Common Sense with Paul Jacob

If you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, you’ve probably seen a few chilling out-takes. People running. Birds swooping. People screaming. Glass shattering.

Could the scenario be even scarier? Well, yes: if, say, it were illegal for the victims to defend themselves.

This is not a movie remake. That’s what the beleaguered citizens of Bartow are currently facing. This is a small town outside of Orlando — a quiet community says the Orlando Sentinel. Well, except for the screaming.

Migrating turkey vultures have turned into quite a nuisance there. They rip shingles off roofs. They chew rubber from car windows. First pecking a little. Then a lot.

And the people? Screams. Of frustration.

They’re not allowed to do much about this. They may blow a shrill whistle to try to scare off the vultures, or tactically position stuffed toys that resemble dead vultures. But the beleaguered residents may not kill or even capture the birds.

The birds are protected by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Apparently we’ve signed an agreement with the birds which makes it a criminal offense for anybody to ruffle their feathers. Too bad such well-meaning edicts don’t also make it illegal for birds to harass innocent villagers.

Once again we see the tyranny of well-meaning politics, un-tethered by even the tiniest amount of thought about the consequences.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I don’t live in Milwaukee County, so I’m not gasping right now. But, gasping or not, Milwaukee County residents have something the rest of us don’t. They have GASP.

GASP is the snappy acronym for CRG Network’s new Government Accountability in Spending Project. It’s an online database of information of Milwaukee County government’s finances. In the future, more local governments will go on the system. Right now, we can root around in the finances of this one county only. The search engine works like a breeze, and you can export the results of each search to a spreadsheet with an easy Export function.

CRG Network calls this “the ultimate in openness and transparency.” At crgnetwork.com it’s explained that “Scott Walker and the Milwaukee County stepped forward to be the first unit of Wisconsin government to commit” to this citizens’ resource. The project had funding help from the Sam Adams Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and Citizens in Charge.

Hey, I’m affiliated with two of these outfits! So I guess I’m patting myself on the back.

But not really. The hard work was done by the county’s Information Management Services Division, Controller’s Office, and Department of Administration, with a lot of help from professional volunteers of the CRG Network.

If you want to see how a local government spends its billions, you can hardly do better than putting Milwaukee County onto your research agenda. Thanks to GASP.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Do we need another czar?

Ask Senator John McCain. In a year he could be president and appointing “czars.”

Scary thought. His McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law squelched too many freedoms for me to rush into rah-rah mode.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, agrees with me, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “McCain- Feingold has really left a bad taste in many people’s mouths, not just conservatives . . .”

But when Cooper asked Perkins what steps McCain could take to win support from conservatives, Perkins said McCain could “announce a family czar in the White House to focus on strengthening America’s families.”

You know, I’ve never liked that term, czar. Russian czars were dictators, the name taken from Caesar, the Roman emperor. We Americans are just generally down on all-powerful tyrants. So, why name our government officials “czars”?

Of course, Perkins’s idea isn’t for this Family Czar to tyrannize the countryside. He simply wants to bolster families.

But, ask yourself, which is more likely to come from some powerful new office in Washington: tyranny or stronger families?

And if you bet McCain would pick a swell person to be Family Czar, how would you like Hillary Clinton’s pick? Or Barack Obama’s? If you’re a Democrat, flip the examples around.

I wouldn’t want my own mother to pick someone for such a position. And she’s super swell.

Let’s make this our slogan: No new czars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

When curious people do curious things, I get a bit curious myself.

A few months ago I mentioned how Warren Buffett had gone on record as saying he would like to be taxed more. Curious.

Bill Clinton said pretty much the same thing. And my response was to recommend they voluntarily give more. It’s legal to give money to the government; the U.S. Treasury is there to help.

Well, on CNBC recently, a listener emailed Buffett that very question. And the billionaire, not unreasonably, said that his charitable foundation probably does a better job of allocating resources than the government would do.

