Categories
media and media people too much government

Boring Ferry Story?

Government has a notorious record of wasting money when it engages in regular business activity. One reason is that governments tend to pick up businesses that fail, and deliver goods at prices that often have nothing to do with costs. So of course government businesses lose money. They’re set up that way.

But it’s worse than that.

Three years ago I told the sad story of Washington State’s ferry system for Puget Sound. For over a score of years, ferry system managers have been unable to provide a comprehensible audit, unable even to account for cash flow.

Now, a series of stories for Channel 5 in Seattle, by Susannah Frame, has exposed the operation for wasting “millions and millions of taxpayer dollars,” according to Ken Schram, a popular Seattle-area pundit who works for another news service on another channel.

Schram claims not to know “why every news organization in the Puget Sound isn’t outraged.” He sees this as a non-partisan issue, and is befuddled by lack of interest from news consumers. And he’s especially annoyed by Washington State’s governor, who blew off the news story, saying she couldn’t keep track of everything. Schram calls her arrogant, and goes further: “I find her lack of regard and respect for taxpayers offensive.”

I’m on Schram’s side, except I wonder: Is this really all so inexplicable? Maybe everybody just knows, deep down, that government businesses never will run as well as real businesses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Road to Number One

Good news and bad news.

The good news: F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, an exploration of the fallacies of socialism and the very real political hazards of bureaucratic, centralized planning, has been riding high on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. It even made it to No. 1 on the list, and is No. 6 as I write.

Pretty amazing for a reprint of a 66-year-old treatise on how economic controls foster tyranny.

Economist Hayek’s most accessible tome first hit it big in the 1940s, especially after Reader’s Digest excerpted it. The book resurges in popularity now thanks to something a bit different than a Digest excerpt. Glenn Beck featured it on his controversial talk show, praising it in glowing terms.

But there’s a deeper reason for its comeback, the reason Beck turned to in the first place: Its insights seem particularly relevant in an era of spastic expansion of government power.

That’s the bad news.

Gene Healey, at Cato Institute’s blog, suggests that “the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek’s book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government. . . . Things seem out of control.”

Maybe, with Hayek’s help, we can hang a U-ee and reverse course.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Pensacola Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party wasn’t about tea. It wasn’t even about high taxes.

“The Boston Tea Party happened during a time of very low taxes,” explains Eric O’Keefe on the Heritage Foundation blog, “and the tea in the harbor had the lowest price of any tea from Britain for years.… But the patriots viewed their local control of government and taxes as an essential anchor for their liberty, so they rebelled at a violation of a basic principle.”

The Tea Party — the American Revolution — was about government. Self-government.

The same issue has surfaced in Pensacola, Florida, where ten citizens are circulating a petition there to challenge a “design-build” contract the City Council approved in May to develop a park and build a stadium.

The Pensacola News Journal headline reads: “Petition drive won’t stop park, CMPA attorney says.” The CMPA is the Community Maritime Park Associates. Their attorney, Ed Fleming, says “Even if they did collect enough signatures and it does get approved by voters, the park has passed a point of approval that it is going to be built now.”

Hmmm?

One of the petitioners, former City Councilman Jack Nobles, said, “I would hope they would re-evaluate their positions based on the wishes of the public.”

It’s not about a stadium or a park construction process. Or tea or taxes. It’s about self-government, about keeping citizens in charge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
judiciary Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Advance for Rights

Next to the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment might well be the most momentous Amendment to the Constitution. Here’s the most interesting chunk of it:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Before this amendment, adopted after the Civil War (mainly to keep white southerners from tyrannizing ex-slaves), the Bill of Rights had applied to individuals only against the federal government. After it, states were required to follow the Bill of Rights, too.

This week, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, five of nine members of the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own guns against prohibitive regulation by states. In Heller, two years ago, the Supreme Court had applied the Second Amendment to individuals only against federal government regulation.

McDonald is a major advance for gun ownership rights. But the most interesting thing about the case is Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate concurrence. Four of the Justices decided that the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause applied. Thomas argued, instead, that it is the “privileges and immunities” clause that matters.

Why care? Well, “privileges and immunities” is just a fancy way of saying “rights.”

That’s why we have courts. To protect our rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
porkbarrel politics

Fitting Tribute

Senator Robert Byrd has passed from this world, ending a 58-year perch in power, the longest stint in the entire history of Congress.

Politics isn’t a sport, though sometimes it’s blood-sport . . . thus there’s no jersey to retire.

So what do you offer to the memory of a man who in life already appropriated nearly everything possible? What’s the proper homage to the King of Pork?

Retire the earmark, once and for all.

Congress had a good run with earmarked pork barrel spending, and Byrd was that run’s poster boy. He had bridges named after him, highways and freeways and a stadium or two. Airports. Special rooms in the legislative wing. All paid for by taxpayers, most often funded by Congress through sneaking said projects into legislation without requiring a separate, conscious and above-board vote.

You might think it nicer, if not wiser, to commemorate the man for his habit of keeping a pocket Constitution on his person at all times. Or for his knowledge of history. Or arcane Senate rules. Certainly, it wouldn’t be polite to mention his “youthful” organizing of his state’s KKK.

But West Virginia’s senior senator was so closely associated with self-aggrandizing earmarked spending that no other honor comes close — we should push for a true monument to outshine all others. And that’s why I suggest cutting out the earmark.

Make the porkers squeal.

And let the tumult stand as a salute to Sen. Byrd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights incumbents national politics & policies

The Kill-Political-Discourse Act

Sometimes politicians name their legislation the better to hide what they are trying to do. The name fails to disclose, you might say.

