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

A Question Worth Asking?

The presidential candidates talk about leadership and change. What’s the one question that combines both, but is not asked? Simple: What happens if it all comes crashing down?

After the worst stock market drop since 9/11, the question doesn’t seem so out of place. Our federal government’s debt is rising fast. Even if we balanced the budget tomorrow, the government would have a deep, multi-trillion dollar debt. Trillions and trillions, you might say.

So, Mr. Obama; so, Mr. McCain — what do you do when the Treasury can’t find anyone to invest in all the debt we have created, and must maintain? What do we do when the compounding of interest and increased deficits make monthly maintenance impossible?

Neither of you have even suggested a balanced budget early in your first term. So what do you do when our credit goes crunch?

Add to this the federal government’s obligations to the citizenry, in the form of Social Security retirements and Medicare and pensions and such, and what can you do?

How do you stave off — or, if not, survive — a worldwide depression?

The scenario is not fantastic. Just look at current figures and crunch the numbers.

So, what would Senators Obama and McCain say? I’d be curious what Bob Barr and Ralph Nader would say, too. Have they thought of the possibility?

This is one question that sure would make the upcoming debates interesting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption

A Rose Blooms in Michigan

Rose Bogeart reminds me of my mother. Both are from Michigan. Rose is the president of the Wayne County Taxpayers Association. Mom hails from Jackson. Both love their Detroit Tigers, hate tax increases.

Rose led this year’s charge to recall Michigan House Speaker Andy Dillon. I’ve talked before about the tax hike state legislators imposed against the clear wishes of Michigan citizens. I’ve also exposed the establishment’s incredible intimidation campaign to block Rose’s recall drive.

This harassment included bad actions by state employees working for Dillon and even some police groups. Despite this, Rose and company collected nearly twice the number of voter signatures needed.

In June, Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land ruled that the petition lacked the requisite signatures, after she had opted to enforce restrictions already ruled unconstitutional in very clear U.S. Supreme Court decisions, throwing out a huge batch of signatures. Then, the Michigan courts refused to give Rose and Redford Township recall advocates any relief.

So, Rose went to federal court, where a judge quickly granted an injunction requiring Secretary of State Land to count the disputed signatures.

Now, against every sling and arrow imaginable, Speaker Dillon’s recall will be on the November ballot.

For the first time ever, a state’s House speaker may be removed by popular vote.

Rose, I thank you; history thanks you; my mother thanks you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
porkbarrel politics

One Very Fine Pig

The political season is upon us, and people get hung up on the goofiest things. Like jokes.

Sarah Palin jested about hockey moms and pit bulls, the biggest difference between them being, she says, “lipstick.”

Then Barack Obama fought back, attacking the McCain-Palin ticket and Republican policy in general with another such comparison: “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”

And, it turns out that them’s fightin’ words, because, well, Mrs. Palin is thought to “own” the word “lipstick,” and, some said, Obama had just called her a pig.

No he didn’t. If one has to deconstruct the whole fracas into symbols, Palin would be the lipstick, McCain the pig.

Of course, Obama was really talking about policies. But which policies of John McCain was Obama complaining about, which were . . . porcine?

How about McCain’s best issue, pork itself? Unfortunately for him, Sarah Palin has been too pork-receptive in her days as an Alaskan politician. McCain has resisted pork. He’s not made requesting earmarks part of his job. Obama, on the other hand, though demanding that all pork requests be put up transparently, with full disclosure, is known to ask for quite a lot. In fact, nearly a million dollars for every day he’s been in office.

It’s a pity that in all this talk of lipstick-wearing pigs, the real pork issue gets lost. No joke.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency insider corruption local leaders

Learning from Sal Grosso

Sal Grosso, a retired man in his 80s, moved to Cape Coral, Florida, after a successful career as a troubleshooter for New York State’s phone network. Since then he has served as troubleshooter for the government of Cape Coral, writing a column, kicking up a fuss.

And boy, does Cape Coral need a troubleshooter! Sal has uncovered a whole network of incompetence and corruption in the water, sewer, and charter school bureaucracies.

