Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Can You Cut It?

Let me call to your attention a noble and popular (if perhaps slightly under-baked) political initiative launched by Congressman Eric Cantor and the House Republican Economy Recovery Working Group. It’s called YouCut. The goal is to let people vote for spending cuts they’d like to see Congress enact.

The response has been enthusiastic. Cantor reports that the first week YouCut was up and running, visitors cast an average of more than 3,000 votes an hour. People are also mailing in ideas of their own — tens of thousands of ideas.

Yet so far there have been only two “winners” of the YouCut budget-cut sweepstakes. One winning idea was to cut a redundant welfare program. The other was to drop the latest pay raise for nonmilitary federal employees. These cuts would save several billion in the short run and many more billions down the line.

Great . . . but why have only two spending-cut ideas passed muster so far? We’ve got trillions in expenditures to eliminate. And it’s really not that hard to find greasy marbled slabs in the federal budget to hack away at. YouCut’s contest rules are way too “conservative.”

Therefore, by the power vested in me as a fellow downtrodden taxpayer, I hereby authorize any and all spending cut ideas vetted by YouCut visitors that earn more than a dozen votes be judged victorious and worthy of immediate implementation.

Congratulations to all you winners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Prophet of Loss

What if Karl Marx was . . .  half right?

Marx’s theory of history elaborated that, with each bust of the boom-and-bust cycle, the rich would nab ever more property — capital — until impoverished workers united to take all that capital for “themselves” (as a collective) and run it for the common good.

That’s dialectical materialism. It didn’t predict what happened even in Communist countries. But something vaguely Marxian is going on now.

Today, when there’s a bust, government bails out the failed rich guys — even buying companies.

Further, governments keep hiring more people to “stimulate” the economy. Government workers increase as a percentage of the workforce, with higher-than-average wages and benefits.

This used to be called “creeping socialism.” Politicians move us closer to total government — measure by measure, tax by tax, law by law. No revolution necessary.

Except . . . well, as politicians put more of our eggs into the collectivist basket, each down-swoop of the business cycle makes the whole system less stable — and (with increasing taxes and debt) more burdensome to sustain.

It could all lead to revolt — a taxpayer revolt.

Taxpayers, who’ve had to put up with a lot of nonsense over the years, aren’t even a tad bit interested in the foolishness of communism — or a corporate, fascist super-state.

That’s where Marx and his followers had it all wrong. Only the build-up of instability seems Marxian. Americans’ response is to seek limits on government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom

Videotape Police Abuse, Go to Jail?

George Donnelly may be wondering what country he is in right now.

Recently, he and other activists trying to hand out pamphlets published by the Fully Informed Jury Association were confronted by U.S. marshals in Manhattan. Attempting to record the encounter, Donnelly found himself being pushed to the pavement by the marshals. Then arrested. He is accused of “assaulting a federal marshal.” Another FIJA activist on the scene, Julian Heicklin, was also arrested.

The Libertarian News Examiner is among those reporting about the injustice.

In another recent case, documented by Reason magazine’s Radley Balko, a Maryland motorcyclist was arrested for videotaping an encounter during which a state trooper pulled a gun. Andy Gruber thought this out of bounds. So he posted the video, which he had captured with a camera tucked in his helmet, on the Internet. This resulted in a raid and arrest, and the possibility of imprisonment. Maryland police officers claim that it’s “illegal” to record anybody’s voice — ever — in Maryland, a willful misinterpretation of the state’s wiretapping laws.

Miscarriages of justice have often been rectified only when video comes to light exposing falsehoods in the official story. As inconvenient as it is for law enforcers to be held accountable for how they do their jobs, the alternative of letting them make up the rules as they go along and hide or destroy evidence of their conduct is grotesquely unreasonable and dangerous, and should be itself punishable by law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets

Finding Common Sense in China?

Las Vegas gambling entrepreneur Steve Wynn says that “common sense” has “disappeared in Washington, DC.” In a recent interview on CNBC, he complained about the federal government’s “wild, uncontrolled spending” and “unbelievable, unsustainable debt.”

Good point, of course, but nothing new. Still, Wynn’s rant went further.