Consider the so-called DISCLOSE Act, which just passed the House of Representatives by a mostly party-line vote of 219-206 and is now awaiting action in the Senate. The full name of the monstrosity is the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act. It should be called the Democracy Is Undermined by Rigging the Game to Favor Incumbents and Especially Democrats Act.

The goal is to hamper political advertising by independent groups and corporations by requiring disclosure of the names of contributors who give above $600 a year. The new rules would harm corporations more than unions, and would foist anew some of the same burdens on First Amendment rights just overturned by the Supreme Court. The same court that threw out chunks of McCain-Feingold on free speech grounds would also likely find DISCLOSE unconstitutional.

But could the court do so before the 2010 elections? Democrats like Hank Johnson ― who told fellow partisans that the Act, if passed, would stop Republicans from being elected ― are betting that it can’t. Their hope is that with the speech-shackling new law skewing things in their favor until the high court acts, they’ll be more likely to escape political annihilation in November.

No, we can’t wait for the Supremes on this one. Call your senator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

E-Power to the People

Disagreement is simply an inescapable part of living with one another. But we should all agree on one thing: The people are sovereign.

The practical question is, how is that sovereignty best instituted? Our experience with those organization and rules we’ve come to rely upon is that, too often, they work against our interests, even working mightily to limit our sovereignty.

Earlier this week, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that electronic signatures should be counted in a case involving an independent candidate for governor who was required by law to gather 1,000 official voter affirmations on a petition.

Of immediate concern is whether the same standard on e-signatures should apply to initiative petitions, which in Utah are required to number over 100,000. Utahns for Ethical Government is asking the AG to count electronic signatures on their measure.

There are certainly issues as to how best to authenticate e-signatures. But can there be any doubt as to the desirability of making it easier for voters to sign petitions and place issues they deem important before their fellow sovereign citizens?

There’s entrenched political opposition to that, though. Utah Governor Gary Herbert says “electronic signatures are part of the future” — but he hopes that’s the far distant future. He wants the legislature to weigh in. Which it may do, working around the judgment of the State Supreme Court.

Will popular sovereignty make it to the Internet, today’s dominant interactivity realm?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

The Maywood Solution

What do you do when your town’s politics has been bitter and internecine for years, when your police force is best known for hiring disgraced cops from other departments, and when your town budget is nearly half a million bucks in the red?

Give up.

Well, not quite. The town of Maywood, not far south of downtown Los Angeles, was in just such a pickle, and resorted to a rather extreme solution: The elected officials, town manager, and city attorney kept their positions, but everybody else was let go.

The move was forced by the fact that no insurance company would guarantee the burg. The town had grown so iffy on all counts that it would have been crazy to bet on it. Thus placed in legal jeopardy, the town’s leaders decided that the only way to keep their jobs was to get rid of all others.

No. Wait. That’s too cynical. With a civic culture so corrupt something had to be done to move forward.

That makes Maywood’s next step almost sheer genius: Contract police, fire, everything else to neighboring, better-run jurisdictions. The county Sheriff takes over police patrols. Bell, a neighbor city, takes over the bulk of municipal services.

The new arrangement begins July 1. This makes Maywood one city to watch. Could it be a bellwether? In collapsing California, very likely.

And what about other cities in other states? It might mean a revolution: Economic competition for public services.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets tax policy too much government

Cinema Without Subsidy

Yesterday I insisted that states stop subsidizing filmmaking. Implied, I hope, was the notion that states needn’t provide tax credits to lure movie shoots to their state, either.

No sooner did I wrap up that argument (with the premature proclamation “end of story”) than I read a fine article on Show Me Daily about how “States Can Entice Businesses and Industries Without Credits.” The article begins talking about making films in Wisconsin, where the tax credits were just cut by two thirds. And yet the state has nabbed some major film efforts.

According to Show Me, “Wisconsin sets a great example. . . .” Every state has something going for it, unique locations, geography, architecture, people, climate, what-have-you. “Firms will locate” where they do for relevant reasons; “they don’t need to be bribed with generous incentive packages.”

But, but, but, but! some will sputter. Film companies are special firms. They start up, inhabit a location for a while, and then vamoose. State regulations and business taxation often makes it very difficult to shoot in a particular place. Filmmakers need special help around encumbering bureaucratic obstacles.

I’m sympathetic. For example, the business-and-occupation taxes that increasing numbers of states are instituting are horrendously burdensome: They take from gross revenues, of all things!

But the proper way around such counter-productive laws is outright repeal, setting up better state revenue programs . . . ones that are not so generally destructive of industry, including the film industry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Knot Cannibalism!

Midas, in honor of his peasant-turned-king father, King Gordias, dedicated an ox-cart to the gods, tying it with a knot so complex no one could undo it. It was there years later when Alexander of Macedon stopped by, and turned his hand to untying it. He couldn’t. So he took his sword and cut it open.

Some seemingly insoluble problems are best solved by stepping back and “cutting the Gordian knot.”

Take a current knot, fictional cannibalism. The auteur responsible for the gore-fest The Offspring recently sought funding for another cannibalism horror film, to be entitled The Woman.

The funder turned him down. “This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” said the head honcho of the funding institution, the state’s film commission.

Two years ago, that tax-funded organization produced 26 separate efforts. “Isn’t that just amazing?” Commissioner Janet Lockwood gurgled.

But her turning down funding for a horror film, for reasons of content, have let loose a storm of criticism. Some say that when government says “no” to an artistic product on content grounds, that’s censorship.

They are right.

Others say they don’t want their tax dollars going to vile, disgusting depictions of cannibalism and other vices and crimes.

And they are right, too.

The solution? Cut the knot of this problem in one swipe: Governments shouldn’t fund films. End of story. [Roll credits.]

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.