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Accountability crime and punishment moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Watcha Gonna Do?

civil asset forfeiture, forfeiture, police, abuse, theft, Trump, corruption, incentives, illustration, money, cops

At a White House meeting last week between President Trump and law enforcement officials, a Texas sheriff raised a concern about legislation introduced by a state senator to require a conviction before police could take someone’s property.

Mr. Trump asked for that senator’s name, adding, “We’ll destroy his career.” The room erupted with laughter.

“That joke by President Trump,” Fox News’s Rick Schmitt said on Monday, “has the libertarian wing of the Republican Party raising their eyebrows, instead of laughing.”

Not to mention the civil libertarians in the Democratic Party and the Libertarian Party itself.

Civil asset forfeiture, as we’ve discussed, allows police to take people’s cash, cars, houses and other stuff without ever convicting anyone of a crime — or even bringing charges. The person must sue to regain their property.

Lawyers aren’t free.

Two bedrock principles are at stake:

  1. that innocent-​until-​proven-​guilty thing, and
  2. Our right to property.

Since police departments can keep the proceeds of their seizures, they’re incentivized to take a break from protecting us — to, instead, rob us.

“Our country is founded on liberties,” offered Jeanne Zaino, a professor at Ionia College. “[G]overnmental overreach is not something that is natural for Republicans to embrace.”

Schmitt acknowledged that “Libertarians would hate this. They don’t want big government. But they don’t have a lot of pull.”

Libertarian-​leaning Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash are trying to end civil forfeiture, but the president will likely veto their legislation.*

Let’s not wait. Activists in three Michigan cities put the issue on last November’s ballot and won. You can, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* FoxNews​.com reported that, “Trump signaled he would fight reforms in Congress, saying politicians could ‘get beat up really badly by the voters’ if they pursue laws to limit police authority.”

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Accountability free trade & free markets national politics & policies responsibility

No Set Prices?

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“Paul,” an old boss of mine used to say, “there are no set prices.”

He meant that when a vendor said it would cost x, my choice wasn’t just yes or no. Negotiate. I could say, “Boy, I’d sure like that, but golly, I can’t afford to pay x. Any chance you’d consider 4/​5ths of x?”

It was amazing how often I bought what was priced at x for less than x.*

Consider government waste — from the Pentagon’s $400 hammers to millions in cost overruns for weapons systems. Politicians pay lip service to getting waste under control, but actually do something about it? 

Yeah, right.

That’s why I took notice last December when then President-​Elect Trump tweeted “Cancel order!” in response to the high price of a future Air Force One from Boeing. Then, Trump sent Lockheed stock down 3 percent with another tweet: 

Based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F‑35, I have asked Boeing to price-​out a comparable F‑18 Super Hornet!

“Mr. Trump … would like to squeeze Lockheed for a better deal …” the New York Times explained, adding that Trump had “sent shock waves through the military industry.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, where the F‑35’s engines are manufactured, responded, “The suggestion that costs are out of control is just plain wrong.” 

Well, last week, CNN reported that, “Defense giant Lockheed Martin has agreed to sell 90 new F‑35 fighter jets to the US Defense Department … a deal that amounts to more than $700 million in savings over the last batch of aircraft delivered.”

There are no set prices.

This is Common Sense. I’m skinflint Paul Jacob. 

* Even when a vendor wouldn’t budge on price, I could always call back a day later and say I’d finagled a way to afford it. Even then, the message that cost mattered likely started any future negotiations from a better position. 

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Accountability folly ideological culture national politics & policies

The Shadow of Incompetence and Racism

Hillary Clinton, Podesta, list, quota, illustration

Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton …

Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.

And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta! 

Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-​to-​guess password “p@ssw0rd.”

The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.

And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-​up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/​or the Department of Education were to go to an African-​American candidate.…”

Ah, tokenism!

Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-​color.

Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is … suspiciously close to being racist.

Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.

