Common Sense with Paul Jacob

initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary

The Ultimate Legislature

California, AB5, gig work, freelance driver

Proposition 22 was supported by 59 percent of California voters last November.

The statutory initiative partly reverses the destructive effects of AB5, a law that forced many California gig workers or freelancers to be treated as regular employees who must receive benefits — whether these gig workers like it or not.

One notices at Ballotpedia that all the listed opponents of this measure were politicians, including our current Vice President (then Senator) Kamala Harris as well as socialist Bernie Sanders, while the diverse list of Prop 22’s supporters included: the California Chambers of Commerce along with the Black, CalAsian, and Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Crime Victims United of California, California Farm Bureau Federation, California NAACP State Conference, California Small Business Association, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The benefits of the so-called gig economy are politically opposed and diversely appreciated.

Unions funded the opposition, though far outspent by the prosperous app companies: Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. Those same unions, having failed to win over voters, then filed suit to block implementation of Prop 22.

‘The Court finds,” reads Judge Frank Roesch’s opinion, “that Section 7431 is unconstitutional because it limits the power of a future legislature to define app-based drivers as workers subject to workers’ compensation law.”

Simply. Not. So.

A statutory California initiative can only be changed via a vote of the people, whether that vote happens because the legislature places the change on the ballot or citizens do so through the initiative petition process.

The voters are the ultimate legislature.

Therefore, nothing prevents the elected California Legislature from providing a change to ultimately be decided by the people of California, i.e. the whole legislature, at the ballot box.

For good reason, the judge’s decision is being appealed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags AB5, California, freelancing, gig economy, Proposition 22

Thought

Yves Guyot

There are three words that socialism must erase from the facades of our public buildings — the three words of the republican motto:
Liberty, because socialism is a rule of tyranny and of police.
Equality, because it is a rule of class.
Fraternity, because its policy is that of the class war.
Yves Guyot, Sophismes Socialistes (1908; English translation 1910), Book IX: “Socialism and Democracy,” Chapter X: “The Impotence of Socialism,” conclusion.

Today

Fannie and Freddie

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these had been created by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007–2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”

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Ingested Invective Rejected

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 6, 2021
4 Comments on Ingested Invective Rejected

“There is a bizarre propaganda underway in the United States of America to brand Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer,’” mused OpIndia, in its coverage of Joe Rogan’s recent brief bout of COVID and Alex Jones’s on-air Ivermectin ingestion stunt, “despite the fact that a version of the drug is known to be used for human treatment.”

The origin story is instructive. “The propaganda appears to have been triggered by an ambiguously worded tweet by the US Food and Drugs Administration.”

Well, ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This FDA tweet led to virality of invectives against Ivermectin users.

Then Katelyn Ogle, of KFOR in Oklahoma, upped the hysteria ante, claiming that a “rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the horse de-wormer medication, ivermectin, to fight COVID-19 are causing emergency room and ambulance back ups.”

This then went stampede, with Rolling Stone taking it up.

Apparently without a fact check.

In hardly any time at all, the hospital in question issued a statement repudiating the whole brouhaha.

It was Fake News — capital F and capital N — and Rolling Stone had to issue a . . . well, it wasn’t a retraction.

Journalist Glen Greewald offered his take: “The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don’t care at all if they publish fake news as long as it’s done with the right political motives and goals.”

Dismissing Ivermectin as any kind of “de-wormer” is fraudulent. That this strain of invective against its COVID-suffering users was started by the government is especially galling.

Lots of people swallowed the meme.

Will they develop immunity to future, similar spin?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Buckminster Fuller

Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specializations and leave it to others — primarily to the politicians — to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969).

Today

Yves Guyot

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born. A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).

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Watch: Knowing Beans About War

Post author By Editor
Post date September 5, 2021
1 Comment on Watch: Knowing Beans About War

Could Biden Be Half-Right?

The first rule of war? Don’t fight unwinnable ones.

The second rule of war? Don’t forget the first.

This weekend on This Week in Common Sense, Paul Jacob seeks to clarify the Afghanistan mess . . . but not without some pushback:

Thought

Isaiah

None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.
Isaiah 59: 4-5. A cockatrice is a legendary winged dragon with a rooster’s head. Image features a decorative cockatrice figure over a door.

Today

First President of Congress

Post author By Editor
Post date September 5, 2021
No Comments on First President of Congress

Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.

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