Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies tax policy

State Violence in Vladivostok

While our president was finagling his way to support two out of three of the Big Three automakers, folk in Vladivostak were protesting Vladimir Putin’s new high tariffs on foreign-made used automobiles. As many as 6,000 protesters on Russia’s Pacific Coast took to the streets, some even calling for Putin’s ouster.

Used cars are a big deal on the eastern end of the Russian empire. Over 200,000 people in and around Vladivostok work on — or professionally trade — used cars. The used car business heavily undergirds the economy of the area . . . just across the East Sea from Japan. (I add this topographical note in case you forgot your grade school geography lessons.)

Not only did Putin insist on keeping the high tariffs, he sent in extra police to beat heads. The police attacked not only protesters, but journalists, too — without regard for nationality.

On the Sunday before Christmas, smaller protests were held around the vastness of Russia, including Moscow.

Don’t dismiss the tariff as “mere” economic policy — Putin sure doesn’t. One protester went on record, saying, “First, we have been deprived of our right to elect, now they are taking away our right to choose cars.”

An important lesson for America, too. Government policy skews our ability to choose. Favors to local business (whether by subsidy or tariff) decrease our ability to contract to get what we want. Which, often, includes imports.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

Bad-Time Bonuses

People often complain about executive pay. I don’t. What other people get paid isn’t my business.

But after we discovered that many of the major companies bailed out by our government went on to give their execs bonuses, I changed my tune, a bit. How did failed companies and failed businessmen deserve bailouts in the first place? After being bailed out of their mess, the failed execs earned bonuses how? For bringing home the bacon from politicians?

This problem is not limited to private enterprise at the public nipple.

Take DC Metro. This governmental organization, tasked with providing public transit in the District of Columbia and adjacent areas, is in deep financial woes, even worse than many businesses. The transit authority threatens deep cuts in service.

And yet, somehow, they just managed to hike the salaries of management, not to mention the wages of hourly workers.

This is the reaction of a concern when its rising costs are not being matched by income gains?

It seems insane. And yet, this is government, so we at least have a ready explanation. And, being a metropolitan service district rather than a city or county government, it doesn’t have many of the usual checks in place. From the people.

If you are looking for a cause to get involved in, I bet your area’s metro district would get your blood boiling. Why not look into it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency term limits

Committee Chair Limits, RIP?

Advocates of limited government have lamented the decline and fall of the 1994 Republican “revolution” since, well, not long after the so-called revolution began. But before it melted into a puddle of politics-as-usual, there were some serious efforts at reform.

One procedural reform that survived was term limits on committee chairmen. The Democratic leadership, after gaining a majority in 2006, decided to keep these limits.

But now, with their majority increased, a Democrat headed to the White House, and economic collapse as a distraction, they apparently feel the time has become as ripe as a freckled banana to peel away such impediments to their rule. The scuttling of committee chair limits is now part of their new rules package.

The package also limits the ability of Republicans to force votes on bills that would be politically difficult for Democrats to vote on. Sheesh, I thought voting on stuff was the whole idea.

The minority Republicans have sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi, complaining, “This is not the kind of openness and transparency that President-elect Obama promised.”

But they shouldn’t stop there, even if the new rules are implemented over their protest. In politics, it often pays to keep fighting.

Term limits remain very popular with the many of the same voters who also like the openness and accountability the new president keeps talking about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

How to Spell “America”

In Franz Kafka’s famous-but-incomplete novel, Amerika, his protagonist treks to our brave new world only to repeatedly find himself persecuted by a bizarre assortment of authorities.

That was fiction. How’s our factual world?

Today, our governments — particularly our police and prosecutors — seem to treat Kafka’s nightmare as a blueprint for action. Accuse. Accost. Ticket. Jail. Innocence is no excuse. Sense is no criterion.

There has to be a better artistic model for our country. There is: The Andy Griffith Show.

Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry never used his toughness in a bullying or bureaucratic way. He was respectful of the public, interpreting both the rules and his own discretion with a healthy dose of common sense.

Unlike modern America, Mayberry was never Kafkaesque.

In searching about for standards, better to reach to Andy rather than Franz. Our enforcement culture sure needs something.

Still, many police are exemplary public servants providing necessary service. So let’s keep our cool, not over-react. Every time law enforcement goes even slightly off the beam, someone, somewhere, starts spelling “America” with a “k” — as in Kafka’s novel. But remember, Kafka had an excuse: He wrote in German, and in German “America” is spelled with a “k,” not a “c.”

For me, I’d like to keep the “c,” and let it stand for . . . Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

The Wizard of Fraudz

Every time the economy takes a nose-dive, we roust up a few frauds and a bevy of humbugs.

This outing’s big villain is financier Bernard Madoff. For decades, Madoff made off with billions of other people’s money by pretending to invest it honestly.

Instead, he paid off early “investors” with the “investments” of later “investors.” To keep the Ponzi scheme going, Madoff had to keep widening the circle of the victims — which meant that he and his boosters had to keep whispering sweet cryptic nothings to awestruck big-pocketed individuals eager to join an exclusive club.

Some prospects declined. They now say they could get no real information about how he was investing. What? Oracular pronouncements weren’t enough for these skeptics?

Another Delphic entity that pretends to “invest” our money is the federal government. Its masterminds, too, claim to know everything about doing financial magic — but explain nothing. The Federal Reserve, for example, is refusing to comply with media requests for info on the “emergency loans” now being handed to ailing companies.

America’s government officials “know,” somehow, that they can “invest” in decrepit, floundering, washed-up firms and industries, using money siphoned from actually productive enterprise, while always paying off old government debt with new government debt, adding up to trillions . . . and somehow everything will turn out all right.

Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency porkbarrel politics

Worst Waste of 2008

Do you miss the late Senator William Proxmire and his yearly “Golden Fleece Awards”?

Well, if wasteful spending is something you just can’t get enough of, then it’s high time to turn to Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. His report on the “Worst Waste of 2008” came out in early December, and it’s quite a read.
Just skimming the report can keep you fuming for weeks. Here it is, a new year, and I’m still fuming. Over what? Well . . .

  • $3.2 million on a blimp the Pentagon does not want.
  • $300,000 on specialty potatoes for frou-frou restaurants.
  • $2.4 million for a retractable shade canopy at a park in West Virginia.

But it’s not as if you cannot mount a defense for some of this. It’s not as if Congress isn’t thinking ahead. Congress has already allocated $24.6 million to the National Park Service for the institution’s centennial, and the centennial is eight years away!

Well, I didn’t say you could mount a good defense.

Americans already know that Congress lacks common sense. But what we need to learn, Coburn says, is that “[u]ntil Congress abandons the short-term parochialism that gives us LobsterCams and inflatable alligators, we will never get a handle on the major economic challenges facing this country.”

Coburn’s report is gold. It proves that, yes, we’ve been fleeced.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption too much government

Get Real, Mr. Rael

Political ads are not much different from normal, commercial ads. Effective advertisements usually make it pretty clear what the hoped-for outcome is.

Buy a widget? Patronize a business? In politics, it’s “Vote for X” . . . or A, B, or C.

Last political season, in New Mexico’s Bernalillo, Sandoval, and Valencia counties, ads ballyhooed a Rio Metro expansion project. They very clearly concluded by telling voters to “Make a Difference on November 4th,” and offering up a certain website that also promoted voting for the tax increase to expand the transit system.

So why did Lawrence Rael of the political entity responsible for Rio Metro deny the obvious? “We’re not saying ‘vote for the tax’ as an advocacy committee would do,” he explained. “We’re just simply saying, ‘Look, this issue is on the ballot . . . Here’s what it’s about.’”

Oh, get real, Mr. Rael.

