Tag: Washington

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Kindness of Bureaucrats

When the local government of Washington, D.C., says, “Don’t worry” — people worry.

Matthew Marcou, deputy associate director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation’s Public Space Regulation Administration, told those ruled by his long-worded administrative agency — the people working the city’s many food trucks, which feed lunch to a great number of Washingtonians and tourists on sidewalks every day — not to worry.

Just because the wording of a new sidewalk regulation would shut down eight of the city’s ten most popular food trucks doesn’t mean the good folks at the Public Space Regulation Administration couldn’t simply — almost magically — grant a waiver.

Be happy.

Still, there are the malcontents, the businesspeople who want some sort of certainty about the rules controlling their enterprise. The Washington Post reports that “Owners of food trucks . . . are put off by a still-unknown process that relies on the kindness of bureaucrats to keep their businesses alive.”

Che Ruddell-Tabisola is the D.C. Food Truck Association’s executive director and also a co-owner of the BBQ Bus. “[W]hy would you put forward regulations that are only successful when you make an exception to the rule?” asked Che.

The word “regulate” comes from the word “regular”; the goal of regulation being to make things regular. Therefore, regulations that require significant use of waivers fail. They aren’t rules at all. They constitute, instead, a labyrinth of economically suffocating and graft-inducing red tape.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

Two Initiatives, With Initiative

Josh Sutinen is 17. He can’t vote yet. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t having an effect on the politics of his hometown of Longview, Washington.

After his father’s second valiant if unsuccessful attempt to get into the Evergreen State’s House of Representatives, Josh became fascinated with political change. Conveniently, an issue soon darkened his town: Red light cameras.

Josh organized an initiative campaign to remove the red light cameras. Indeed, visitors to the family business, Sutinen Consulting, will sometimes find Josh manning the front desk — and then bringing another employee up from the back room (where they fix computers and do other technical things beyond my understanding) while he fields calls from major newspapers around the state, even around the country.

The campaign has been difficult; the powers that be in Longview (“The Planned City”) fought back. First they balked at giving the collected signatures to the county, to be counted. Then they even sued the petitioners — Josh Sutinen and Mike Wallin — to prevent the initiative from appearing on the ballot.

So the petitioners are fighting back. Josh is now preparing to gather signatures for an Initiative 2, which would prevent the city from suing citizens who draw up initiatives that challenge city policies.

Joining Josh is initiative guru Tim Eyman. Eyman has worked against red light cameras up north, and is enthusiastic about Longview’s second initiative as well, saying it is “exceptionally good policy and something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

I’ll keep you posted.

This is CommonSense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets insider corruption too much government

Medallions “Stink of Tyranny”

Not long ago on Townhall.com I briefly told the tale of two journalists, both arrested for taking pictures at a public meeting. This stunk of tyranny, to me. “Government cameras on citizens? Dangerous. Citizen lenses trained on government? Essential safety devices.”

What I didn’t mention was that the public meeting was for the District of Columbia’s taxi-cab commission. The commission oversees what was once a remarkably free system of taxis, but has become more regulated while also earning a reputation for corruption. Pete Tucker, one of the reporters, was on the scene to cover a breaking story related to that corruption: The commission’s proposal to regulate the industry using the over-used and idiotic “medallion” system, familiar to New Yorkers and far too many other city-dwellers.

Well, Tucker’s work has reached the completion stage, now, with Reason TV’s video about the medallion system up on YouTube. It’s an eye-opener.

The gist of the piece may be familiar: Government regulation helps bigger businesses at the expense of smaller ones . . . as well as consumers. You may have read similar tales from economists such as those in the French Liberal School (Frédéric Bastiat), the Chicago School (Milton Friedman), the Austrian School (Ludwig von Mises), and Public Choice (James Buchanan). Courtesy of the Reason video, now you can see ordinary citizens making the case. One said, “We know tyranny when we smell it.”

The stench is also of corruption, which has driven the politics behind the new regulatory scheme.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

In the Money

The economy is down, but some businesses are still bustling. Take the business of running local government in Washington, D.C. Money must be rolling in. The mayor just asked the city council to raise the highest compensation level he is permitted to pay employees by $100,000.

No, not to $100,000. Mayor Vincent Gray wants to raise the top salary by $100,000 — from $179,000 to $279,000.

One council member called the new mayor “tone deaf”; another said the idea is DOA. “These [salaries] are in excess of federal Cabinet officials,” a third pointed out.

Sounds like the council is putting its collective feet down. It just isn’t going to overpay for manpower, right?

Well, not really.

The mayor stuck the new pay levels into a bill already asking the council to okay salaries for the police, fire and school system heads, all of which exceed the current legal limit. News reports say the council is “likely” to approve those.

That how DC “works.” Pay limits are set in law, and then, when the mayor wants to overpay, he has to get the council to approve the higher pay.

While allowing higher pay in some cases, the council is unlikely to make it easier for the mayor to overpay without their deliberated say-so. Why? To provide fiscal accountability? Or, more cynically, to give the council more political leverage to get more political spoils?