Wynn is opening a new headquarters for his casino empire in Macau, China, and was asked if he expected to find “common sense in Macau.” He didn’t mince words, arguing that the “opportunities” were “far superior abroad than in America.”

But what about the regulation and government oversight in Macau, China, versus the U.S.?

“Macau has been steady,” he replied. “The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington. That’s where we get surprises everyday. That’s where taxes are changed every five minutes. That’s where you don’t know what to expect tomorrow. To compare political stability and predictability in China to Washington is like comparing Mount Everest to an ant hill.

“Macau and China is stable. Washington is not. Is there a businessman or a media person in America . . . that isn’t frightened about what the next crazy idea is coming from Washington? . . . Everything is cuckoo and God knows what’s next.”

Wynn closed by saying, “The uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody. . . . there’s a sense of fear that the politicians are ruining us . . .  It’s got to stop.”

Amen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom too much government

How Dare You Say We Waste Our Time?

Businessmen tend to be extremely concerned about efficiency, even to the point of talking incessantly about things like “performance metrics.”

Bureaucrats? Not so much.

Indeed, the merest suggestion that a program isn’t cutting the mustard can bring on protests of outrage. John Payne, writing on The Lesson Applied, caught my attention to one such instance. Quoting from the Associated Press, he reveals the passion and “logic” of former “drug czar” John Walters:

“To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven’t made any difference is ridiculous,” Walters said. “It destroys everything we’ve done. It’s saying all the people involved in law enforcement, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time.”

Payne’s no-nonsense response? “Yes, that is exactly what critics of the drug war are saying.”

Why did Walters take such umbrage? Could it be to intimidate us into not thinking about the evidence that drug-war critics present? Or questioning the logic of the whole program?

And the logic is a tad shaky: Allegedly to prevent some people from ruining their lives, we ruin those lives and many, many others.

Hundreds of thousands of people in prison. Billions in property confiscated without due process. Innocents shot in no-knock raids — including dogs, little girls . . . and the police themselves from innocent Americans defending themselves from seemingly anonymous attackers in the night.

Drug abuse can be very bad. I know. But Constitution-abuse can be worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets government transparency

Ignorance Is Strength (for Boodle Mongers)

Journalist Mark Tapscott helps spread the word about the boondoggles perpetrated by the Department of Agriculture. But his work is being thwarted by the Super Friends of Government Transparency, the Democratic Congress.

The Ag Department manages Congress’s wretched, anti-productive policy of paying farmers to grow fewer crops. It also applies these New-Deal-era policies in the silliest manner possible — for example, by giving former basketball star Scottie Pippen $130,000 over five years not to grow crops.

Other Dust-Bowl-afflicted tillers of the field rescued with taxpayer-funded largesse include Sam Donaldson, Ted Turner, Larry Flynt and Ben Bradlee. The ridiculous payouts were exposed thanks to the efforts of a nonprofit outfit called Environmental Working Group (EWG), which posted an Agriculture Department database on its website. It obtained the data from reluctant officials by dint of the Freedom of Information Act.

Back in 2002, Tapscott reported that then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had tried but failed to exempt such embarrassing spending details from freedom-of-information laws. Because he failed, the EWG could keep updating its database. But in 2008, the Democrats finally let the Department of Agriculture off the hook. Complying with information requests about its crazy subsidies is now “optional.”

So Aggie officials don’t bother.

Tapscott presses the obvious point: Wasn’t the new Democratic majority slated to embody the “most honest and transparent” Congress ever?

Perhaps their new slogan will be Ignorance is Strength?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy too much government

A Plague Upon Small Business

Those who like Big Government tend to dislike Big Business. So it must be just an unintended effect that shiny, new government programs invariably harm small businesses, aiding big ones.

There are many examples of this. Today’s comes from the biggest new kid on the block, the new health care reform.

Who wins with it? Sure isn’t small business.

The increased paperwork and added regulations especially burden smaller operations. Big corporations can more easily eat the additional costs. Small businesses, on the other hand, have to expend a greater percentage of their gross incomes to meet new requirements, and this drain on their resources means that they can’t compete as well against the big guys, toe-to-toe in the marketplace.

