ThisIsCommonSense.org

What do military berets, valedictorians and consumer confidence have in common? Quite a bit. They are emblems of our stupid utopia. In our utopia, we all pretend we can be everything we want to be without all that much hard work.

Take the recent attempt to change a system where special army units, requiring higher than normal standards, wore distinctive berets. Instead, the army wanted to give every soldier the same beret (manufactured in communist China, appropriately enough). Why then work harder to achieve more?

Same thing in high schools, which are no longer naming valedictorians, the person earning the highest grade point average. Why? Because it makes people who don’t get the best grades feel bad. Some perhaps never quite recover. Give me a break. Part of learning how to succeed is learning how to accept and learn from failure. What about consumer confidence?

Some blame President Bush for talking the economy down, as if he could. All the attention paid to “consumer confidence” rests on the notion that we don’t have to be free and productive to enjoy a good economy; instead, smiling politicians can simply trick us into prosperity.

The world doesn’t work that way. Self-​esteem and success cannot be mass-​produced and handed out like pills. They have to be earned. Politicians have tried to repeal the laws of nature and economics little wonder our society is now repealing common sense, too.

Well, there will always be at least one place where you can find Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

Robert Young wasn’t a doctor, he just played one on TV. Politicians are also actors, in a way. Like the rest of us, they probably are pretty knowledgeable in one field or another. But they act like they know everything. And that can be dangerous.

In his book The Trust Committed To Me, citizen legislator Mark Sanford tells how easy it is to get drunk on all the attention accorded to those who achieve high public office. Once you’re elected to Congress, the media start peppering you with questions, demanding your opinion on anything and everything almost as if you’re the universal expert. Then there’s the special deference everyone gives you, the limos that pick you up and drop you off, the lobbyists and constituents who hang on your every word. “If you weren’t careful you’d start to believe your own press,” as Sanford puts it.

Congressman Sanford was able to remain just a regular guy, and step down from power after his third term just as he promised he would. But not everyone has that kind of moral fiber. It’s easy to understand what happens to folks who stick around Washington too long. Because you have power, people treat you as if you’re the man. As if you are now very, very, but very, very, very important. The guy who knows everything. The god who walks.

But politicians don’t necessarily know what’s best for you and me. They don’t know everything. And none of them is a god. They just play one on TV.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

They call New York City “The Big Apple,” and New Yorkers like to think that, as the song says, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

So it is with career politicians, too. In New York City, the city council has been a haven for entrenched career politicians spending decades in power. However in 1993, New Yorkers approved term limits with a 60 percent vote.

That didn’t settle the issue for the politicians on New York’s city council, however. In 1996, the council came back with a referendum to delay and deny term limits. The politicians who hated term limits were going to “fix” them. But voters caught on and kept term limits just as they passed them.

Then some clever council members discovered what they believed was a legal loophole: let’s just repeal the limits without the voters having any say-​so! Soon-​to-​be termed-​out council members signed on to the repeal in droves. But New Yorkers were furious, public hearings were packed, candidates gearing up to run for open seats in what promised to finally be competitive elections refused to back down. In short, council members caught hell. So they backed down. The people won, again. Even The New York Times , long an opponent of term limits, admitted that, “A large-​scale change on the Council might provide a wealth of new ideas.”

Term limits have made it in New York City. And if we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

When you’re in the business of tracking career politicians, like I am, one of the things you notice is how often the careerists lard their legislation with pork. Pork is payola. It’s spending on specific local projects at national taxpayer expense. It may be a statue or a football stadium or a military base that the military no longer needs. Anything that funds a narrow local interest without regard to the common good.

Politicians push pork not to promote the general welfare but to get reelected. There’s concrete evidence that it helps them do just that. One study classified first-​term representatives according to how much federal largesse flowed into their districts. It showed that, yes indeed, those who forked over the most pork won re-​election by the most comfortable margins. Those with the least pork increased their share of votes by an average 4.6 percentage points over what their first election. And those who hauled the most pork projects home added almost 9 percent to their vote.

So pork works, in a way. Some voters respond positively to it. And some special interest groups respond very positively by helping line a candidate’s campaign coffers. But it doesn’t really help most folks. The cities and states that get the most pork remain the poorest. And pork certainly doesn’t help politicians fulfill their genuine civic obligations as servants of the common good. It only helps them achieve one pork-​larded term in office after another. And who wants that?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Remember Harry Nilsson’s song “Without You”? You know: “I can’t live/​If living is without you.” Well, that’s exactly how career politicians in Congress feel when it comes to your sweet, cuddly tax dollars. They can’t live without ’em.

In fact, after 28 years in Washington, Republican Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici says Congress cannot live with an overall 4 percent increase in discretionary funding. Wait a second; I know we’ve heard our elected officials brag about being so fiscally responsible in the last couple years. They’ve actually got a budget surplus going. It’s amazing, though it’s nothing any fiscally irresponsible bum could fail to accomplish, if only he won the lottery. That’s what happened to the big-​spending career politicians. While they were busy piling up $200 billion dollar deficits every year, the economy expanded in a major way and tax revenues rained down on Washington like manna from heaven.

What to do with all this easy money? Well, the career politicians worked long hours on new ways to spend this money to increase their power and prestige. Give a politician money and he’ll find a way to spend it. And he’ll say it’s urgent, even in a booming economy. Of course, sooner or later, when the economy slows down, we will confront the same problem of putting the federal monster on a diet, except the monster will be bigger and fatter than ever. When that day comes, you can bet this monster will be looking for your wallet or your purse, not manna from heaven.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Thank goodness we live in a country where they can’t imprison you for speaking out. Too many governments just throw people in jail when they don’t like what they say. Fortunately, with new technologies like the Internet, it may be getting harder and harder to shut people up.

But governments still try. Even in communist China a lot of independent journalism has sprung up lately, helped by the advent of the Internet. But as you might expect, many of the stories make government officials uncomfortable, as freelance journalist Gao Qinrong discovered when he published a story about a fraudulent irrigation scheme. Now he’s serving a 12-​year sentence.

Same thing in Cuba, where two visitors from the Czech Republic recently found themselves cooped up in a Cuban jail for almost a month. The government feared they would spread tales of how the Czech people rebelled against tyranny. The Czechs say they were told again and again, “What happened in Central Europe will not succeed here.” Yeah, right. Something tells me that if throwing off the shackles of tyranny couldn’t possibly happen in Cuba, you wouldn’t need to lock people up to prevent it.

Thank goodness in America they don’t throw you in jail for saying the wrong thing. But there is that debate on the Senate floor on the McCain-​Feingold Campaign Finance Bill that would prevent people from mentioning the name of any congressman in any advertisement during the last 60 days before an election. Hmmmm. What’s that all about?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.