Tag: government

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free trade & free markets subsidy

Feed America, Cut Government

safety net, food bank, government, inflation, economics

“More people in the United States are going hungry now than during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago,” a National Public Radio report tells us, citing a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

The New York Fed “periodically asks Americans whether they’re having to skip meals, having to rely on food donations or receiving federal assistance to buy groceries.” Ten percent of families nationwide reported missing meals because their cupboards were bare.

This isn’t the result of a breakdown in production and distribution of food, for “food insecurity” rates are two times higher in “families earning less than $50,000 a year.”

NPR notes that inflation — especially the rapid increase in prices at the gas pump — has made everything harder for everybody.

Gas prices are even higher than during COVID. Reduce fuel taxes now. To really lower prices, end the wars in the Middle East. And ending the ethanol mandate would nudge farmers back to actually feeding people, at the very least reducing corn prices.

Finally, SNAP program subsidies are being reduced over the next decade, a result of the Big Beautiful Bill. To help these “food stamps” actually feed folks during this period, SNAP should be further reduced.

That is, in scope . . . across all states. 

This is about trade-offs: Restricting these subsidies from paying for sugary soft drinks, candy, and the like, are underway, state by state, but by the end of the year, fewer than half of these United States will have done so. Taxpayers in all states should demand subsidies that actually help folks, rather than sending them on a slow train to the hospital. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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privacy regulation

Driving VPNs South

Canada, VPN, privacy, regulations, Ottawa, government

Public Safety Canada, an agency responsible for safety, security, emergency preparedness and this kind of thing, recently urged Canadians to protect themselves when using public Wi-Fi by also using a VPN. 

“Using a VPN protects your data,” the agency said. 

True.

Unless — unless others in the government succeed in requiring VPN companies to uniformly sabotage the privacy of their customers.

The mechanism for crippling VPN’s? That would be the pending legislation to force VPN providers to retain personal data which users expect them not to retain, in this way killing these companies’ very reason for being as well as Canadian Internet users’ reasons to employ these companies. 

We netizens want some security. A VPN required to track and store information  on customers seeking security is, ipso facto, insecure.

Bill C-22, or the Lawful Access Act, introduced by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in March, would require customers’ data to be retained for a year. Everybody’s data, mind you, not just the data of persons suspected of a crime.

“Oh this is just rich,” says Windscribe, a VPN provider based in Toronto. “Bill C-22 is driving VPN businesses like ours out of Canada because of the required user logging. And in the same breath you tell people to secure their data with VPNs.”

If things go on like this, Ottawa’s impulse to destroy or try to destroy online privacy will override any contrary impulse to help people preserve online privacy. Thereby obliging Canadians who do value it to figure out a way to override the override.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom nannyism regulation

Killer Cars for Your Safety

“It is in my memory banks,” Eric Peters wrote last month, referencing an android on an old Star Trek episode, “the long-ago time when GM was a car company.”

Yes, in the “long-ago” they “made an almost infinite variety of vehicles to suit almost any need and budget, all of them designed and engineered to free their owners. Some were utilitarian. Others were beautiful. Some were arrogant. None were parenting. They were made by adults who respected other adults. What became of that GM?”

The answer? Government.

Specifically, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as directed by Section 24220 of 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

“By 2027, every new car sold in the United States could be required to actively monitor the person behind the wheel,” explained Shawn Henry, the Chief Security Officer at CrowdStrike until last year. “That means watching your eyes, tracking your behavior, and constantly evaluating whether you’re alert enough to drive. For a lot of drivers, that starts to feel less like safety and more like surveillance.”

The idea is for your car to remove you from control.

The excuse for this nanny-state totalitarianism — a human-made robot take-over! — is that it will save lives. If you are too tired, too excited, too sleepy, or just walking erratically, the idea is for your smart car to prevent you from taking the wheel. 

But it would only save lives under normal conditions. In an emergency, your actions — watched over with loving grace by your ultra-smart car — could look like you’re on drugs or worse, and the car, not understanding the emergency, blocks your escape.

That is, if the NHTSA ever finalizes the regulation.

In a world where the CIA can execute you by making your car drive off the road (yes, it’s a thing), adding more overriding tech?

The wrong direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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representation

What We Want and How to Get It

Mick Jagger, government, democracy, elections, voting, initiatives, recall, referendum

British-American philosopher Mick Jagger put it best: “You can’t always get what you want.”

A universal verity.

But what about a sadder situation? “You must always get what you don’t want.”

Only the deepest pessimist thinks this pertains to our lives, our “lived experience” in even these our mixed-up times. But it does apply to one huge domain of life: our representation in Congress.

Or so says Stephen Erickson. “The American people consistently rank career politicians among the least trustworthy professions. At the same time, professional politicians are supposed to represent us, and they have more power over our lives than any other profession.”

