Common Sense with 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.

We won. They lost.

I mean the February 5 defeat of Proposition 93 in California. Final tally: 46 percent Yes, 53 percent No. The end game of another huge effort by Golden State politicians, spending $17 million to trash term limits.

Most California voters like term limits, like how they rev electoral competition, stem corruption. So foes of term limits pretend to like them also. “They’re great,” they say. “Yippee for term limits! We just want to ’tweak’ them.”

A lie. They’d kill term limits altogether if they could.

Prop 93 would have boosted maximum tenure by 100 percent in the Assembly, 50 percent in the Senate. That was the point. Yet advocates said they wanted to cut term limits. Trim combined maximum legislative tenure, Assembly plus Senate, to twelve years, instead of 14.

Of course, lawmakers know that it’s lots easier to get re-elected as an incumbent than to win a new office in another chamber. For the vast majority, the new law would have meant a straight extension of tenure. And 14 years wasn’t even the real maximum either, given the measure’s generous transition period.

Last November in Maine, politicians brought a term limits extension to ballot — but admitted they actually wanted to lengthen their tenure. They also lost, of course.

California was a tougher battle. But it shows that even the most slick and brazen dirty tricks go only so far — when voters have a chance to hear the truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Pascal said that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

I’m thinking that the problem of politicians is that they cannot sit together without spending increasing amounts of money.

In his final State of the Union message, with Senators and Representatives gathered round, President Bush did what I’d hoped he’d do: Proclaiming he would issue an Executive Order to not spend the money directed by Congress’s earmarked pork spending.

But was that merely a sop to responsibility? The sum total of the rest of his suggested new spending netted out to nearly $135 billion. That is the most he’s ever proposed in a State of the Union address.

It’s still not half what Bill Clinton asked for in his final State of the Union speech, and Clinton didn’t have a wartime excuse. But do you see the pattern here?

The longer a president is in office, the more he wants to spend.

There’s something about sitting in a place of power that whispers to politicians one clear message: spend, spend, spend.

The longer in office, the more they obey that message.

Monks in monasteries talk about the need for spiritual discipline. Hmmm. What discipline might help politicians cope?

Well, the President serves under term limits. Increasing urges to spend get cut off at the end of the second term.

Too bad our Senators and Representatives don’t come up against a similar cutoff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A leading candidate for the presidency said recently, and I quote, “I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.”

Though I agree with the statement, the meaning meant is not the meaning I would intend were I saying it.

Let’s get this straight: Government has gotten way out of whack with markets. There’s too much government, which has grown ferociously in the past eight years.

The candidate in question, however, argued that we need more government taking a more active role, in part to address the “excesses” of the Bush Administration.

Puzzling. The excesses of the Bush administration have been in the area of government growth. Too much spending, too few vetoes.

Example? A new entitlement program, Medicare D, devised and pushed by the administration, now threatens to further destabilize our already over-regulated, over-subsidized health care system.

Here’s another: Mostly idiotic increases in regulation of business, in the wake of the Enron scandal, when the original trouble with Enron was a fraudulent accounting system approved by existing government regulators.

The candidate focused on Bush era tax relief, but tax cuts are not the chief problem with government today. Over-spending by Congress is.

As is weakness in presidential leadership to fight government imbalance.

Balance? Good.

More government to mess up where government has failed before? Bad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.