I can almost see your hand raise up. “Pick me, pick me, Mr. Buffett,” you are saying. “I’ve got a follow-up question!”

Me too. Doesn’t your very answer, Mr. Buffett, beg the question of why we should have higher tax rates in the first place? I mean, why give more money to an entity that will not do a good job of allocating resources?

Maybe good ol’ Warren shouldn’t be taxed more. Maybe we should send our charitable money to Mr. Buffett!

But no. I bet even you and I — yes, humble you and humble me — have just as good ideas of how to spend our money as does Warren Buffett.

And, of course, as does the U.S. government.

So the simple question remains, why higher taxes, Mr. Buffett?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Popular political blogger Glenn Reynolds, he of InstaPundit fame, has done lots of yeoman work to bring attention to the proliferation of earmarks in the federal budget.

InstaPundit and others have pushed to make the process of stuffing pork into spending bills a lot more transparent, so constituents can see what’s happening while the wheeling and dealing is still in process.

Despite gestures from lawmakers in that direction, the effort has largely stalled. The Democrats, like the Republicans before them, proved more inclined to favor reform before they gained their new majority. Earmarks waste taxpayers’ money in ways ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous; they still get tucked away in murky committee reports, instead of listed openly in the bills lawmakers are constitutionally instructed to read and then vote on.

Twenty-three House members have publicly pledged to forgo earmarks. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus, has posted the list. Go to my PaulJacob.com and click the “Swearing Off Pork” logo to get to it. These 23 abstainers may not make up even a fourth of the conservative caucus, let alone a hefty percentage of the full 435-member House . . . but we gotta start somewhere.

Want the list to grow? Listen to the InstaPundit, who says: “Call your Representatives — congratulate ’em if they’re on it, and if they’re not, ask why not.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Sometimes it takes money to do things. Say, to collect signatures for a petition. If you want folks to be hitting the sidewalks all day inviting support for a ballot question, you might want to pay them so they can pay the rent while they’re doing this.

Critics of citizen initiative rights often complain about paying people to gather signatures — especially if they’re paid per signature. They even try to outlaw it. If workers are paid per signature, aren’t they motivated to commit fraud? Concoct fake signatures?

Let’s think this through. If the possibility of fraud justifies outlawing a paid activity, how many paid activities could then be outlawed? Well, all of them.

Outlawing fraud and outlawing a freedom that might be abused are two different things. All freedom can be abused. Suppose an envelope-stuffer’s revenue depends on envelopes stuffed per hour. Does he have an “incentive” to work too fast, never bothering to lick the envelopes?

No. It only makes sense to tie pay to productivity. And that doesn’t give you an automatic incentive to do slipshod work.

There are bad guys. But we don’t criminalize all conduct, even the good, because of the possibility of bad. Instead, we make laws against bad conduct.

That’s why the Federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals just struck down an Ohio law that banned paying people based on the number of signatures they collect. The law was declared unconstitutional because it restricts good people from effectively using their First Amendment rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Even the obvious needs defenders.

It is obvious that private property rights are vitally important. It is obvious that markets in property encourage development where development is desired. It is just as obvious that a lot of the progress that has happened in America over its two hundred year-plus history can be accounted to the very fact that we’ve had private property rights.

But, it is also obvious that one can become wealthy by theft, especially if the government is on your side. In localities all across the land, governments take land from some and give it to others. To “develop.”

And it’s not a socialistic scheme concocted by crackpot utopians. It flows right out of the eminent domain clause of the Constitution — as an abuse.

And it has its defenders. They say that, without using eminent domain to engage in big development projects, cities would die.

Nonsense. Right? Yes. And, if real-world logic can’t convince you of the obvious, consult real-world data. A study done by the Institute for Justice — a report called “Doomsday? No Way: Economic Trends and Post-Kelo Eminent Domain Reform” — shows clear evidence that development occurs rather naturally when private property rights are consistently defended. The study compared states with and without such eminent domain abuses.

And it defended the obvious. Freedom is better than theft.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.