I don’t think this needs to be argued. Though Mr. Erickson does cite evidence, the thesis hardly needs massive data sets. Or British-American philosophers. So what to do? Erickson, being a practical man, takes the bull by the bumps on its head, two of them:

“First, we need to show how representative democracy might work without professional politicians.” The basic proposal is to “Reduce all local electoral districts to no more than 10,000 residents” where “every district becomes walkable and winnable with handshakes, flyers and yard signs.” This would work because small districts turn politics into “personal reputations and relationships, not money and marketing. Special interests therefore lose their influence.”

His second show-and-tell is “a realistic path forward.” That path lies with “the citizens’ initiative and referendum.”

As readers of this column know, my support for this more direct approach is both long-standing and thorough-going. The initiative process is the only decent process for serious reforms of our representative system because our representatives will block serious reform otherwise. 

Please read Stephen Erickson’s essay, “How to Eliminate Politics as a Profession.”

No one wants to be their Beast of Burden.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption too much government

Gov’t Pushing Gov’t

Wisconsin, taxes, lobbying, government

Why, asks the MacIver Institute, “is the government lobbying the government?”

MacIver calls itself Wisconsin’s “free-market voice.” It is a privately funded outfit that makes the case for less government in the Badger State. It has to earn its funds from donors who can, at any moment, stop donating money.

One of the things the MacIver Institute found itself up against are other think-tanks and apparently donor-funded organizations advocating for more government in the state, for more programs, bigger programs, and more taxes to feed all the great new stuff.

And it turns out that several of these advocacy organizations are themselves funded by government! I mean, taxpayers.

I know, it’s not unheard of. It’s too common, existing in probably every state of the union.

And it is thoroughly corrupt.

The MacIver Institute identifies three outfits that receive tax money to promote more tax-funded programs: the Wisconsin Counties Association, the Wisconsin Towns Association and the Wisconsin League of Municipalities. These outfits promote more transportation funding and higher taxes. Comparing these outfits’ core pitch to “a swindler selling gullible buyers submerged swampland,” MacIver makes it quite clear how easily local leaders are bamboozled: “Your supervisors — at least many of them — are clueless that they are being used as patsies in a coordinated scheme by a taxpayer-funded lobbying machine, one that exists not to represent the public, but to represent government itself.”

People who want fewer government services and a smaller tax burden often wonder why government size always ratchets up, never down. Well, this is one reason: the government takes your money to give to groups that will push for more government.

Sadly, this ratchet racket is a part of government that works too well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Homelessness Costs

New York City, homeless, homelessness, spending, government, charity

“Spending tripled,” shows the graph, but the “population grew 26 percent.”

Charlie Smirkley (@charliesmirkley) provided the graph, deriving the numbers from official state reports, just out.

New York City, writes Mr. Smirkley, “spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns.” And that “$81,705 per person in FY2025,” he explains, “is a floor.” Excluded? Supportive housing (about a half a billion per year), mental health response teams; the costs of police department dealings with homeless encampments. 

Shocking? Yes and no. We expect increasing costs in government “charity,” in part because governments centralize and standardize methods, discouraging innovation and adaptation. It’s not a market. Government bureaucrats and operatives try to coordinate increasing staffs (along with market costs in housing, etc.) while necessarily dealing with clients as objects of pity and bother rather than, as in markets (where people exchange valuable goods), subjects whose responses immediately affect the “business” at hand.

This year, the city projects to spend about $97,000 per person.

Some of the articles on the subject are better than others, naturally enough, and at least one had great graphs, too. But this sentence in Meagan O’Rourke’s Reason contribution caught my eye: “The most alarming part of the comptroller’s report is that the state cannot assess whether tax dollars are being spent effectively.”

It’s a typical problem governments have — which points to a problem not with the homeless but with government.

And of course this is not just a Big Apple thing: while spending per homeless individual since 2019 is up 187 percent in New York, spending’s up 190 percent in San Francisco, 430 percent up in Portland, and 480 percent up in L.A.

Homelessness is expensive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Winning Through Identification

Javier Milei, Argentina, freedom, government

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, perceives that many political battles amount to a clash between producers and thieves. Between those who work for living (using what sociologist Franz Oppenheimer called the “economic means”) and those who steal for a living (using the “political means”).

Politics can’t always be reduced to this conflict, of course. But it can pretty often — certainly in a country where socialists have been pulverizing the economy.

Now, this knowledge is not kept by Milei as a dark secret, about which he would be embarrassed to be caught mentioning to a select few supporters.

Milei is not coy! That we learned during his campaign for president; and, no matter what his ups and downs in office, he still seems to be just as candid, just as willing to blast his opponents, to their faces, for —

Well: “Listen up, you ignorant fools! ‘Social justice’ is theft. It implies unequal treatment before the law and is preceded by theft. You bunch of thieves! Criminals!”