Worse yet, even the special tax credits tossed in small businesses’ direction serve up a thorny mess of complexity and arcane paperwork. And while the credits are scheduled to evaporate, there appears no end to soaring costs.

Finally, the new IRS 1099 reporting requirements on business-to-business transactions of $600 or more will hit small businesses hard. These new required forms are in effect a tax themselves, because the extra paperwork will cost real money.

Is this any way to improve health care? No. It’s got nothing to do with health care. It’s just a way to increase the tax take and another way Big Government helps Big Business at the expense of the little guys.

And that’s sick.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy

But He Promised

Like the rest of us, politicians can honestly change their mind about an issue.

But when a presidential candidate “firmly” pledges to, say, never act to raise taxes of any kind on families earning less than $250,000 a year, and then reneges, that doesn’t quite count. And then when, soon after being elected, the politician pretends that his earlier pledge doesn’t mean what it plainly meant — or even pretends that he never made the pledge at all — one suspects that the original promise was really a fib, a falsehood. From the get-go.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos given last September during the health care debate, Barack Obama tried to escape his no-new-taxes pledge by asserting that the new taxes that would be imposed on Americans declining to buy health insurance under his health care plan would not in fact be taxes. With a straight face, Obama even disputed the dictionary definition of “tax” that Stephanopoulos recited to him.

Now we’re hearing from an administration official that the president never even made the pledge. According to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, it was merely an expression of a “preference.” We’ll have to wait until a bipartisan commission (on how to tax us more) finishes its work before we learn whether it will be viable for Obama to hew to that “preference.”

Meanwhile, those who prefer truth can view the video proof of an actual pledge on YouTube.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Incumbents and Upstarts

Guess who said this: “My gosh, these people in Washington are running the country right into the ground.”

According to the New York Times, it was Senator Orrin Hatch who voiced that lament — “despite having lived and worked [in Washington DC] for the last 34 years.”

Those old-timers! They retain all the advantages of incumbency, but pretend to be exempt from criticism when the results of their habits become clear.

That’s why last week’s primaries auger well: Seems that being the establishment’s favored candidate — or a longtime incumbent — does not even guarantee winning a nomination.

In Pennsylvania, the unprincipled Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter sought to avoid getting clobbered in the GOP primary. Instead, he got clobbered in the Democratic primary — despite the support of the Democratic Party establishment.

Likewise, in Kentucky, Rand Paul wrested the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate from Secretary of State Trey Grayson, the party-backed candidate, with a 23 percent margin.

Paul, who explicitly allies himself with the Tea Party movement, was soon engulfed in controversy over the 46-year old Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations. Meanwhile, Congressman Sestak’s charge that the Obama White House offered him a federal job in an attempt to keep him out of the race, possibly a federal crime, dampened the news of his triumph.

Still, it seems clear: the voters don’t want “Those people in Washington” running the country into the ground.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Free Speech Assault Dropped

America has a relatively robust tradition of respecting freedom of speech. Nevertheless, our government officials often find criticism not only annoying but actionable.

But actionable how?

Campaign finance regulation offers officials one avenue to go after political critics. The CFR regime is so ambiguous and complex that it often seems to cover anything anybody might say at any time about anybody running for office. But the ever-metastasizing repressive power of campaign finance regulation was probably not what Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett was relying on when he subpoenaed Twitter, the micro-blogging company, to try to learn who was savaging his conduct as attorney general.

Corbett demanded names, street addresses and IP addresses of two Twitter subscribers who have been claiming that his investigation into public corruption was politically motivated. Twitter representatives were threatened with arrest if they failed to appear before a grand jury to “give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

Corbett’s office claims that the subpoena had nothing to do with aversion to political criticism but was related to a particular prosecution. Perhaps the angry tweeters were really a single disgruntled defendant, only pretending to be contrite in court?

Regardless, the attorney general was obviously on a fishing expedition, one that targeted First Amendment rights. The outcry from Twitter users, the ACLU, and others was swift and vehement, so Corbett has dropped his abusive subpoena.

Perhaps he should also drop his gubernatorial campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.