After years of trying, he got the state to do an operational audit of the town — which is now under federal investigation.

While preparing a column about him for Townhall.com, I learned about Sal’s methods. He solves problems through a common-sense process he calls “sectionalization.” Start with a problem area, divide it in half. Determine which half holds the problem, focus on it and repeat.

“You keep whittling the problem down until you’ve isolated it,” he says, “to a very manageable size, which enables you to decide on where to look, and what to look for.”

He’s done this with the local water system, the city budget, sewer — you name it.

If you have a knack for problem solving — say, you like puzzles — then why not follow Sal’s example and give your local governments a look? Governments often present huge puzzles. Unravelling the messes that politicians and bureaucrats have made can be very rewarding.

Well, perhaps not so much. But it IS critical in keeping government accountable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Ideas Semi-Move the World

Ideas move the world. Want a better world, spread good ideas as widely as possible.

If you can expose enough people to the right ideas, everything will work out for the best, with an ever-wider vista of freedom and achievement as the inevitable consequence. Right?

Well . . . not quite. Ideas and values don’t have any kind of independent existence. Individuals must accept and apply them. Hillary Clinton once admitted to being inspired by Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel celebrating freedom and entrepreneurship and attacking socialism. Yet Hillary still ended up trying to ram socialist health care down our throats. And she ain’t done yet.

Or take Vladimir Putin, the repressive semi-post-Communist Russian leader whose government just invaded the former satellite country of Georgia. The autocratic Putin is no Stalin, but he’s no Jefferson either . . . even if he did attend a Cato seminar on the values of a free society.

It’s true! I recently stumbled across a 2004 issue of Cato Policy Report, published by the libertarian Cato Institute. Ed Crane, Cato’s president, reported that during a long meeting with Putin, Crane and others discussed the benefits of a free press and concerns that the Russian government was repressing the media. Putin seemed open to a more across-the-board freedom. He even said he wanted to “make Moscow the center of liberal debate in Europe.”

Really? Try a little harder, Vlad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets local leaders too much government

Gateway Capitalism

You’ve heard of “gateway drugs.” What about “gateway capitalism”?

The mayor of Clayton, California, apparently believes that two little girls selling zucchinis and melons by the roadside is the start of something bad.

The city cracked down on Katie and Sabrina Lewis’s veggie stand. Mayor Gregg Manning defended the bust, saying that “They may start out with a little card-table and selling a couple of things, but then who is to say what else they have. Is all the produce made there, do they make it themselves? Are they going to have eggs and chickens for sale next?”

Heavens! Capitalism run amok! Streetside vendors are to be allowed only when city governments run the show, as in the growing movement to establish old-fashioned day-markets. You know, Saturday Markets and Sunday Markets and the like.

But veggie stands, like dreaded lemonade stands, are illegal in Clayton.

You can understand the concern, I guess: Traffic problems. This police operation started off on one complaint. But most neighbors defend the stand, saying that traffic was never a problem.

So now 11-year-old Katie has gotten political. She circulated a petition to reopen the stand, and has lots of signatures. Best of luck to Katie and Sabrina, but I am afraid that the lesson you’ll really be learning isn’t about capitalism at all. It’s about bureaucracy.

And an awful void of common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets nannyism

Jerry Brown’s Latest Trip

Some politicians are loathe to allow freedom of action even when they’re going out of their way to allow freedom of action.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown doesn’t want the federal government to harass patients who use medical marijuana, or to harass those who provide it. To implement this laissez-faire policy, Brown wants to make darn sure that any businessmen who provide cancer patients with marijuana are the ones who get raided and arrested.

What’s going on?

Cannabis for medical use has been legal in California since 1996, when voters passed Proposition 215. The federal government has not been playing along, however.

To clarify things, Attorney General Brown has issued an 11-page guideline to help “legitimate patients” avoid being arrested. The guidelines also confirm the legality of medical marijuana co-ops. Brown hopes that under the new guidelines patients will steer clear of the unapproved dispensaries.