Did I mention that I’m pretty cynical about the motivations of politicians?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Pseudonymous Concerned Pseudo-Citizen

Is it wrong to admire a scoundrel, er, “W. Howard”?

In Everett, Washington, traffic enforcement cameras — so-called “red-light cameras” — have stirred up a lot of people, many airing their ideas or just venting on HeraldNet, the local paper’s website. Among the most persistent contributors to the comments/letters section has been “W. Howard.”

Readers got suspicious. Once he said he was from Lynnwood; in another post he implied he lived in Everett. But no matter what town he was from, he was always for the cameras, which he claimed would prevent pedestrian deaths and save the children.

He thus bucked the stream in the growing controversy over the cameras, which seem so big-brotherish, so totalitarian. Even when one is caught red, er, lighted.

But, hey, learn your lesson. That’s what “W. Howard” said, anyway. Get over your paranoia.

The “paranoid” turned out to be right about W.H., though. The newspaper traced his posts to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., far from the Evergreen State in Scottsdale, Arizona — which just happened to make and sell the cameras under question — all the way back to Bill Kroske, vice president of business development.

That makes Kroske a Saul Alinsky of marketing.

But a scoundrel nonetheless, mimicking a Music Man-style pretense of being “part of the community” just to stir up business.

Thankfully, the scoundrel was revealed as such by a free press and in public debate. The First Amendment rides to the rescue!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Citizen’s Stop Sign

What an election year. It’s not just the drubbing dealt to many statist incumbents that warrants a little triumphalism. We can also cheer about ballot measures whose passage means the defeat of very specific attacks on the citizenry.

Several local referendums targeted all those ticket-triggering red-light cameras that have been popping up. The main purpose of the gotcha-gizmos seems to be lunging for the wallets of hapless motorists, not enhancing anybody’s safety.

Voters are rejecting this fancy tax on driving. In Houston, a group called Citizens Against Red Light Cameras pushed for a ballot question to chuck the cameras. Voters passed it, despite the apoplectic opposition of the city council and the company operating the cameras, American Traffic Solutions. Camera ordinances were also felled in two Ohio towns, Chillicothe and Heath, and in College Station, Texas. In Anaheim, California, 73 percent said Yes to banning red-light cameras.

It was a tougher battle in Mukilteo, Washington, where ATS tried to stop voters from deciding on the cameras. Citizen activist Tim Eyman, who also has a slew of successful tax-limitation initiatives under his belt, led the effort to combat that obstructionism, and the state supreme court ordered ATS to back off. The kill-the-cameras measure went on to pass by 70 percent.

It’s great whenever voters call a halt to political predation. By no method can they do so more directly and effectively than via the right of initiative and referendum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Metro Plays Hooky Roulette

Government-run mass transit is not merely a tragedy of inefficiency, in Washington, DC, the Metro has proved itself a danger to life and limb.

Five Metro workers have been killed on the job in roughly the last year. Before that, a June 2009 Metro train accident that killed nine people and injured seventy more. In a June 27 Townhall.com column, I lamented that even after all these deadly accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board complained there remain “significant deficiencies in their safety culture.”

Now, thanks to a Washington Examiner report we find out that Metro’s deficiencies start right at the top. During the last 18 months, six of Metro’s 14 appointed board members have no-showed for at least 20 percent of the meetings.

Vice Chairman Marcell Solomon, the board’s highest paid member, missed over half the meetings. Of course, D.C. Councilman Michael Brown was worse, skipping out on two-thirds of the meetings in the same 18-month period.

If this were a private business it would be going belly up from paying out large settlements for the death and destruction it has wrecked across the region, or shut down for gross mismanagement equal to gross negligence.

But Councilman Brown says he’s improved this year, only missing half the meetings. “My attendance hasn’t been great,” Brown concedes, “but my engagement has always been there.”

Metro trains keep rolling dangerously down the tracks with a politicized management that is asleep at the switch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers term limits

Dollars and Change

Big spending by candidates doesn’t always win elections. For instance, New Jersey Governor — soon to be ex-Governor — Jon Corzine outspent his opponent, Chris Christie, more than three to one . . . and still lost.

Of course, spending more money usually works better than spending less.

Michael Bloomberg won his race for mayor of New York City. But barely. Bloomberg spent 16 times more than his challenger — over $100 million dollars to get just 50 percent. It cost him more than $150 for every vote. Ouch.

So, why did the mayor have to spend so much to eke out a win?  Two words: term limits.

Bloomberg’s deal with the council to gut the city’s two-term limit and allow them all to run for a third term didn’t cost him his powerful perch. But it did cost him millions of dollars. And his reputation.

There were also a number of initiatives on the ballot. Before Tuesday’s election, at Townhall.com, I highlighted Maine and Washington State measures to put a cap on state spending growth. Both measures were defeated, but it was educational to take note of the spending.

In the final months, Maine’s measure was outspent by about ten to one. Washington’s? $3.5 million to nothing. Predictably, the big money came  from groups already wealthy from standing in the receiving line for government spending.

Spending money to make money . . . spending money to take money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.