Common Sense with Paul Jacob

The trouble with making government the solution for our medical system’s failures is that government is without a doubt the chief cause of those failures.

Greg Blankenship, founder and president of the Illinois Policy Institute, recently made this very clear in a fascinating column. Blankenship looks at the regulations that beset planning for medical care in his state, Illinois, and gives it a name: Protectionism.

As he makes clear, protectionism isn’t just for busybody politicians in nation-states. State governments, when they heavily regulate an industry, get in on the act, too.

And, like nationwide protectionism, special interest influences come to play, with one or two businesses reaping most of the rewards. Blankenship likened the practice to fast food restaurant regulatory boards getting captured by McDonald’s. Suddenly, Burger King outlets can’t get permission to expand.

Economists have been writing on this for 50 years or more. Regulatory capture. And in Illinois it means that a hospital in Joliet hasn’t been allowed to add beds to its mental health and OB-GYN clinics for years now. Nearby hospitals in Aurora, Joliet, Bolingbrook and Morris oppose the project.

So people in Joliet suffer.

And no doubt blame insufficiencies on doctors, or nurses’ unions, or markets in general.

Yet the real blame rests solely on the state of Illinois and its Health Facilities Planning Board. A sad case, yes. And a sick system.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Are America’s politicians resigned to endless budget deficits and rising debt?

Well, Comptroller General David M. Walker isn’t. As the designated gadfly of the U.S. government’s flaky finances, he’s done a bang-up job. Or, at least, that’s what my accounting friends all say.

But now he has resigned. Effective March 12, he will no longer serve as Comptroller General, or work as the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

He still hopes to serve as gadfly, though.

You see, he’s heading up the newly founded Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which will seek to educate citizens, businesses, and maybe even that unlikeliest class of uneducated numbskulls, our political class, as to the real dangers we face with continuous deficit spending.

Pete Peterson has been ranked by Forbes magazine as the 165th richest man in America. Now he’s investing over a billion dollars in the new foundation. His first big coup is getting David Walker on board.

Walker says that the move away from government and to full-time critic of government will be for the best. He understandably felt constricted in his old role. As a member of the government, you cannot go on bad-mouthing your bosses endlessly, even if they deserve it. Especially if they deserve it.

Walker also says that he has met all the goals in office that he had set for himself. Save one: “Congress to address the nation’s large and growing fiscal and other key sustainability challenges before a crisis hits.”

Look for more from Walker and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. And more about deficits, debt, and our uncontrolled Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Since leaving Congress, Dick Armey has been promoting smaller government as a private citizen. Armey’s organization FreedomWorks recently alerted supporters to a perverse power play in the Georgia state legislature: Payback by House Speaker Glenn Richardson against a conservative caucus called the 216 Group.

It seems Speaker Richardson wanted a political pal of his to become chair of the state transportation board. Members of the 216 Group, which meets in the capitol’s room 216, failed to vote for the speaker’s preference. Perhaps they were more concerned about living up to their motto: “less government, lower taxes, personal responsibility, and liberty and justice for all.”

So, Speaker Richardson retaliated by stripping the uncooperative members of their committee assignments.

Armey says, “Speaker Richardson may feel personally slighted that he couldn’t get a political ally on the DOT board . . . but to hamstring conservative lawmakers in his own party . . . trying to do serious policy-work on behalf of taxpayers is simply unconscionable.”

One victim, Doug Collins, told reporters that he suspected he might be penalized for crossing the speaker, “but I felt the need to vote my conscience and my constituency.”

Georgia citizens upset about Speaker Richardson’s abuse of power should demand that he reinstate demoted members and stop kicking other 216 members off their committees. Richardson’s email address is glenn.richardson@house.ga.gov. The phone number of the Speaker’s office is (404) 656-5020.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Is it possible to discuss the resignation of a dictator, like Fidel Castro, and not mention that he was, indeed, a dictator?

Apparently . . . as Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute noted on February 19, the day of the announcement. The newspaper stories that I read were carefully worded to exclude such a blunt term.

But we shouldn’t forget that Castro maintained power by rejecting democratic elections. And that practice gains for him the Longest Stay In Office Award.

Thutmose III may have ruled Egypt for four years longer, but hey: at least 20 years of that time he shared the throne with his false-beard wearing mother, Hatshepsut.

Why bring up Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaohs? Because Castro behaved more like a Pharaoh than a modern “El Presidente.” He did not merely preside over a democratically elected body — that’s where the term “president” comes from, “presider” — he also ruled the whole country without much sense of any limits.