Also: “The world has only two kinds of people: those who live off what others produce — that is, the parasites, that is, you — and those who produce everything that is possible in modern life.

“The true battle of our time is cultural, philosophical, and moral. It is about choosing the system that lifted millions out of poverty. It is about ceasing to be an immature nation that squanders the future to distribute benefits in the present. . . .”

Probably even better in the original Spanish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

Deliciously Dead

Washington, initiative, citizen, government, democracy

The bill died. Had it lived, it would have — in the words of Tim Eyman — taken away Washington State voters’ “right to initiative, they would stop all dissent.” 

Who’s the “they”? Democrats running the State legislature, who had, Eyman says, been “pushing this thing really hard this session.”

But they gave up. The opposition to the bill was just too strong. Democrats let it die before the scheduled vote on the Senate floor. 

So what was wrong with the bill? 

“SB 5973 would have required a minimum of 1,000 signatures to be submitted to the Secretary of State from those who support the measure, before the issue is given an official title and signature gathering can begin to ensure ‘viability’ of the issue,” explains Carleen Johnson of The Center Square. It would “also have banned the practice of paying signature gatherers for the number of signatures they acquire.”

It was, as opponents called it, an “initiative killer.” You can see why fighting the bill was so important. 

And remember, “initiative killers” are everywhere — at least everywhere initiative and referendum rights are in place. 

Politicians, who allegedly serve citizens, don’t like it when citizens work around their machinations. So they regularly throw up roadblocks to the initiative process — anything to make it harder for citizens to limit their incessant lust for more taxes, terms of office, etc.

Citizen activists all across the country have their work cut out for them. But, until the next major legislative attack (tomorrow): celebrate!

And don’t forget to thank Tim Eyman and other Washington activists for stepping up to defend everyone’s rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people tax policy

Post California Soaking

California, taxes, wealth, government

Rumors that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has been pushing the Post in a more commonsensical editorial direction could very well be true.

A recent Post editorial slams progressives who “think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: if some is good, more must be great.”

I’m no fan of even a moderate amount of that brand of cologne. But anyway. The Post is discussing a proposed ballot measure backed by the ultra-lefty Service Employees International Union.

SEIU troops are currently collecting signatures. And before they’ve even gotten enough to post it to ballot, the people being targeted have started moving. 

Out of state.

The measure would impose a new 5 percent tax on billionaires. Some of the state’s billionaires, including Google cofounder Larry Page and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, aren’t willing to wait and see whether it actually reaches the ballot and passes in November. Why? The measure would apply retroactively “to those who were California residents on January 1, 2026.”

Some Democratic lawmakers are saying “good riddance,” as if it’s possible to loot billionaires who don’t wait around to be looted. Or that it’s good for state coffers to lose their billionaire entrepreneur “contributors.”

The Post says the retroactivity would open the measure to legal challenges, but that if it gets passed and survives litigation, “it’s a safe bet this won’t be a one-off. Funding ongoing expenses like health care with one-time taxes isn’t sustainable. Progressives will want to return to the well until they’ve sucked it dry.”

And no one should know better than Californians how dangerous dry wells are.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

California, taxes, wealth, government

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Two Ways of Walking Away

free speech, censorship, tolerance, mob, 1st Amendment, government

“The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting free speech,” explained Michael J. Reitz in The Detroit News. But what about individuals and non-government groups? 

“Free speech doesn’t compel you to listen. You can walk away,” Mr. Reitz goes on to say.

In the piece, reprinted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Reitz wonders, however, whether this “agree to disagree” attitude is enough to keep free speech alive. He believes that “as a society, we show our commitment to free speech through our willingness to listen, discuss and debate. It’s not consistent to say I value another person’s right to speak if I refuse to engage.”

A liberal attitude — in a social, perhaps non-political sense — is what Reitz advises: tolerant of differences; not prone to anger at hearing an opposing view; engaging logically and fairly with differing opinions; but free to take it or leave it without fearing recrimination, retribution or retaliation.

This right to walk away may define free speech, but Reitz argues that we mustn’t all walk to our bubbles in anger.

An old saw, recently popularized, insists that “we have freedom of speech, but we don’t have freedom from the consequences of speech.” In a free society, you may say what you like on your property, on your dime, but some people may shun you. Or fire you. And that’s OK.

What’s not an acceptable “consequence” of freedom of speech? Being silenced by the government, or the mob, either with petty violence or maximum force. Too many people use the “no freedom from consequences” cliché as an excuse to harass people at their work. Or bank. This is where it gets difficult. 

Since one neither has a right to a specific job nor to force a bank to accept one’s money on account, purely social pressure to de-bank, de-platform, or get someone fired, fits in a free society. But is Reitz correct that, legality aside, when such social pressure is common, and one-sided, free speech is doomed?

Perhaps society is doomed, in multi-lateral wars of us vs. them. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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