Categories
First Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Corporations Are Made of People

After the Supreme Court torpedoed restrictions on political speech by corporations, foes of the First Amendment bitterly denounced its Citizens United v. FEC decision.

They don’t consider themselves enemies of freedom of speech, of course. Instead, they think the Court erred by assuming that corporations have First Amendment rights. They say corporations aren’t people; they can’t have rights.

But hey: Corporations — non-profit or for profit — are actually made up of people.

One corporation denouncing free speech for other corporations is The New York Times. Their angry editorial states, “The Constitution . . . mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.”

First, the Constitution does not assign any rights to “press” or “religion.” It forbids Congress from abridging individuals’ freedom of the press, freedom of religion.

Second, the Constitution doesn’t exhaustively list relevant institutions. The drafters thought everybody knew that one way we exercise their rights is to organize, cooperatively, into groups — à la freedom of association.

Media corporations have been exempt from limits on campaign spending and political speech. The Times group editorial mind ignores this contradiction. They’re saying, “Our corporate speech is special and worthy of constitutional protection! We’re sincere and good! Members of other corporations, by contrast, can’t be trusted! Therefore, the First Amendment does not apply to them!”

Insist all you like, Mr. Times. You’re still wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Do the Right Thing – Later

Late in life, St. Augustine characterized his youthful, wayward ways in a droll prayer: “Lord, make me chaste and celibate — but not yet!”

Today, politicians of both parties understand the sentiment.

On Monday of last week, President Barack Obama unveiled his budget to Congress with this nicely worded maxim: “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”

Obama proposed a record budget of $3.8 trillion — including a deficit of well over $1 trillion. We can’t keep deficit spending like this, but we keep deficit spending like this.

Talking to reporters, Obama admitted that he and his friends in Congress “won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight.” He cited the need for more job creation as reason to continue to spend so much money.

Money we don’t have. So it will be borrowed. Against future taxes. Or future default.

Sure, the president is proposing a freeze. To start next fiscal year. And he’s proposing a bipartisan committee to cook up some way to balance the budget. The committee hasn’t been formed yet.

That seems like too much procrastination for the state of our nation. I think St. Augustine would agree with me: Virtue is not something you put off until next year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets individual achievement

High Marks for Marko

I wish 9-year-old Marko Calasan had the office next to mine. Then when something goes wrong with my computer — through no fault of my own, I assure you — I could yell “Hey Marko, come fix this!” Alas, he lives in Macedonia.

The CNET website has a nice profile of this genius. We learn that Marko is “perhaps” the youngest system engineer Microsoft has ever certified. He snagged his first credential as a systems administrator when just six.

Marko works for a living. He remotely manages a computer network for a nonprofit organization. The employees tell him they are “very glad that that there is a good administrator.” But he seems a little unsure of it, saying, “I think that’s true, but who knows.”

Marko also teaches computing to other kids at his school. When I heard this my spidey sense tingled ferociously. What? Has he put in his years at a teaching college? Mastered the latest labyrinthine educational theories? Where’s his teaching certificate? The kid’s an outlaw!! At least, he would be stateside.

Marko works when he works and plays when he plays. He doesn’t indulge in computer games because, as he puts it, “there is nothing serious about playing games on computers. . . . If you want to play, go outside and play with your friends.”

Yes sir! I will do that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Listening to the Voters

After Scott Brown captured the U.S. Senate seat Ted Kennedy had occupied for decades, we heard two different views of the event.

One said the surprise victory of an obscure state senator over the anointed Democrat in such a Democrat-leaning state had much to do with growing antagonism to runaway federal spending and spastic efforts to expand federal control over our lives. That Scott Brown promised to vote against Obamacare supports this view. So do exit polls showing that 41 percent of participants “strongly oppose” the health care legislation, only 25 percent “strongly favor” it.

The other notion is that Brown won only because people are frustrated. President Obama declared that “the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept [him] into office.” People are “angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

See, it’s all Bush-legacy stuff, not anything Obama and the Democrats have been doing.

Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.

Not everyone’s wearing blinders. Soon after Brown won, Democratic Senator Jim Webb said the election had been a referendum on both health care legislation and “the integrity of the government process.” He urged fellow Democrats not to try ramming Obamacare through before Brown could be seated.

Hmmm. Listening to the voters. Good idea, Jim.

And it’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Disaster Economics 101

Could House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have spilled the beans, laid bare her party’s vision of economic growth in one offhand utterance?

A terrible tragedy in impoverished Haiti. An earthquake. The scope of the damage staggers the imagination . . . and spurs outpourings of charitable aid from America, and across the globe.

And this is where Mrs. Pelosi chimes in. As if she had never heard of the Broken Window Fallacy, she just blurted it out, hazarding that Haiti “can leap-frog over its past challenges, economically, politically, and demographically in terms of the rich and the poor and the rest there, and have a new — just a new, fresh start.”

Over 70,000 dead, Haiti in ruins, and she’s talking about hope for a “real boom economy.”

Now, I know, politicians like to spend money. They think it does a lot of good — though in Haiti’s case, the billions spent, previously, have sure fizzled. But Pelosi isn’t just arguing that the aid is going to remake an impoverished country. She thinks that scurrying about rebuilding is a net positive.

