “extremism” when anybody offers cogent objections to their socialist agenda. “Compromise,” to them, means only tweaking the speed at which we hurtle ever closer to full government control over our lives.

Let’s not submit to this intimidation, this fraudulent debate-framing.

Let’s demand a fair and open clash of basic political principles.

That’s a battle we’ll win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access First Amendment rights

Clean Elections or Dirty Con?

No supporter of so-called “clean elections” would argue that we should be forced by law to pull the lever on election day for the candidate we oppose. But the tangled web that politicians and regulators have woven with campaign finance laws does often force us to support candidates we oppose during the run-up to election day.

Here’s just one perverse example: The “‘clean’ elections” system in Arizona. Under Arizona’s scheme, if Candidate A runs as a “‘clean’ elections” candidate, every time Candidate B, who declines public funding, raises a certain amount of money by making effective appeals for support, Candidate A gets matching funds at taxpayer expense. In other words, the government forces you as taxpayer to offset the support you give to Candidate B voluntarily by ensuring that your money goes to Candidate A too — involuntarily. Under this law, the spending of independent groups is also matched by coercive taxpayer donations to “‘clean’ elections” candidates.

It’s a horrific skewing of the political field in favor of the ideas and candidates voters don’t want to support — a direct coercive assault on their democratic rights.

The fate of Arizona’s “welfare-for-politicians” law has survived a federal appeal, but may yet be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Institute for Justice has taken up the cudgels on behalf of independent groups and candidates who garner financial support the old fashioned way . . . they earn it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Perfect Safety?

Maybe the most interesting thing to come out, so far, from the “porno-scanner”/TSA-gropings controversy is this statement by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas: “You can’t provide perfect safety.”

Going on, Rep. Paul denied that it is “the government’s role . . . to provide safety.”

It isn’t; it’s to protect our rights. But here we’re being told that we go to the gate, we buy a ticket, and you’ve lost your right, you’ve sacrificed your right. Where did that come from? It’s about the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

Rep. Paul has introduced legislation that would prohibit physical contact between TSA screeners and would-be airline passengers, and would prohibit taking images of people’s bodies using X-Rays, millimeter rays, etc..

Ron Paul sees all these new, invasive screening techniques as based on the idea that it is the government’s job to ensure airline invulnerability to terrorism, not the airlines’. He suggests putting the onus back on the airlines, who would likely be more respectful of their customers than the TSA is.

9/11/01 caught the airlines and the government with their pants down. Maybe the best solution to this security lapse isn’t to institute intrusions into our pants, or the kind of X-Ray vision scanners that boys used to be enticed with in the back of comic books.

There must be better ways.

Alas, government probably won’t find them. Which is why Ron Paul is on to something: It should be up to private enterprise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies video

Video of the Week: Quantitative Easing Explained

Earlier this week I did a short Q&A about the latest in monetary policy: quantitative easing. This video goes into much more detail. And is pretty funny:

For an extended, non-animated explanation of QE, try a helpful article by monetary economist Leland Yeager: “The Fed’s Easy Money.”

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Dare to Cut

If the Tea Party’s newly elected spokespeople really want to prove they are serious, they must dare to gore a familiar ox.

The best place to start? Pentagon budgets.

It’s not just me saying that. Just as Congress overspends domestically, it overspends militarily, primarily by what Cato Institute’s Downsizing the Federal Government website defines as “overreach”:

We would improve the nation’s security by adopting a more restrained and defensive strategy. We should cut the number of military personnel and reduce overseas deployments to save money and relieve burdens on military families.

But Cato’s a think tank. What say actual, elected Tea Party politicians?

Well, Sen. Tom Coburn recently wrote that “Taking defense spending off the table is indefensible.” Further, Senator Elect Rand Paul has called for a debate in the Senate and House over the war in Afghanistan. He started off by saying that Congress had proved lax in its duty to declare war, and then argued that the debate ten years ago on the Afghanistan intervention was not enough for the war’s continuation. He brought up a list of sensible concerns that require careful discussion.

Tea Party politicians should also see the political value of strategic disengagement from any number of worldwide hotspots. Or funding sinkholes, like Europe. Being the world’s policeman costs us dearly, in more ways than one. Were Republicans to rethink their traditional No Pentagon Budget Left Behind approach, Democrats might have less standing to oppose the domestic cuts that must be made.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

The Costs of Airport Security

John Tyner, a 31-year-old man hailing from Oceanside, California, not only declined San Diego International Airport’s kind offer of a full-body scan via privacy-invading machine, he also declined a full-body groping via privacy-invading human.

Unfortunately for TSA (who would like to make it unfortunate for Tyner as well) he happened to record his interactions with security personnel on a cell phone. Now TSA honchos are growling that they may well follow through with a threat to fine him $10,000 for not submitting to either procedure — inasmuch as it’s now a crime to care about one’s personal dignity.

The penalty has gone up, though, since TSA threatened Tyner at the airport. It’s now $11,000.

Five or ten dollars for refusing an obnoxious groping, I understand. Or a nickel. Better? A penny. But thousands of dollars?

I’m sure other aspiring passengers who initially cooperated with such intrusions also decided mid-procedure that things were getting too invasive for comfort and that retreat was the better part of valor. I doubt that TSA has sought to extract $10,000+ from each recalcitrant.

But it seems Tyner’s conduct is especially heinous. First, he balked at unreasonable search of his person; second, he blatantly exercised his First Amendment rights by shockingly sharing evidence and testimony about what happened.

If the TSA doesn’t do something, fast, more and more people might act as if their constitutional rights still apply.

Do they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.