Tag: control

Gloating Time?

net neutrality, censorship, control, FCC,

“The freak-out was something to behold,” I wrote two years ago.

Newly appointed chair of Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, had just nixed ‘net neutrality,’ and reactions from the left end of the political spectrum were overwhelmingly negative.

I, on the other hand, prophesied good times ahead. But we free-market folks were outshouted.

At least on Twitter.

Now, two years later, with something like a free market returned to Internet regulation, Casey Given at the Washington Examiner urges us not to “forget how the Left cried wolf.”

Contrary to doomsayers — whose alarm was that, sans net neutrality, we would experience “the End of the Internet as We Know It” — things are turning out pretty well. Mr. Given tells us that “since the repeal of net neutrality, more than 6 million people have gained access to the internet. Internet speeds have increased as well.”

Which shouldn’t shock. After all, the whole net neutrality mania was fear-based anti-capitalist prejudice.

“The Internet had stumbled along just fine until 2015, when President Barack Obama’s FCC put ‘net neutrality’ in place — a point Ajit Pai ably makes in his defense,” I argued two orbits ago. “Do the doom-sayers really believe that a set of regulations that had been in place just a few years was going to ‘ruin the Internet’ and unleash Big Corporations upon the world to the detriment of regular consumers and start-up service providers?”

What most net neutrality advocates wouldn’t acknowledge, at the time, was that net neutrality was supported by key telecom corporations. This should have given them a hint that net neutrality itself was the thing to be most feared: a rigged system for a few at the expense of the many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, control, FCC, Net Neutrality

general freedom ideological culture

The Atrocity Exhibition

atrocity, exhibition, shooting, violence, guns, control, 2nd Amendment, boy, white,

News commentary can seem like a race, commentators reacting as if to the crack of the starting-gun, scrambling to make sure they do not come in last.

Yet, in stories like this weekend’s round of mass shootings, being last to comment might be something to aspire towards.

As I have argued before, mentioning perps’ names has a tendency to encourage further mass murders, spree murders. But in cases of outright terrorism — as the El Paso shooting was immediately classified — the frenzy to comment is pretty much the same thing as using names.

How?

Well, terrorism is the use of violence to effect political change. The old anarchists and syndicalists called it “propaganda by the deed.” And, in a mass- and alt-media drenched democratic society, the aim is to get people to go into alarm, in part by getting tongues tapping and keyboards clattering.

Focusing on terrorist murders does feed the idea that terrorism somehow works.

So, when Democrats immediately talk about racism and the need for gun confiscation (both seen on Twitter immediately after the El Paso event, of course) and Republicans leap to the “mental health” issue and … video games (as I saw inching across the news chyrons) … my urge to comment dissipates dramatically.

But here I am.

Politicians can demand new laws to restrict firearms, or video games, but those laws won’t prevent future mass shootings.

Nor do I hold any hope that we can perfectly police against white nationalists like the manifesto-writing El Paso killer or lewd socialists such as the Dayton shooter.

Our best hope is to save kids from growing into angry, disaffected, violent adults.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2nd Amendment, atrocity, boy, control, exhibition, guns, shooting, violence, white

initiative, referendum, and recall subsidy

Subsidizers May Be Checked

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 5, 2019
No Comments on Subsidizers May Be Checked

Ohio, referendum, control, stop, emergency button,

“FirstEnergy Solutions might not want to spend its bailout money just yet,” warns a story in Crain’s Cleveland Business.

At issue? A possible statewide referendum on House Bill 6.

HB6 would, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “gut Ohio’s green-energy mandates and set up customer-funded subsidies to nuclear and coal power plants.” It passed the majority Republican state House “thanks to key support from several House Democrats.”

Passage of HB6 through both houses of the Ohio Legislature and its signature by Governor Mike DeWine would force Ohio ratepayers to fork over roughly $150 million in subsidies to FirstEnergy Solutions for its two nuclear power plants.

Except for one thing — in Ohio, voters possess a powerful political weapon: the referendum.