If you wonder why politicians so like economic booms, even the most artificial ones, look no further. They cannot distinguish between real progress and the frenzy of making up for disaster.

Perhaps that’s why they are so nonchalant about the disasters their own taxes and regulations so often cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

No More Speech Rationing

Advocates of campaign finance regulation, what George Will calls “speech rationing,” say letting corporations — including non-profit corporations — spend unlimited money on political speech corrupts democracy.

Actually, muzzling speech is what corrupts democracy and the point of it: i.e., to protect our freedoms, including freedom of speech.

Protecting these freedoms is a vital political good, even if some speech is deplorable.

The recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, dramatically strikes down unconstitutional limits on electioneering by businesses and non-profits. But it leaves intact unconstitutional limits on their direct contributions to campaigns.

It also doesn’t touch requirements forcing campaign donors to disclose personal information. In his partial dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to how California donors giving more than $100 must reveal their names and addresses, info then publicized on the Internet. Supporters of a recent controversial ballot proposition were subjected to intimidation and property damage as a result.

The disclosure laws have spawned what Justice Thomas calls “a cottage industry that uses forcibly disclosed donor information to pre-empt citizens’ exercise of their First Amendment rights.”

Thomas is right. And campaign finance regulation should be tossed out root and branch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

Greater Eloquence

Last week, two major speeches caught our attention.

Barack Obama wagged his finger at the Supreme Court and orated in front of Congress. He said the state of the union is sound.

Apple’s Steve Jobs gave the other big speech, presenting the new iPad, a portable device that accesses the Web, allows users niftily to buy and read e-books, and much more.

Which speech will usher in real change?

Both have their critics. Many people no longer trust Obama, whether he’s pushing more government or a freeze. And many folks second-guess Apple’s newest project, despite Jobs’s spectacular success record.

For my part, I don’t buy Obama’s agenda. But I probably won’t buy an iPad, either. I tend to regard even the best new tech breakthroughs as just more vacuum cleaners. They really do suck . . . one’s time, anyway.

But to succeed, Apple doesn’t need my excitement. Just enough from others.

Early in each of Apple’s revolutions, it was hard to prophesy success, with certainty.

The neat thing about a possible neo-Gutenberg Age of tablets, e-books and virtual libraries is that I will still be able to read a normal book. One the other hand, if Obama gets his way, his policies will, willy nilly, crowd out better ones.

Still, it’s heartening to realize that to most of us the eloquence of a revolutionary thing means more, now, than the eloquence of any politician.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Who Killed Disco?

The age of the glittery mirror ball and loud, simple dance music is over.

According to Ian Schrager, as recorded in Vanity Fair’s recent oral history of disco, it “wasn’t AIDS that made the nightclub business difficult. Government regulations did it in.”

Schrager and his partner set up their first nightclub, in Queens, for $27,000. The more famous Studio 54 — or is that “infamous”? — went up for $400,000.

“Now,” says Schrager, a major real estate developer, “with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards . . . before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.”

And it’s not just disco that’s suffered. It’s worth remembering one sad side effect of all the red tape cities and states put up to new enterprises. It leaves the private sector desperate to focus on the surest forms of wealth generation, less able to serve niche markets. Like discos.

Nowadays, to establish and run non-school,  non-work activities for young people, volunteers organize community events, write grant applications and hold out their hats. This crowds out funding for needier, worthier charities, and litters our towns with poorly run government-funded efforts.

Personally, I don’t like disco — but could it be that things were better when entrepreneurs like Schrager set the stage?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people

Haiti on the Hot Seat

Television theologian Pat Robertson attributes Haiti’s current woes to a two-century-old pact:

[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti. . . . They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” . . . Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. . . .

Pact with the devil? True story??

The Haitians threw off the French long before the rule of Napoleon III . . . but, whatever. It is doubtful that any amount of thumbing through an encyclopedia before going on air would have saved Pat.

Soon after the Robertson clip we got the clip from actor Danny Glover. Glover says climate change caused the earthquake. Apparently, he was mad about the failed summit. “They’re all in peril because of global warming . . . because of climate change. . . . When we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens. . . .”

Hey, why not? “Global warming” causes everything! Maybe even the heated hectoring of Pat and Danny.

Where’s the common sense?

Oh, here: This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility

Washing Dishes

If you can’t pay your bill at a restaurant, management may set you to washing dishes to cover the cost of your meal.

Or so it’s said — I’ve never heard of it actually happening. Clean dishes are a must for serving food to paying customers; restaurants simply can’t wait around to press non-paying customers into service. Instead, they hire folks to do the dishes.

This came to mind when our president and congressional leaders began pushing to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion.

The raise would allow the federal debt to increase to $14.3 trillion, about the size of our country’s entire yearly economic output.

Senator Max Baucus of Montana is all for raising the limit. He says it simply must be done: “We have gone to the restaurant,” he explained. “We have eaten the meal. Now the only question is whether we will pay the check.”

No dishwashing for Baucus.

Most of us avoid Congress’s unseemly situation by looking in our wallets for cash or ready credit before we order the filet mignon, not after we’ve consumed it.

I’m no wizard of high finance, but hey: If we want to stop piling debts onto our children, at some point we will have to prevent our so-called representatives from borrowing more trillions.

Oh, and if a congressman enters your diner, better make him pay cash up front.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.