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

Wide-Eyed Wackiness

Where to begin? How about the very first sentence of the New York Times article hailing passage of the Dodd-Frank financial bill? According to the illustrious fishwrap, “sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation” reflects “a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.”

We’ve seen some liberalization of financial dealings over the years. It was once illegal to own gold. Travelers can be glad of the rise of interstate banking after governments began to permit it in the 1980s.

But have politicians really offered nothing but “wide-eyed admiration” for “Wall Street” for “decades”? Has the federal government really been hands-off till now?

Take Senators Dodd and Frank. They were out front pushing home ownership on people who could not afford homes, with multiple programs and legislative packages. This bubble-making process was further inflated (quite literally) by the Federal Reserve’s cheap credit policies. Many lenders, encouraged by government-provided (but perverse) incentives, jumped onto the Irresponsibility Bandwagon in the run-up to collapse.

So how can the “solution” be additional bailout authority . . . which will further encourage bankers and others to invest unwisely?

And the new regulations — these, too, are supposed to help? We don’t even know what they are yet, because bureaucrats have yet to write them, as specified (vaguely) by Congress. In addition to their burden, they will allow pols to shake down Wall Street for years to come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Serpentine, Indeed

California, increasingly known for its faults, has a major problem. Its politicians have rocks in their heads.

As the state teeters on the brink of insolvency, legislators are considering de-listing the mineral serpentine as the state rock.

Sponsored by State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat hailing from la la L.A., Senate Bill 624 would raise “awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Serpentine contains asbestos, a known carcinogen. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the state.”

The trouble with this is that not all — or even most — samples of the mineral (or, more correctly, mineral group) contain asbestos. Geologists, when they learned about the bill, were all abuzz. What was the Senate up to when it voted to throw out the rock?

Dan Walters, writing in the Monterey Herald, has the answer: Litigation. If the state defines serpentine itself as asbestos-laden — not just those forms that sometimes contain the substance — then trial lawyers can sue more people for having the rocks on their property, etc. Predictably, the “language in the bill was provided by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, an anti-asbestos group whose major sponsors are law firms specializing in asbestos litigation.”

If California legislators toss out the state rock to aid lawyers in plundering others, maybe the state’s citizens can use the initiative to make the rock the official symbol of the California Legislature. But only those chrysotile forms that contain the dreaded silicate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency

The Gulf in the Gulf

CNN’s Anderson Cooper wanted to know why the government wouldn’t let the media fully report on the infamous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Just before Independence Day, the Coast Guard widened the gulf between official policy and common sense — a gulf that has characterized much of the federal response to the catastrophe. A newly concocted rule prohibited camera crews and others from coming within 65 feet of response vessels or booms without obtaining special permission.

The government’s point man on all things BP-oil-spill, Admiral Thad Allen, at first defended the rule. This was the same man who, Cooper noted, had weeks earlier stressed that “the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations, except for two things, if it’s a security or a safety problem.”

The blanket 65-feet boundary arbitrarily inhibited access. And it raised Anderson Cooper’s ire:

“We’re not the enemy here,” Cooper clarified. “Those of us down here trying to accurately show what’s happening, we are not the enemy. I have not heard about any journalist who has disrupted relief efforts. . . . If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I would move.”

Anderson Cooper’s criticism of the rule, and its widespread coverage, elicited a backlash. In less than two weeks the rule was lifted for reporters.

Openness? Transparency? Governments don’t like it. Citizens do.

The lesson appears to be that we are likely to get transparency only after loudly demanding it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets Ninth Amendment rights too much government

Farm at Your Own Risk

Some of the most vicious threats to individual rights and liberty occur not on the federal but on the local level. Clint Bolick, an attorney who has combated many local governmental assaults on citizens around the country, once wrote a book to make the point entitled Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty.

Example? Consider the zany local edict issued in the little town of Lake Elmo, Minnesota. The Institute for Justice — Bolick’s old stomping ground — informs us that the city council there has begun “enforcing a law that makes it illegal for farmers to sell products from their own land unless they were grown within Lake Elmo.”

Two of the farmers being threatened with fines and 90 days in jail are Richard and Eileen Bergman, who have tilled the land in Lake Elmo for almost four decades. They grow pumpkins. But part of their farm extends beyond the city limits, and most of their pumpkins grow on that out-of-Elmo part.

The Institute for Justice has filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the town’s ban on out of-of-town pumpkins. Council members who support the ban must have some ludicrous theory about how such totalitarian edicts goose the local economy. But the ban is certainly no good for folks stopped from buying and selling what they want to buy and sell.

And how, pray tell, do you promote local farming by throwing local farmers in jail?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Winners and Losers in Sports and Government

Sports excite because of the contest: There are winners and losers. But in making “big shows,” some promoters make losers of us all.

South Africa’s sticker price for hosting the World Cup was marked up past $4 billion to nearly $6 billion. The games generated fewer billions in revenue, but the taxpayers of South Africa, one-fourth of whom are out of work, will see little return on their massive investment.

So why would politicians want to “invest” only to lose?

They can’t resist the hoopla. They get to throw a big show with someone else’s bucks. And if some of the money they throw around reaches their pals’ businesses, all the better.

