Common Sense with Paul Jacob

In recent years Congress has done all sorts of things against the tobacco industry. And yet they’re also subsidizing the tobacco industry. I am sure that many of the same congressmen who vote to clobber tobacco also vote to give tobacco a handout. That’s the way the tangled web works in Washington. It’s deals and special interests and more deals and more special interests. It’s not the congressman’s money, after all. Just yours and mine. And we’ve got money to burn, apparently.

A few years ago there were droughts in one state and floods in another that spoiled the tobacco crop. This was bad news for the tobacco farmers of those states. So the government bailed them out by buying up the useless tobacco crop. Well, that’s one way to solve your financial problems, I guess. Just get the government to send you a check.

Honey, can you get the government on the phone? That particular bailout cost the government $661 million. It was illegal for the government to even try to find domestic buyers for the useless crop, and it couldn’t find foreign buyers either. So the tobacco has just been moldering in warehouses for four years. And now the bureaucrats have finally decided to burn it all.

The moral of the story is, government, get out of the tobacco-industry harassment business, and get out of the tobacco-industry subsidy business. And get out of the very expensive business of chronically catering to special interests at the expense of the common good. I guess that’s three morals.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

What worries me is that if you did it, government might have to shut down. Okay, so maybe that doesn’t worry me so much.

Here’s the deal. After some high-profile firms were found cooking the books Enron, Worldcom Congress cracked down. Fraud, they said, could not be tolerated. The CEOs of companies would now have to sign off on the accuracy of all the accounting in their firm, under penalty of fine or jail if the accounting turned out to be misleading.

There are a couple problems with the new law. One has to do with treating CEOs as proven fraud artists when the case against them isn’t really proven. If a CEO signs off on accounting that does turn out to include fraud, does that mean the CEO knew about the fraud at the time? Not at all. If the CEO were the accountant, he would be the accountant, not the CEO. He hires other people precisely so other people can handle details he cannot handle.

Anyway, Richard Rahn, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, suggests that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The requirement of attesting to the “accuracy of the financial statements under penalty of fine or jail” should, he says, be “extended to government officials.” And Congress should freeze the budgets of agencies that fail to satisfy proper audits.

Given all the sloppy accounting we always hear about, from HUD to the Pentagon, if this advice is followed the government would soon have to shut down. Well . . . okay.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Parents must be constantly hounded by the government or else their kids won’t be safe. At least, that’s the theory. As a parent I’ve always wanted my kids to remain alive. And my wife and I have always done our best to keep them alive. So far so good, knock on wood.  This is, in fact, a very widespread approach to parenting, I believe. Yet I’m always reading stuff about how what worked just fine yesterday could kill your baby today.

In a recent column, Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review-Journal points out that “do-gooders now busy themselves passing laws under which parents can be jailed for using their own best judgment,” like letting their kids ride in the front seat with them. The newsletter Accident Reconstruction argues that always stashing children in the back seat is a “simplistic band-aide solution fraught with danger.” One problem is that infants in the back seat can distract other drivers and cause accidents that way. Vin also notes the increasing danger of “forgotten-baby syndrome,” in which infants are accidentally left in the car by parents who would never have forgotten the child had it not been banned from riding up front. Babies have died from suffocation that way.

The greatest danger here is the notion that government regulators are better at parenting from a distance than the parents are themselves, right up close. Yet it’s Mom and Dad who must live with the consequences. Reminds me of the time a public official claimed to care as much for a couple’s children as they did, but had nothing to say when the father asked, “Then what are their names?

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Former Congressman Tom Coburn has a new book out all about business as usual in our nation’s Congress. You can read excerpts from the memoir, called Breach of Trust , at the web site limitedgov.org.

In a land of career politicians, Dr. Coburn was a citizen legislator. He pledged to serve only three terms in the Congress; and he never wavered from that commitment, stepping down in 2000 just as promised. The memoir is fascinating. One episode that leaps from the page relates his attempt to get his fellow congressmen to abide by spending caps passed as part of the 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.

In 1999 Coburn met with House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Senator Trent Lott, urging them to step up to the plate and lead. Coburn recalls that while Dennis Hastert at least listened to him on the issue more than he had come to expect from recently-ousted Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Lott was a lot less interested. “Lott looked at me, rested his chin on his hand, and said in his Mississippi baritone drawl, ‘Well, I’ve got an election coming up in 2000. After that we can have good government.’ “It made me sick,” says Coburn. “Here was one of the most powerful men in the country brazenly admitting, in effect, ‘Yes, the government we have now is not good, but I don’t really care as long as I keep getting elected.'” Coburn’s story tells us a lot, if we’re willing to listen. Sadly, though, nothing we didn’t already know.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

They’re pros. They’re experts, They’re real experienced. Of course, they can’t get the job done. But other than that, they sure do know what they’re doing. It’s the job of passing a federal budget. Not that I’m a huge fan of the budget as such. I disagree with about 94 percent of the federal spending. You’d think I’d like budget delays, but I don’t. Because in the crazy world of Washington, delays in the budget like everything else in the end cost us more money.

