When you systematically reward failure, incompetence and irresponsibility…what results should you expect?
QE — Toxic Asset Government Purchases
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Tag: government
The biggest problem facing Americans? According to a Gallup poll, for the second year in a row, it’s our government.
Maybe I should say “the government.” Few think it represents us. Which is sort of a big problem for a representative government.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump says our leaders are “stupid.” Were that the case, it’d be easier to correct. The reality is worse.
We have an ethical problem in government. Those entrusted to represent us represent, instead, themselves. And their cronies. And special interests.
Charged with creating a level playing field where we can all succeed through hard work, our elected officialdom have tilted that field. Oh, they’re doing just swell. The rest of us? Not so well.
Elected officials from Washington to state capitols have hiked up their pay, finagled perks, per diems and other bennies, and rewarded themselves with lavish pensions. Meanwhile, most Americans lack even a 401K to help save for retirement, much less a pension beyond a meager (and politician-imperiled) Social Security safety net.
Transparency? Well, it’s not just Hillary Clinton who has conducted public business privately. Even with her scandal looming in the headlines, Defense Secretary Ash Carter confidently did likewise.
Let’s end pensions for politicians, nudging them to return to our world. And let’s change the rules so they work serving the public, not for private gain.
Can we count on our elected representatives to rectify their ethical lapses? Not on your life. We need to do it ourselves, using ballot initiatives to put ethics first.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Capitalism can be rigged a hundred different ways, apparently. China’s is run by its Communist Party, and even current innovations bear the stamp of the Party.
Take “social credit.”
Not the quaint decentralist economic reform movement that was a minor deal in politics on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada 60 or more years ago.
What I’m referring to is the innovative credit scoring system devised by a gaming company in cooperation with China’s commie-run government.
But it’s not quite like the credit scoring systems set up by competing companies in the U.S., which cook up “credit scores” based on going into debt and paying off debt. If you pay your bills, you get a higher score. If you don’t, it plummets.
The new “Sesame” credit scoring system is less interested in the debts you pay off and more in what you buy and what you put up on social media. The company has concocted a secret algorithm, and gives higher scores to good citizens — obedient people — and lower scores to lazy people (inferred from, say, if you play a lot of video games) or to folks who are rebellious free thinkers (posting pictures of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, for example).
That is what it seems like, so far.
It rewards those Chinese who are industrious (yay?) and who kowtow to Communist Party expectations (yikes!) — and makes me extra glad I live in the U.S., where government is too chaotic and stupid to cook up anything quite this insidious.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Is Big Government necessary to accomplish Big Things?
Big government built the pyramids. Big government erected the Great Wall of China. Big government put Man on the Moon.
But humanity could have reached Luna over a thousand years ago, had Roman civilization not gone into a death spiral.
Bill Whittle made this point in some recent talks on Afterburner and guesting on Stefan Molyneux’s philosophy show. He blames the fall of past civilizations on “sexual strategies”: the sociobiology of r/K. (The “r” strategy organisms make lots of babies, invest little in them, accept widespread predation; the “K” strategy makes fewer babies, invests heavily in each, and suppresses predators and parasites.) Civilizations start K‑style and decline with r.
It’s a theory.
Whatever the biology, Big Government was integral to Rome’s decline, with its exploitative systems and corruption, monetary inflation and “handouts.”
Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. There were delays and cost-overruns, like any government job.
But Whittle’s right about progress. Humanity would be a lot further along if it didn’t get caught in government/conflict/exploitation traps. Private companies might be on the Moon today were it not for Big governments that destroyed promising civilization in the past.
But hey: private enterprise is catching up.
“In an historic first,” Popular Science informs us, “the private company founded by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos has become the first to land a re-useable rocket that’s traveled to and from space.” The rocket lands as envisioned in old science fiction flicks, vertically — though with the aid of “drag brakes” (parachutes).
Let’s hope our civilization doesn’t once again collapse before we witness (and contribute to) further progress.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Charming. That is the best word to describe the “Little Free Library” movement.
Haven’t heard of it? It is the practice by which just plain folks share their books by building these little birdhouse-sized free lending libraries that they place in their yards by the curb. Usually, the little “libraries” encourage folks to take a book, bring a book.
Sometimes they advise readers to just take.
It’s the spirit of the public library, only provided privately, and without great pretense. Or expense.
The example in the artwork, above, is from across the country, in the tiny burg of Cathlamet, Washington. A reader sent me the photo. It is obvious: libraries like this are both quaint and useful — encouraging literacy, the activity of reading, and the appreciation of learning.
And yet, local governments across the country are cracking down.
Andrew Collins, writing at the Franklin Center website, points to an excellent Conor Friedersdorf article published early this year in The Atlantic, “The Danger of Being Neighborly Without a Permit.” Both these pieces present how meddlesome, ugly, intrusive, and anti-social local governments can be. Harassing friendly book providers with cease-and-desist letters, fines, and other niggly, invasive spins on zoning and public nuisance laws is just so idiotic it hardly merits much comment. But I agree with Friedersdorf — folks hosting Little Free Libraries are acting in the “venerable tradition” described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, the cooperative, neighborly culture that made our country great.
Government officials attacking this new, endearing bit of Americana are grand examples of the pettiness that is bringing America down.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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What one man cannot morally do…
“We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.”
—ALBERT JAY NOCK
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