Categories
government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

The Day After

Not thrilled with the election results? Don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of the battle.

Traipsing off to the polls every few years does not exhuast our duty as Americans. In addition to voting, we have to keep learning, stay informed about what’s happening in our government. We must also provide constant feedback, writing to newspapers and websites, or speaking out on your favorite talk radio program.

Citizenship means going further, too, joining with groups already fighting for accountability, or tackling problems ourselves by organizing friends, neighbors and co-workers. We can overcome abusive government policies and protect the right of citizens to speak out, to petition their government.

The national media may obsess with whatever is going on — or not going on — in Washington, but we don’t have to. We can look to the state and local arenas, where citizens are better able to reassert control over out-of-control government.

As early as next year this time voters can be deciding new statewide ballot measures in Ohio and Washington. Such measures crop up even sooner at the local level . . . but only if concerned citizens get together to do the hard work of petitioning reforms onto the ballot.

Politics can be more than a spectator sport. In fact, it must be much more than that if we aim to leave freedom and prosperity to our children and grandchildren, rather than bondage and debt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Wow, This Job Is Tough

It’s a dirty job, kicking voters in the teeth. But somebody’s gotta do it.

I speak of the craven marionettes of the New York City Council, complaining how tough it is to abet Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assault on democracy. Bloomberg demanded a third term in office. He pulled strings.

Polls show that voters like the two-term limit that they twice endorsed at the ballot box. So instead of asking voters to change their minds, city politicians connived to ignore them.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn explained that ignoring voters is demanded by these hard times. Weakening term limits is a “vote and a choice” that is “a difficult one,” but you know, the city is now, she says, “facing the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression.” Ergo voters must be treated like chopped liver. Sequitur, meet non. Non sequitur.

Councilman Simcha Felder concurs.

“Before us today is a very difficult decision, and one which we have been elected to make,” Felder told his colleagues.

You see, voters elected Felder to ignore the voters and keep himself in power longer against their wishes. So what else could he do? Why oh why can’t the stupid voters protesting this unilateral overthrow of term limits understand this?

The poor politicians. Nobody understands how tough they have it, serving their narrow political self-interest and sticking it to the citizenry. It is the weight of the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Socialism Fails . . . in Hawaii

We may have dismal years ahead of us. Democrats ruling Congress while Barack Obama, Mr. Redistributionist, will preside over an attempt to move in lurch step to massive new amounts of spending and taxes.

I write these words before the election, so maybe by the time you hear them, the electorate will have proved me wrong. But, hey: Under a McCain administration the federales would still not likely shy away from big government insanity.

There is, however, hope. When wishful thinking slams head-on into practical reality, sometimes we take stock. Sometimes we even say things like, “Know what? This is dumb and destructive. Let’s stop.”

We saw this in the 1980s and ’90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the turn toward freer markets in many former Soviet or other tyrannies (and near-tyrannies) around in the world.

And we’ve just seen an example here in the states, in Hawaii. There the state is ending its universal health care plan for children. Why? Because it was getting too expensive.

A government doctor in Hawaii named Kenny Fink reports, “People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free.” He adds that that this was not the purpose.

Of course not. Socialism is never supposed to kill economic incentives and self-responsibility. It just always does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom property rights

Barbed Logic

Bill Malcolm has grown potatoes, onions, asparagus and other veggies in his garden in Marlbrook, Worcestershire, for eight years. Unfortunately, in the past four months he has been burgled three times. Thieves stole £300 worth of garden tools. (That’s not weight, that’s British currency.)

So Mr. Malcolm erected a wire fence with a row or two of barbed wire on top. To discourage thievery.

A professional thief could make short order of the fence. But our English gardener figured that it wasn’t the pros who had stolen from him. So he proceeded.

And then came the Bromsgrove district council, which ordered the gardener to take down his fence . . . or have it be taken down by force of law.

Why?

The local government was afraid it might get sued by a thief who scratched himself on the barbs of the wire.

The fact that the thief would have been in the wrong, for trespass and for intent to steal, that didn’t matter to the council. They were only afraid of being sued.

They gave friendly advice to Bill Malcolm: Not to leave his tools at his garden, in the shed, but to take them home with him.

If you think this is idiotic, I haven’t told you the punch line. That same government, a few weeks before, said not to lock sheds, in case burglars damaged them while breaking in.

It’s nice to know what government is for, eh? That is, insanity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights too much government

Light Rail, Too Heavy for Developers

American city planners tend to obsess over trains. Though not nearly as economical as buses, light rail trains are regarded as the gold standard in public transportation.

But ten years after Portland established its westside line, just how bad an investment light rail can be is becoming clear. So argues John A. Charles, Jr., president of the Cascade Policy Institute.

The area’s light rail system is called MAX. The westside line put up in 1998 maxed out at $963 million. Taxpayers nationwide footed nearly three-quarters of the bill, which went through over the protests of the Federal Transit Authority.

The FTA didn’t like the route, because it was run through a lot of empty area. Why? Because planners hoped that developers would build high-density housing along the line, thus justifying the route as time went on. It was a grand experiment in metropolitan planning.

Metro planners then cajoled and forced various city governments to redo their zoning laws to make the high-density developments more train-dependent. They specified an extremely scarce supply of parking.

And the developers? They stayed away in droves. As a landowner put it, “it’s never been developed” because of that very “mandated lack of parking.”