Already a diverse coalition of opponents to the bill has formed Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, filed a referendum and kicked off a petition drive that has “until October 21, 2019, to collect the 265,774 required signatures.”

“HB6 has created some strange bedfellows,” the Plain Dealer notices, including bringing together “environmental groups, the fossil-fuel industry, renewable energy companies, and some small-government activists” in opposition.

“Many of the forces that fueled the Trump presidency, before 2016 — I’m talking the Tea Party and others — could be supportive in undoing this bill,” explains Paul Beck, former chair of Ohio State University’s political science department. “And so could people on the left. You may find an incredible divergent group of people aligned with each other.”

“Liberals hate that it subsidizes dirty coal plants,” reports Crain’s. “Many conservatives hate that it picks winners and losers by subsidizing one industry over another.”

Thankfully, the fate of the giveaway rests in the hands of Ohioans, not their subsidy-loving representatives.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags control, emergency button, Ohio, referendum, stop

meme too much government

“I’ve Got a Plan for That.”

Post author By CS Admin
Post date July 12, 2019
1 Comment on “I’ve Got a Plan for That.”

Elizabeth Warren, plan, central plan, nanny state, control, puppet,

“If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. ”

–Thomas Sowell

Tags central plan, control, Elizabeth Warren, nanny state, plan, puppet

general freedom media and media people nannyism too much government

When Push Comes to Nudge

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

Ireland’s prime minister — or “Taoiseach” — is enthusiastic. “Speaking at the launch of the Climate Action Plan in Grangegorman today,” the Independent reported last week, “Mr [Leo Eric] Varadkar said the government would establish a Climate Action Delivery Board in the Department of the Taoiseach to oversee its implementation.”

The plan will deeply affect “almost every aspect” of Irish life. “The Government plans to force petrol and diesel cars off our roads,” the Independent elaborates, “introduce new buildings regulations and change the school curriculum in a bid to counteract climate change.”

Though the scope of the effort is breathtaking, Mr. Varadkar pretends he is being oh-so-humble and cautious, “nudging” citizens rather than going for a “coercive” approach.

Typical politician’s whopper, of course. Higher taxes on fuel and plastics, banning oil and gas boilers in new buildings, forcing private cars off city roads — this is all force.

Pretending otherwise is something akin to a Big Lie.

And all in service to the cause of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent a year each year for the next ten years.”

Varadkar says he is doing it for the young and at the behest of the young … who have been propagandized to believe “that the world will be destroyed in a climate apocalypse.”

Well, the Taoiseach didn’t use the word “propagandized,” and insists that disaster is “not inevitable, it can be stopped, action can be taken.”

But Ireland’s contribution to the planet’s “greenhouse gases” is negligible. If all the Irish held their breaths and keeled over for the cause, they wouldn’t make a carbon dioxide burp of a difference.

It is a power grab. Not anything like a “nudge.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags authoritarian, climate, control, global warming, Ireland, totalitarian

meme

An Important Distinction

regulations, rule of law, control, freedom

A “rule of law” is based on general principles, and makes room for — or, better yet, is based upon — the protection of individual rights.

It used to be common to say, “a rule of law, not of men”; it was even as common in political oratory as was spouted out over drinks at the Rotary. But as the modern Regulatory State has grown in scope and power, most folks seem to have lost track of the notion. It is now not even a cliché. Few even of our most educated folks can explain this idea. Vast swaths of the mis-educated public appear not to “get” the idea of limiting government to the enforcement of a few general principles; instead, they cry for more “regulations” (along with additional spending and maybe even a whole new division of the executive government) every time a crisis, tragedy or atrocity occurs.

So we are left with a political culture in which the words of Tacitus seem to a majority as implausible at best, evil at worst: “The more the laws, the more corrupt the State.” Contrary to today’s trendy prejudice, we do not need “more laws” — edicts legislated by representatives, or regulations concocted by bureaucracies — we need Law.

As in, “a rule of Law.”