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ideological culture individual achievement local leaders

Your Just Rewards

Political systems work best when good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished.

Unfortunately, the level of punishment demanded by today’s politicians too often outpaces our ability to deliver sound thwackings. But thanks to the Sam Adams Alliance, at least good behavior gets its rewards.

Since 2007, the Chicago-based group has promoted grassroots citizen action through their annual awards program, the Sammies, which include an impressive $60,000 in cash prizes.

John Stossel will be a special guest at the awards dinner this Friday, April 8th, in The Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station. Stossel, who hosted 20/20 on ABC and now hosts “Stossel” on Fox Business, has captured 19 Emmys. Yet, he’s never won a Sammie, “an award,” he says, “that matters”

The Sammies go to people doing the most important political work of all, and not often recognized for it. As Stossel puts it, “The Sammies celebrates citizen leaders, who take extraordinary steps to advance our freedom.”

Awards are given for Rookie of the Year ($10,000), Messenger, ($10,000), Reformer ($10,000), Watchdog ($10,000), Public’s Servant (no cash prize because it goes to a public official), and Modern Day Sam Adams ($20,000).

I’ve been honored to present an award and also to receive one. I’m excited to attend this year’s ceremony. If you attend, find time to introduce yourself — and, more important, think of projects in your town or region that might earn you an award next year. While saving America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Your Victory

Tuesday’s mid-term elections amount to another watershed moment in American political history. Almost no one can stop talking about the success of (and prospects for) the “Tea Party” movement. I’m no different, except that, for me, the most interesting race in the land wasn’t about a candidate. It was a more direct victory for people controlling government.

I refer to Oklahoma’s State Question 750.

Regular readers know what I’m talking about. Last week I asked for help promoting the measure. My readers came through, and it may be their efforts — your efforts! — that put this crucial ballot initiative over the top.

Tuesday evening we thought we had lost. Results came in Wednesday morning, however, tipping the balance towards SQ-750. Now, with unofficial results in from all precincts, we remain ahead 50.4 to 49.6 percent. We won by 7,649 votes (out of nearly a million). That’s close.

So, each last-minute donor can be proud of really accomplishing something. Our ad, which you sponsored, almost certainly made the difference.

Oklahoma has been the toughest “initiative state,” the one with the most restrictions. Thanks to SQ-750, and previous reforms pushed by Citizens in Charge and several Oklahoma groups, the state will sport more rational requirements on the petition process and the number of petition signatures.

In related news, Oklahoma’s term limits measure won big, as expected.

Both of these measures will be instrumental in allowing citizens more control of their own government.

Thank you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture

“Representatives” Who Avoid Voters

Here’s a surprise. Congressional Democrats who faced angry voters in town halls last summer have scrupulously skipped the pleasure during more recent visits home.

The New York Times suggests that although the open town-hall style political meeting may not be quite dead yet, it’s “teetering closer to extinction,” inasmuch as only a few of 255 House Democrats held such meetings during a recent week-long recess. Instead they arranged invitation-only, scripted meetings with that portion of the electorate who believe that super-sizing the nanny state and burying the country in an Everest of debt are the best things that could ever have happened to us.

These congressmen evade communicating with unhappy constituents to “avoid rage.” And to prevent video clips of their fatuous non-answers to highly pertinent questions about mega-billion-dollar bailouts and pork barrel projects and socialized health care, etc., from showing up on YouTube.

One politician explains that town hall attendees last summer didn’t want to “get answers” so much as pursue a political agenda. I can’t help but remember the YouTube video in which a congresswoman “leading” a town hall forum seemed more interested in her cell phone than in a constituent’s explanation of why she didn’t want a government solution to medicine’s current institutional problems. Anyway, who really expects to escape “political agendas” at political forums convened to discuss politics?

Hopefully, the brilliant campaign strategy of ignoring voters and their legitimate concerns won’t pay off on election day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
local leaders term limits

“A” For Effort

They don’t make it easy for citizen initiatives in Alaska.