The reason for his reticence? Governments in a republic aren’t supposed to influence voters but be influenced by voters. That’s the point of an election, where our tax dollars ought not be on either side.

Paul Gessing, of the Rio Grande Foundation, wrote in the Albuquerque Journal, “Having advocates for these proposals working on the taxpayer dime obviously tilts the advantage in the direction of higher taxes. But giving the pro-tax side the additional advantage of a significant advertising budget is simply too much, and is truly unfair.”

No wonder government keeps growing, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

Battle of the Corrupt States

The name. The hair. The gall. Illinois Governor Rod Blogojevich is getting lots of attention.

However, the governor’s favor-trading is unique only in blatancy. The longer politicians hold power, the more readily they regard pay-to-play corruption as acceptable, profitable. Which is one reason I advocate initiative rights, term limits, mandatory caps on taxes and spending, and other reforms that pay-to-play politicos despise.

The desire to thwart such reform begets even more corruption.

Pundits say that if Illinois’s state government isn’t the most corrupt in the union, it’s in the running. But I nominate Oklahoma for the title. In Oklahoma, the bad-old-boy political establishment is so eager to thwart reform that politicians are willing to jail you for the “crime” of abetting democracy.

Two citizen activists and I found this out the hard way, when Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson indicted us in October 2007 for allegedly “defrauding” the state by running a petition drive to curb state spending.

The charges are phony, and Oklahoma’s residency law for signature gatherers — which we did not violate — has just been ruled unconstitutional.

Winning attorney Todd Graves said the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling “upholds an important free speech principle and joins other federal courts in upholding citizens’ First Amendment right to petition their government without threat of political prosecution.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
U.S. Constitution

Meet the Moots

The meaning of institutions, like words, changes over time.

Take Congress. The Constitution hands legislative power to the two houses of Congress. With the growth of government Congress has delegated more and more of its powers to the executive branch.

In a recent column, George F. Will identified the most recent “development” of this trend. Will’s example is the automaker bailout. Congress did not authorize it: The package failed in the Senate. But President Bush simply took money from another bailout bill and dumped it at the failing automobile manufacturers.

Even if you think the bailout is good policy, the president should be censured. “With the automakers,” Will writes, “executive branch overreaching now extends to the essence of domestic policy — spending. . . .

George Will’s Washington Post column is titled “Making Congress Moot.” Droll, that. “Moot” is an ancient term for a deliberative body. Philologist and fantasist J.R.R. Tolkien used it to designate his congress of “treeherders.” Remember “entmoot”?

The phrase “moot point” used to mean “open to debate.” It now usually means “an issue raised whose determination cannot have any practical effect.”

Congress has gone from an august, important deliberative body — a moot — to a mere debating society. As the meaning of the word “moot” has decayed, so too has Congress.

Think of 535 moot points.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Change and Hope

’Tis the season of “Hope” and “Change.” All the more so, since those are the bywords of the President-Elect.

It’s too early to see whether his changes will match our hopes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still hope for better days and ways.

This Common Sense program is all about hope. I hope that Americans will work together to restore citizen control of government. I share examples of citizens fighting to hold government accountable, hoping that regular folks doing unusually good deeds will inspire more people to join the cause.

For the last two years, we’ve been sponsored by the freedom fighters at the Sam Adams Alliance. The Alliance trains and links allies in the freedom movement. They’ve helped bloggers and activists throughout the country, emphasizing new online media.

I owe the folks at Team Sam a deep debt of gratitude. But change is good, too, and for 2009 this program is moving to a new sponsor, the Citizens in Charge Foundation.

I’m the president of the Citizens in Charge Foundation. We work to educate the public on the importance of voter initiative and referendum, and we defend the petition rights of citizens in the courts.

I’ll continue to speak out on the need for reform, for citizens to be empowered and politicians held accountable. I hope you’ll keep listening. In the end, what we think, what we decide, and what we do will make all the difference.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.