Who is an unapproved provider? Anyone who actually makes money selling medical marijuana. Supposedly, it’s okay for a cancer patient to ease his pain with the plant, so long as there is no economic incentive for anyone to help him ease it. It must be done by nonprofit co-operatives.

Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project doesn’t agree that socialist medicine is good, capitalist medicine bad. “Last I heard,” he says, “Walgreens isn’t a charity.”

He’s right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Helter Keller

In 2000, Florida Congressman Ric Keller was just Citizen Keller, running for Congress for the first time.

An October 2000 news story states, “Regardless of whether Democrat Linda Chapin or Republican Ric Keller wins Orange County’s congressional battle, neither one of them will be in the seat past 2008. Both Chapin and Keller have signed pledges limiting themselves to eight years in office.”

Now, that was optimistic. But hey: I was optimistic too.

After Keller won his first term, I saw him speak at a conference sponsored by U.S. Term Limits. He was persuasive about the virtue of serving a few years, then stepping down. No big deal for him to leave Washington and return to Florida to enjoy balmy lakeside life. Keller was very aw-shucks and folksy about it.

That was then. Now Keller has decided eight years in one political office is not enough, despite his pledge.

He’s telling reporters that as a “rookie candidate” he just didn’t understand the importance of seniority in Washington. Hmm. That’s funny. I thought one of the best reasons to support term limits was because we understand how seniority works in Washington!

There’s also the issue of integrity versus self-interest. Other leaders have kept term-limit pledges: Mark Sanford, now the governor of South Carolina; Tom Coburn, now a U.S. Senator; and Keller’s fellow Floridian, Charles Canady, who was just nominated to serve on the state supreme court. Unlike Keller they’ve succeeded and kept their integrity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary property rights too much government

© Is for California

You might think that there’s nothing a government won’t try. You’d be right. But I was near stupified to learn that the state of California copyrights its laws. And it’s not alone.

The state tries to control — through copyright — how you can access its laws, where and how you store them, etc. The state makes available its building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws online, but requires you to ask for permission to download them!

The state’s out to make money. It charges $1,556 for a digital version, more for a print-out, and makes nearly a million dollars a year selling what is legally ours.

Yes, what’s ours. We are a nation of laws, not of men, and we have the right to own and reprint our laws as much as we want. The purpose of copyright is to ensure private parties can maintain some control over their intellectual property. But the laws themselves are, in point of elementary political theory, the intellectual property of all. Not of state bureaus.

Thankfully, heroic Internet technician and mover and shaker Carl Malamud believes in government transparency. And he, unlike Al Gore, really worked to help build the Internet.

On Labor Day Mr. Malamud published the whole California code online. Available for free.

Obviously, Malamud is spoiling for a fight. Good. He should win it. He has, after all, the law (if not the state) on his side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Bootless Economic Policy

When I was a kid, what we now call flip-flops were called thongs. When I use the word “thong” about footwear, today, I get funny looks from the kids.

Whether it’s today’s thong, or yesteryear’s, both are skimpy. When you walk, the footwear goes “flip flop, flip flop”; what happens to the underwear, well . . .

Modern Democratic Party economic policy is like the underwear — it quickly creeps into uncomfortable places. Republican economic policy resembles the Democrats’, but also the footwear. Take John McCain’s economic policy: “flip flop, flip flop.”

Recently, McCain pompously took credit for “putting” and “keeping [Americans] in their homes.” Give me a break! He’s not paying the mortgage. I liked it better when, after the housing bubble began to burst, McCain said we should be wary of subsidizing bad business decisions with a massive bailout.

But not long after saying that he then specified a whole bunch of bailout measures. Flip. Hillary Clinton chortled that at last he was getting it, but he wasn’t going far enough.

His basic problem, though, goes back to his philosophy. He said that he’s “committed to using all the resources of this government and great nation to create opportunity and make sure that every deserving American has a good job and can achieve their American dream.”

Flop. To ensure his goal, he should not use all the resources of government!

Sometimes less is more. Like . . . sandals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.