According to state law, legislatures there are prohibited from repealing a successful initiative for two years. Two whole years. Whoo hoo! And that’s it. After this two-year moratorium, lawmakers can haul out the shredder.

In 2007, voters in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula Borough passed a term limits measure that caps the tenure of the borough’s assembly members to two consecutive terms. The Alliance for Concerned Taxpayers gathered signatures to put the measure on the ballot.

For some strange reason, the Alliance doesn’t trust incumbent lawmakers in the borough to leave the term limits on themselves alone. They’re not the trusting type, I guess. But these term limits activists are not just wringing their hands and wailing, “Oh, I sure hope those incumbent lawmakers leave the term limits alone!”

Instead, two years after 2007, Alliance members have been out gathering signatures to put the same term limits measure back on the ballot.

Mike McBride, a spokesman for the group, says it’s easy as pie to get the signatures. “The public wants term limits, that’s the bottom line. . . . It’s a real popular idea.”

McBride says if the group has to go out and gather signatures every two years to keep term limits in place, they will. Good for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary property rights too much government

© Is for California

You might think that there’s nothing a government won’t try. You’d be right. But I was near stupified to learn that the state of California copyrights its laws. And it’s not alone.

The state tries to control — through copyright — how you can access its laws, where and how you store them, etc. The state makes available its building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws online, but requires you to ask for permission to download them!

The state’s out to make money. It charges $1,556 for a digital version, more for a print-out, and makes nearly a million dollars a year selling what is legally ours.

Yes, what’s ours. We are a nation of laws, not of men, and we have the right to own and reprint our laws as much as we want. The purpose of copyright is to ensure private parties can maintain some control over their intellectual property. But the laws themselves are, in point of elementary political theory, the intellectual property of all. Not of state bureaus.

Thankfully, heroic Internet technician and mover and shaker Carl Malamud believes in government transparency. And he, unlike Al Gore, really worked to help build the Internet.

On Labor Day Mr. Malamud published the whole California code online. Available for free.

Obviously, Malamud is spoiling for a fight. Good. He should win it. He has, after all, the law (if not the state) on his side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism

“Safe” Kids Are Fat Kids

Even the most careful athlete sometimes pulls a muscle. Does that mean that vigorous and sometimes even risky exercise is more dangerous than being a cordoned and cosseted couch potato?

Many of the gendarmes who oversee America’s playgrounds seem to think so. I don’t know how real the so-called “epidemic” of obesity is. (Is the fat infectious?) But it wouldn’t surprise me if kids banned from playing one “dangerous” game after another tend to accumulate more flab than when they were rambunctiously running around like they always used to do.

Even playing tag is outlawed in some places. Along with cops and robbers, monkey bars, and sliding into third base. Playground mats laid down to break possible falls are the latest terror. The sun sometimes makes them hot, and barefooted kids can burn their feet.

Playground activists are in an uproar over this latest bogus crisis. When are the canopies going up?

Philip Howard, the author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America, says we’re teaching kids to be flabby in more ways than one. He notes that scrapes and bruises are one way “children learn their limits, and the need to take personal responsibility.”

Life is an inherently risky venture. You don’t learn to cope with those risks if you are never allowed to take even modest ones. And that’s dangerous.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Your Money and Your Life

It’s getting illegal to have money these days. Don’t carry lots of cash on your person, that’s for sure. If somebody from law enforcement bumps into you while the cash is on you, they could grab it and you might never get it back. Not unless you can prove it belongs to you. If ever.

Yeah, thanks to the drug war, that kind of thing has happened, even in these United States. Guilty until proven innocent. And oh don’t deposit or withdraw any large amount of money in your bank account, either. Don’t inherit from your uncle, don’t get a big bonus at work, don’t win the lottery. Banks must report transactions larger than $10,000 to the government, and you could be tagged for investigation. Guilty until proven innocent, remember?

