I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.
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Karl Kraus
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Citizenship
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
There’s good news and there’s good news from the Show Me State.
First the good news. The Missouri House declined to follow the lead of the Missouri Senate during its recent legislative session in advancing a ballot measure to make a travesty, mockery and sham of state legislative term limits.
The proposed weakening of the limits would have doubled maximum legislative tenure from eight years to 16 years. Further, it would also have excluded terms already served from counting toward the new limit.
Had the measure ultimately been enacted, some incumbents would have been able to sit in a single seat for up to 24 years. This assault on term limits is dead . . . at least until next year.
Now the good news. The lawmakers deserve high praise for issuing a formal call for an amendment convention to consider the single subject of congressional term limits, making Missouri the third state to do so (after Florida and Alabama). In mid-May, the resolution for a Term Limits Convention easily passed in both chambers.
Thanks to a provision in Article V of the Constitution, if two thirds of the states (34 states) submit a similar application to convene a term limits amendment convention, the convention must be convened. The amendment that the convention produces would then be submitted to the states for ratification. Three fourths (38) are required to ratify.
We’re only in the first-steps stage here, but first steps are crucial.
Thanks for showing us how to do it, Missouri.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Kenneth Minogue
Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven,’ but life for the peasant changes little.
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Tennessee and Kentucky
On June 1, 1792, Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States. Four years later, Tennessee became the 16th state.
In South Florida, two McDonald’s customers are suing the fast food behemoth for charging them for cheese they say they do not want.
“According to a class-action lawsuit filed in Fort Lauderdale federal court on May 8,” informs the Miami Herald, “Cynthia Kissner, of Broward County, and Leonard Werner, of Miami-Dade, say they have had to pay for cheese they don’t want on their Quarter Pounder sandwiches.”
Before you upchuck every last greasy, chemical-infused/extra-beef morsel of this story, let’s look at the facts:
The Quarter Pounder went national in 1973.
The fast-food franchise used to charge extra for the cheese.
But “at some point” the junk food purveyor stopped “separately displaying these products for purchase on menus.” These days, only the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese are listed.
McDonald’s joints in Florida, at least, provide no discount for removing the cheese.
Rip-off, say these two customers. How big? A $5 million injury!
That’s what they are suing for.
It’s mad. The lawsuit, that is. You are not entitled to set the pricing and menu policies of stores you do not own.
In a celebrated analysis of loyalty in markets, an economist revealed that consumers have a continuum of options, including “voice” and “exit.”
“Voice” is what you express when you argue your case in a family or a democracy — and fast food provisioners. Decent people will, if disgruntled, choose “exit,” driving down the street to a Wendy’s.
McDonald’s could rightly charge extra for withholding the cheese.
That it doesn’t do so? Chalk it up to savvy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On May 31, 455 A.D., Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome.
On that date in 1578, King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (New Bridge), the oldest bridge of Paris, France.
In other rock history, May 31, 2013, marked the closest approach to Earth that the asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon will get until two centuries hence.
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G.K. Chesterton
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
One of the stand-bys of the post-2008 mortgage finance bust, at least from left-of-center policy mavens, has been to ask: why has no banker gone to prison? They played a game of fraud and got rich. What a protected class — Cronyism! Plutocracy! Capitalism!
The why is much easier to understand if you read up on Round Two of the aughts’ boom-bust scenario, as in Prashant Gopal’s coverage in Bloomberg, “Getting Rich on Government-Backed Mortgages.” Gopal spotlights a non-bank mortgage broker, Angelo Christian, who is making a killing selling houses to people with horrible credit, just as happened before 2008.
“Christian can do this kind of deal because he is, in effect, making the loan on behalf of the federal government through its most important affordable housing program,” Gopal writes. “It’s a sweet deal: He gets his nearly risk-free commission. [His client] puts no money down. If things go south, the government ultimately bears the risk.”
So, should he go to jail?
Not really. He’s merely doing Congress’s bidding.
Gopal notes that it is not banks that dominate this round. They are under too much scrutiny. But non-banking loan intermediaries like Mr. Christian are swarming like flies on a cow’s behind.
There’s a problem in Gopal’s account though. “No one is saying the system is close to another collapse.”
Well, plenty of people are saying that.
The Cassandras are just not being heeded.
Of course, they don’t know when the bust will happen.
They just know it will.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo by Images Money on Flickr.
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Lord Acton
Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.