Government geniuses might think they can force people into the types of communities that people don’t want, like people were lab rats. Peculiar thing is, folks just naively thinking they are free, tend not to jump aboard that train . . . so to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall

Why the People

Some people wonder at my support for initiative and referendum. They don’t place much trust in their neighbors to run their lives. They fear what de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”

And hey: I don’t trust fellow voters to run my life, either. But I trust voters to let me be free to run my own life more a lot more than I trust politicians.

Voters will choose less government more often than their representatives will.

And less government, in today’s context, means better government.

This was most notably demonstrated in late September. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on the Bush administration’s proposed bailout of the mortgage industry, the biggest takeover of private property in world history.

To politicians, it made a whole heckuva a lot of sense. To Americans who wrote and phoned Congress, the bailout appeared just as it was: a quickie, panic “fix” that merely lined the pockets of a sector of the investor population.

It was a subsidy, socializing risk while letting profit remain private.

Enough Americans notified enough of their reps to convince them to take a stand, defeating the bailout. The letters came in, ten to one against the bill.

Of course, the next week Congress voted in the bailout, adding injury, in the form of a bigger price tag, to the insult of ignoring constituents.

Once again, politicians ignored the people. That’s never good government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Microcosm Out West

The Wahkiakum County Eagle covers one of the smallest counties in Washington state. Last issue’s big story was about the county’s finances.

The large picture on the front page shows county officials conferring how to lay off employees. A smaller picture features a note pinned to a wall. The note says “By October 7th the County Debt is $1.4 million.” Then, in bigger letters, it says “Do Something” with the Treasurer’s signature below.

For a county with less than 4,000 citizens to rack up a multi-million dollar debt is no small thing.

The commissioners gave notice to discontinue the county extension agreement with the state’s cow college. A bitter pill for many, since this was the first county west of the Mississippi to institute such an office.

Weirdly, the commissioners saw this coming. Revenues have been falling for some time. Yet a few years ago they bought the failing local medical clinic. A picture lower on the front page welcomes a new physician’s assistant. The hidden story here is that since the county has owned the clinic it has been costing the county at least a quarter a million per year.

Can you say “microcosm”? The microcosm — small universe — is this little county, faltering because it took over a medical delivery system.

The lesson for America, our macrocosm: Don’t take over health care. We can’t afford another huge expense on the books.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Florida Anti-Speech Tyranny

The Broward Coalition of Condominiums, Homeowners Associations and Community Organizations, Inc., regularly puts out newsletters. No surprise. Lots of organizations do.

This Florida organization, though, does something more. Its newsletters regularly feature political subjects. Nothing shocking about that, either. This is America, right?

Well, yes. But the First Amendment has been abridged. In Florida, especially, there exist onerous “electioneering communications” laws that squelch the kind of speech that the Broward Coalition engages in.

Florida law requires any group of people to register with the government if the group mentions a candidate or ballot issue in any media — electronic, paper, or plastic — and to report all of its spending and funding sources, too.

That kind of oppressive control is what started the American Revolution. Fortunately, we have a less violent way of opposing speech tyranny today.

The Broward Coalition has joined with the National Taxpayers Union and the University of Florida College Libertarians to file suit. Represented by the Institute for Justice, they charge that the law regulating their speech goes against the First Amendment.

Bert Gall, IJ senior attorney, puts it exactly right when he insists that “Florida’s law is part of a growing trend of shutting up and shutting out anyone but political pros from politics.”

And that trend must be stopped.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

When Good Economists Go Bad

It is weird to watch respected economists leap so far off the beam that you question their sanity.

The number who supported the federal bailout made me shake my head. I guess economists can panic, too, get all doe-eyed in the face of a power grab.

My confidence in sanity returned when I read Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith’s amazingly insightful article in the Wall Street Journal. He argued that the Treasury Department has now committed itself to a kind of auction with which it has no demonstrated competence. Smith’s practical take on the bailout folly reminds me of another Smith, Adam, way back in 1776, explaining why markets work better than governments to create the wealth of nations.

Then, a few days later, Paul Krugman received the Nobel Prize for Economics.

I had read Krugman years ago, and was impresssed with his good sense. But then he began writing op-eds for the New York Times, and, uh, I began questioning his sanity. On so many issues he seems to believe that the best government governs most. And he’s a very pro-Democratic Party partisan.

It is worth remembering, though, that Krugman is a left-winger who supports free trade, attributes Europe’s high unemployment to wage regulations, and regards anti-globalization activists as enemies of the world’s poor.

Maybe his new prize will remind him of his good sense. He might even rethink his allegiance to Party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Fear of Falling

The fear of falling is innate. Newborns have it.

The fear of falling prices is different.

What? Who fears falling prices?

Politicians and investors and the big boys in big business, that’s who. When all sorts of prices fall, it means that their plans for ever-upward growth hit the hard rocks of economic reality. And these downturns sure can hurt. A lot.

Yet there’s an awful lot of evidence that you just have to weather these periods. You shouldn’t panic. And you definitely should not try to “prop things up.”

But that is exactly what politicians generally try to do in an economic downturn — they try to prevent some set of prices from falling.

Post-Great War depression in Britain, and America’s own beginning of the Great Depression . . . in both downturns there were huge political forces at work, trying to prevent a sector of prices from hitting their natural floors. In those cases, it was mainly wages that got propped up.

The effect? Massive unemployment.

I’m no economic historian, so I hate to tread these waters. But I’m not going to play Santayana’s fool, forgetting history and then forced to repeat it like Sisyphus’s rock-and-roll classic on permanent skip-repeat/skip-repeat.

So remember: Propping up prices in the past didn’t work. They won’t work now with housing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.