They live in a race-​based bubble. But like the Podesta-​Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:

Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch

Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official

Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy responsibility

In Plain Sight

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The Berlin terrorist attack just a little over a week ago fit a noteworthy pattern. German authorities had investigated Anis Amri — the Tunisian man who drove that large truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding 56 others — and found “links with Islamic extremists.”

Later killed in Milan, Italy, Amri had been wanted in Tunisia for “hijacking a van” and jailed in Italy for arson and a “violent assault at his migrant reception center.” And yet with all that known or easily knowable, the German authorities couldn’t prevent him from killing innocent Germans.

It’s not just a European phenomenon, either.

Consider Omar Mateen, this country’s worst mass shooter, having massacred 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The FBI had spent ten months looking into Mateen.

Years before the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI had tracked Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.*

“In case after case … authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence,” the Washington Post recently noted. This was the case with the majority of recent lone-​wolf terrorism plots.

“If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks,” a report in The Intercept concluded, “it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-​jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance …”

Yet intelligence agencies are still grabbing our metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That needs to stop.

The fact that known threats are consistently not being stopped suggests curtailing mass surveillance won’t hurt our security, but improve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The same is true regarding the Ft. Hood (work-​place) shooter, Nidal Hasan. Likewise, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), who was under the active eye of the FBI after returning from Yemen … until he opened fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station killing one soldier and wounding another. Ditto Ahmad Khan Rahami, the less deadly bomber in New York City and New Jersey.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Democracy — Oh, My!

Rockettes, democracy, inauguration, Trump, media, entertainment, illustration, association, voluntary

The President-​elect has had some difficulty booking celebrity acts for his inauguration. And instead of taking this as a cue to trim down on celebratory excess, his team has extended the guest performer list to include New York’s world-​famous chorus line dancers, the Rockettes.

The leggy, sequined showgirls might seem a perfect fit for the President-elect’s celebration — more, say, than a ballet troupe, or a string quartet — but one among the Rockettes protested.  Being a part of a performing team might seem a dream job, but not for Phoebe Pearl. She was, she wrote on Instagram, “overwhelmed with emotion,” and not in a good way. She felt “embarrassed and disappointed” that the gig “has been decided” for her.

She feels … coerced.

Dan Avery, writing before Christmas, characterizes the contract as a matter of “force.”

Welcome, Ms. Pearl, to the world that most American workers already know.

But the silliness reached high pitch with actor George Takei, who tweeted: “The members of the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle are like all of us: Forced to go along with something horrible they didn’t choose.”

Democracy — oh, my!

Most people have had to put up with democratic results they did not like. Are Democrats only now understanding this?

To a degree, I sympathize. Which is why I want limits placed on government. Perhaps Democrats should have thought of this every time they cheered as their elected candidates increased presidential power. Did they not realize that someday they might lose?

And if you want a right of refusal, make sure it is in your contract.

The Rockette does not have a leg to stand on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

The Truth About Gun Control

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Confucius said that our first task is to “rectify the language.”

That amounts to word control, but we probably should not take that too literally. We cannot “control the language.” Instead, we should take caution: error often rests upon improper word choice.

Take as an example not word control, but …

Gun control.

Which, Thomas Sowell reminds us, isn’t what it seems to be. “The fatal fallacy of gun-​control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns,” Sowell wrote on the first day of winter. “What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.”

A new wisdom? No. Sowell, in 2016, is disabusing The New York Times for its inanities regarding the bearing of arms. In 1925, H. L. Mencken took on The Nation.

Gun control, Mencken wrote, “would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men.”

Sowell argues that, no matter how irrational spree and mass murderers may seem, they “are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.”

Mencken noted that the gunman of his day “has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-​thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.”

Maybe, following Confucius*, we should call laws against concealed carry not “gun control” but “citizen disarmament.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Confucius” is the Western name for Kong Qui (551 – 479 B.C.E.), the great Chinese sage. He was often referred to by the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong,” which Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th-​century Latinized to “Confucius.”

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