Around the world, governments vie to spend tax money like South Africa just did. In America, we have our city-funded/state-funded sports stadiums. And remember when our president flew across the globe to pitch for the Chicago Olympics?

Rather than soccer fans paying for soccer, baseball fans for baseball, etc., taxpayers support soccer at the expense of those who find the game tedious, baseball fans helped at the expense of opera lovers, etc.

But considering the wages paid to athletes and the profits made by team owners, these subsidies flow bigger not so much from fan to fan but from regular folks to the rich.

Governments are supposed to serve us all. It ruins the game when governments pick sides through subsidies. That way we all lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
judiciary Ninth Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Rights Retained by All But Kagan

When grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan didn’t have to go out on a limb to dismiss the rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. Most liberals and conservatives share the view that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not defend “natural rights.”

Yet, our Founders regarded natural rights as an important restraint on government.

Not so with progressives today and yesterday. As scholar Jim Powell noted in The Daily Caller, progressives don’t like natural rights, or the function they serve. Powell quotes Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t think any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”

TR was wrong. Progress depends not on unlimited power for leaders and bureaus, but on limiting those powers so voluntary co-operation can work its wonders.

Progressives from TR to Kagan oppose natural rights because they run dead against progressivism.

Even the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights limits government too much for progressives, so they twist words to get rid of their practicality.

The idea of natural, basic rights find their most concise defense in the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The question to ask Supreme Court candidates — indeed, any person who must swear to “uphold the Constitution” — is how “the people” can retain their unenumerated rights.

The question is almost never asked.

To our detriment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Déjà vu Economics

Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?

Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Sometimes a Great Reversal

After World War II, European Social Democrats — the heirs of Karl Marx’s delusional vision — broke with their heritage. They rewrote their political principles, compromising. No longer would they go for socialism whole hog; they abandoned its key feature, the replacement of markets with total government control.

This was a great moment for modern civilization. It bequeathed Europe (and, perhaps, America) a clunky and intrusive (and unsustainable) welfare states, sure . . . but that’s far, far better than Communism.

We may be witnessing a similar groundswell of ideological shift in America’s stronghold of the status quo, the media. This week the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times endorsed budgetary rules that would take power and unlimited budgetary discretion from California’s out-of-control legislature:

It’s unfortunate that automated budgeting is necessary. But it is necessary. The state must continue to invest in the social welfare of its people, but we must do it in accordance with California’s projected growth so that we do not repeatedly yank from the young, the elderly and the poor the very services that we provided only a year or two before.

This may not sound revolutionary. But, as Tim Cavanaugh put it on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, the Times — long an opponent of spending limits — has “acknowledge[d] clearly and publicly that out-of-control spending, not insufficient tax revenue, is suffocating the Golden State.”

And that is revolutionary. Not American Founder-revolutionary, but Social Democrat-compromise-y revolutionary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

How to Keep Your Health Insurance Plan

Like the medical insurance coverage you have now? Don’t worry, you can keep it under the new “health care” regime . . . Or so President Obama and his Democratic allies promised during the recent debates over reform of medical insurance and delivery institutions.

Now we’re now learning, per “internal White House documents,” that the insurance plans we were told would enjoy grandfathered protection under the new law won’t be immune at all. Looks like more than half of current company plans must be chucked by 2013.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently, the goal has always been destruction of private insurance. But why? Well, so government can swoop in to “rescue” us after private firms collapse under the weight of all the new taxes and regulations.

The State of Massachusetts offers a preview of what awaits us. Insurance regulators there were recently warned by a department in charge of “monitoring solvency” that a new round of price caps on insurance rates would jeopardize private insurers’ solvency. Officials imposed the caps anyway. Now those private firms face losses that, if the price controls persist, can lead only to bankruptcy.

Despite all this, there is a way to keep your current health insurance coverage. All folks in Congress have to do is repeal their recent “reforms.” All you have to do is make sure they do.

To ensure that you have better options in the future? Well, very different reforms will be required. And repeals of different laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability media and media people

Catastrophic Q & A

Suppose I say that the world will blow up tomorrow unless we shut down industrial civilization. I can’t really prove this. But, if you allow me certain unsubstantiated assumptions, that is what the extrapolations show.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong, but what if I’m right? To be on the safe side, all mankind better lapse into hunter-gatherer mode immediately.

If you’re not taking me seriously, well — me neither. But my unserious argument isn’t very far from the approach of certain environmentalist doomsayers, as unable to defend their theoretical house of cards as I am to defend mine.

Exhibit A: Australian journalist Andrew Bolt’s interview with a leading environmental alarmist, Tim Flannery. Bolt does his best to pin Flannery down with respect to some of the wilder claims that Flannery’s made in his career. But it’s no go.

When Bolt points out that Flannery once claimed that Australian towns like Brisbane might “run out” of water by 2007 or 2009, his interviewee first sidesteps the question and then says it’s a lie that he ever said any such things. So Bolt comes up with a quote from Flannery’s writing that belies the denial. Flannery now “responds” by noting variability in rainfall and trying to promote a lecture series.

And so on. Bolt is determined to hold Flannery to account for his alarmism; Flannery insists on persisting with flimsy flimflam.

Read the whole thing. It’s awfully illuminating. (And boy, do I mean “awfully”!)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.