The budget deadline for the 2004 fiscal year has now passed. So Congress is once again freezing operations at the previous year’s fiscal levels until it figures out spending for the next fiscal year. Congress has passed continuing budget resolutions to keep the spending going. The danger is that the new appropriations will be passed with an omnibus resolution that sandwiches all the spending into one big fat bill. That you’d need a crane to deliver to the White House.

Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union points out that “Once you get into omnibus territory, it’s usually as urgent and rushed as the final two minutes of a football game.” So lawmakers will “approve anyone’s pet project just to get the bill to the president’s desk, and that can be very fiscally dangerous.” What this means, of course, is that there is actually an incentive for the career politician not to get things done so that he can later slip in all kinds of salty pork-barrel spending under the political radar screen. There oughta be a law.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

60 Minutes is known for its hard-hitting investigative journalism. Sometimes it seems to hit harder at business than at government, but recently we’ve seen an exception to that. Mike Wallace talked to businessmen and homeowners under attack for the crime of well, owning property, I guess.

Governments around the country are trying to kick people off their property to make way for others to use the land instead. Simply because these other owners might offer a higher tax base. Their weapon is the concept of eminent domain, which says government can take over your land if it’s for public use and you’re fairly compensated. But the takings Mike Wallace reported on show how this concept is being abused. The process is corrupt on its face. One politician bluntly admitted that his government calls “blighted” any property that they want to take over, whether it’s really blighted or not.

An Ace Hardware owner claimed with a straight face that he was trying to kick out a competitor from his property merely for the common good of the city. Seems that when government acts as their go-between, some people can con themselves into believing that even the worst actions are morally acceptable.

Property owners are fighting back, though, with the help of the libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice, which has won some important eminent-domain cases. And in one besieged town, Lakewood, OH, residents opposed to being pushed off their land have gathered enough signatures to post a ballot initiative this November. Good for them, and good luck to them.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

There is more to an election than just the outcome. The process counts too. The dialogue between candidates and the voters. California voters did a lot more than say “Hasta La Vista” to one governor and “Hola!” to another. For one thing, there was plenty of poetic justice.

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant, was attacked for allegedly insensitive opposition to allowing illegal aliens to get drivers’ licenses. This was supposed to hurt him in the Latino community. But doggone it if exit polls didn’t show Latino voters also opposed granting the licenses. Meanwhile, Davis was flip-flopping madly and in vain to gain their support, first vetoing then signing the new law.

There was justice in the fact that Davis, well-known for campaigns where he savaged his opponent, had no opponent but himself in the recall. Still, even Gray Davis sent a great message. His concession speech was in the best tradition of American democracy, as Davis urged those who loved California to accept the verdict. It showed character. I hope the impact of this recall will be felt throughout the country.

Only 17 states have a recall process, and only 24 have some process for voter-sponsored initiatives. California’s process isn’t the perfect model, but citizens should be empowered in every state. After the election, Arnold said, “For the people to win, politics as usual must lose.” Can the people win in your state? Do you have voter recall of officials? Do you have Initiative & Referendum? Well, you should.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Isabel, we hardly knew ya. I live in the DC area. A few weeks ago a hurricane called Isabel paid us a visit. It had skipped past Florida and Georgia and decided to rage through North Carolina, Virginia and DC. More a tropical storm than a hurricane by the time it got to our neck of the woods. Still, it caused damage. There were power outages.  The wrong power got hit, though. For example, the DC Metro system decided to shut down its subway when it was not yet really necessary to do so for the sake of safety. In fact, the system was shut down in the middle of the day, and hours before the storm was scheduled to show up.

Why did they Metro this? Power play. Social engineering: they wanted to encourage people to stay off the street. The chairman of Metro’s board, Jim Graham, told The Washington Post that the decision to close was “part of a coordinated action to get people to stay at home.” So because Metro decided that it knew better than its customers whether its service was really wanted and needed, thousands of people had to scramble for other transportation.

Totally unnecessarily. Metro is, of course, not an independent private company worried above all to keep its customers happy. They’re a brainchild of government, and subsidized by the government. And they seem to think they are obliged when they have the chance to impose bureaucratic mothering on their riders. This is why I say the wrong power lines got knocked down that day.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

The apocalypse . . . Armageddon . . . the California recall. Well, that’s one down. And I feel good about it. The recall was called all manner of wild and crazy names by elitist bipartisan hipsters. However, it turned out to be just another example of the American-as-apple-pie process of petitioning our government, scheduling an election, and then voting. What’s not to like?

In fact, after all the predictions that the winner would get just a tiny percentage of the total certainly less votes than Governor Gray Davis received just a year ago it turned out that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s percentage and vote total bested Davis. Arnold terminated the guy.  In 2002, Davis got 47 percent of the vote in an election with very low turnout and with 60 percent of voters expressing disgust for their choices.

I feel good knowing that a clear majority of Californians got what they wanted: an end to Davis’s corrupt and incompetent tenure and a new governor with more support and a chance to do better. Isn’t that what we all hope our political process will deliver? The recall even peeled off plenty of votes from standard Democratic constituencies.

If this was a Republican plot, Republicans have gotten smarter. Some said the process would be too confusing. But voters, said to be too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, went through 135 candidates on the ballot like a knife through butter. Elections, the rule of law, democracy, citizen control . . . Bring it on.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.