A few years ago federal banking agencies wanted to tighten these reporting requirements even further. So-called “Know Your Customer” rules would have forced bankers to monitor your bank accounts and report any deviation from “normal” activity to the feds. Well, there was such an uproar over this Big-Brother-like proposal that the government backed down. But now an international organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is pushing its 28 member nations to impose “Know Your Customer” laws anyway. It seems that OECD and other global groups don’t like it when some countries have more freedom than others. They want everyone to be equally oppressed. Let’s hope our government will not only resist this new demand, but also act to restore the presumption of innocence that has already been eroded.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Your Media on Drugs

Now and then I must admit that the career politicians don’t produce bad laws based on bad thinking and venal motives all by themselves. They have help. Some of their enablers are in the media. If all you knew about global warming was what you read in Time magazine, you might think the earth was about to turn into a burning crisp.

A recent cover even featured our globe as the yolk of an egg sizzling in a frying pan. I find this kind of apocalyptic reporting to be egg-scrutiating. For example, the article says glaciers are retreating around the world, and blames our bad habit of carbon-dioxide-emitting industrialization, which in turn supposedly increases average global temperature. But as Paul Georgia with the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “the glaciers on Kilimanjaro mentioned in the Time story aren’t retreating due to higher temperatures, since local temperatures haven’t changed in that area.”

Georgia argues that temperature is only one of the factors that affect glacier movements. He points out other bloopers in the article too, which could easily have been avoided by an outfit with the resources of Time magazine. Despite the impression the media sometimes convey, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of global warming, the extent of it, or what the effects must be. But nuance and complexity can be a burden for those who have an agenda to promote, legislation to push, or grants to apply for. And that kind of non-objective rush to judgment can lead to a different kind of crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Zero Sense

A boy is suspended from a New York City high school for carrying a metal ruler . . . a ruler issued to him by the school itself. A girl is handcuffed at a Metro train station in Washington DC and led away by the police. Her crime? Eating a sandwich on the platform. Another girl is suspended from a Virginia high school for having a pair of scissors. Scissors, of course, are sharp. There can be no debate about that. And yes, rulers can poke people in the eye. And maybe sandwiches can be lethal weapons too. I don’t know. I guess it depends on what kind of mustard.

The authorities call this kind of thing “zero tolerance.” I call it zero discretion and zero common sense. The concerns are legitimate enough. Students and teachers should be safe in school. Transit authorities shouldn’t have to clean up after messy food eaters. But when common sense is expelled from the rules, the rules themselves become an arbitrary weapon. None of these young people was threatening anyone. All the school officials had to do was say “Keep the scissors in your desk, Sally” or “What’s that ruler for?” All the DC police had to do was say, “Put the sandwich down . . . now!!”It’s easier to swat flies with a sledgehammer than to apply reasonable principles reasonably. But if the goal is a safer and more civil society not to mention justice let’s put the sledgehammer down.

These days corrupt politicians and their pals often seem to get away with anything. Why don’t we get tough on them, and leave the innocent kids alone?

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Your Friendly Legislators

It’s all been a big misunderstanding.

For some reason, those of us in the term limits movement got the crazy idea that California politicians don’t like term limits. How silly of us! Maybe it was the nearly $6 million legislators raised to run ads trashing the 1990 initiative. One could easily perceive that as opposition.

Or maybe we got confused when the legislators sued the voters the minute the voters passed limits. Maybe that lawsuit was just their quiet way of making sure the term limits that politicians cherish so deeply wouldn’t be overturned later after legislators became even more emotionally attached to the idea. That sounds right.

And then when that second lawsuit came along . . . well, that did seem a little negative. Now these public-spirited legislators are working overtime to make dramatic improvements to California’s law: extend the limits by 50 percent in the Senate; double the House limit; nobody termed-out again until 2012; allow a total of 24 years in the Legislature, even if they’ve already served 14 years. It’s all becoming clear now.

They love term limits so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives serving under term limits. Sure, you and I don’t think that a 38-year career in the Legislature is a term limit, but we just don’t love term limits as much as these guys. God bless them, every one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.