The only term limit Fidel Castro honored was that of human frailty, I guess. To him, modern, limited-government rules like term limits made no sense. If you want to get something done, why let little things like legality and the liberties of citizens get in the way?

There are a lot of people with the same attitude. You hear it in the strangest places. Oddly, you read it in the newspapers, in their unwillingness to use a term like “dictator.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s that Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Lately I’ve been getting lots of outlandish parodies from my huge research staff, which calls itself “the Internet.” Hey, stop sending me all these goofy parodies, “Internet.” Just the facts, man.

The latest is a press release from the New York chapter of NOW, the National Organization for Women. It reads like a spoof of group-identity politics. It blasts Senator Teddy Kennedy for endorsing Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton. I quote:

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent . . . has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him . . . And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton. . . .

Geez, what a crude satire of the notion that an individual’s accidental group affiliation is far more important than the content of her character, or her ideas — assuming that even the most blinkered partisan of groupthink can’t grasp the impossibility of playing both the gender-identity card and the racial-identity card in this situation. And what about “the women” who don’t support Hillary?

Er . . . except it’s not a parody. It’s an actual press release of the New York chapter of NOW. They’re serious. Yikes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

My new favorite comedian is Drew Carey.

Not that Carey is funnier than, say, Don Knotts . . . or explanations of the national debt. I just like what Carey’s doing lately — helping turn local stories about political lunacy into national stories. Carey is working with reason.tv, spinoff of Reason magazine, to host professionally made online videos about threats to freedom.

One of the first, which you can watch at santanflat.com, tells of horrific abuse of power in Queen Creek, Arizona. The victim is Dale Bell, owner of San Tan Flat restaurant. Where something terrible is going on.

Dancing.

Not nude dancing. Just dancing. The county council opposes.

Mr. Bell says: “We are open, we never stopped people from dancing and we never will stop people from dancing.”

Ted Balaker, a ReasonTV producer, notes this is about the right to earn an honest living. “If you’re not harming anyone else and people enjoy dancing, that hardly seems like something that should be against the law and restricted in any way.”

County officials conducted what they called the longest “code compliance hearing” in the county’s history to decide how much the fine should be. Result? They want to fine San Tan $5,000 a day for letting his customers dance.

Remember H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism? “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”

But it ain’t over. Not with lawyers from the Institute for Justice now on board; and not with Drew Cary promoting the story, aided by Reason.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Are you like me? Are you interested in the right of direct democracy, of initiative and referendum? Do you wish we had some nifty collaborative way to  aggregate fast-changing facts about citizen initiatives and other ballot issues?

No sooner do I wave my magic wand than somebody else has done the hard work of setting up Ballotpedia, a project of Citizens in Charge Foundation. Stick a “.org” on the end of it and you’ve got the url for the site, ballotpedia.org. You can also click into it from the Citizens in Charge home page.

If you know about Wikipedia, you can guess that Ballotpedia is a Web resource with a similar format. The difference? Ballotpedia specializes: It’s everything about ballot measures, voter rights, citizen initiative rights, litigation about these, the ballot rules of different states, etc. Anyone with relevant information is free to add a new entry or expand a current one.

Ballotpedia has the familiar pluses and minuses of this freewheeling format. Somebody might get a fact wrong. But the open editorial process acts as a corrective.

Why do we need Ballotpedia? We’ve talked about the recent attempt in California, through Prop 93, to pull the wool over voters’ eyes and weaken term limits. Ballotpedia was one place where voters could get accurate and honest information.

So check out Ballotpedia, friend of you and me(dia)! (Hey, just be glad I don’t start a punpedia.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s in the nature of government to want to clamp down on information. You see it clearest in totalitarian systems. And in New York City.

The city’s deputy commissioner of counter-terrorism wants to clamp down the private ownership of devices that measure toxins. You know, like anthrax, asbestos, ragweed.

The mayor is all behind him. They have put forward a bill to license such devices.

Why? According to the Village Voice, after 9/11, lots of people bought toxin detectors. And “a lot of these machines didn’t work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.”

Scared now?

But the Village Voice went on to take it back as jest: “OK, none of that has actually happened.” That’s just what the regulators think might happen. The Voice was just having fun with its readers.

The scare scenario is just that, a cooked-up scenario.

At a public meeting it was noted that, soon after the catastrophe of 9/11, when the EPA said the air around Ground Zero was safe, it was privately held detectors that proved the EPA wrong. The commissioner did a little hemming and hawing. But when asked if the city really had to put unlicensed detector users in jail, this bozo said yes.

Remember folks: Fear is the great weapon of totalitarians. We have nothing to fear but fear of fear itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.