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Wednesday

29

August 2012

3

COMMENTS

5 Issues Republicans Should Address At the Convention (Or After)

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Foreign Affairs & Policy, Liberty & Limited Government, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

Being the more leftist party, I criticize Democrats frequently. But Republicans do a lot of stupid things and have plenty to answer for themselves. Here’s a list of issues I’d like to see the party address prominently to the American people (at the ongoing Republican National Convention would be an ideal choice, but anytime during the rest of the campaign would be good).

Explain Why We Should Trust That Republicans Will Get Spending Right This Time. Republicans criticize the President, and rightly so, for spending like a drunken sailor. His massive and wasteful stimulus was bad enough as a one time deal, but he’s since set the new baseline at post-stimulus levels, and has called for ever more spending each year. But it’s important to remember that the big spending didn’t start with Obama.

Republicans can’t simply excuse Bush’s big spending as a response to an unusual financial crisis. Yes, a lot of money was spent in response to the financial meltdown, and perhaps that can be excused even if it was misguided. But what’s the excuse for creating a massive new prescription drug entitlement? Or the 30% increase in federal subsidy programs? Or the massive increase in regulatory spending? Simply put, when Republicans most recently controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, they spent like drunken sailors, too. They need to explain clearly how they’ve internalized the lessons of those mistakes, and what controls are or will be in place to ensure they aren’t repeated.

(more…)

Saturday

25

August 2012

2

COMMENTS

Overgovernment: Birthday Blues Edition

Written by , Posted in Big Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

It’s your birthday! But don’t hold the party just yet, citizen, step into my office and fill out some paperwork first…

When Martha Boneta hosted a birthday party for a friend’s 10-year-old daughter on her Virginia farm, she didn’t expect to have the county come knocking on her door.

But come knocking it did — threatening her with nearly $5,000 in fines.

Fauquier County officials say Boneta, owner of the 70-acre Liberty Farms in Paris, Va., didn’t have the proper permit to host the party, nor to sell produce on her own land. Zoning Administrator Kimberley Johnson sent her a cease-and-desist letter in April after the party, warning her with the financial consequences if she didn’t stop her activities within 30 days.

I’m beginning to understand how Michelle Obama must have felt all those years. An America that requires permits for birthday parties is not one I’m proud of.

But perhaps even worse in its overall impact than that utterly asinine requirement is the continued and widespread disregard for basic economic liberties, a particular problem when it comes to zoning laws.

Our economic rights are essential. The right to earn a living, to engage in commerce and trade, these are things which we are required to have if we are to be able to pursue happiness. If we can’t even walk up to our neighbors and buy a bit of food grown on their own land, I don’t even know what we’re doing in this country anymore. Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

For more on the story above, enjoy (or become enraged because of) this video from Economic Freedom:

Friday

24

August 2012

0

COMMENTS

Overgovernment: “You Didn’t Get There On Your Own” Edition

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Government Meddling

Commenting on a story of a type common in my Overgovernment series, Dr. Mark Perry offered this brilliant repackaging of President Obama’s now infamous collectivist screed:

Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure.  There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive.  Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them.  If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own.  Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state.

This is one of those times when all I can think is “wow, why didn’t I think to write that?”

Tuesday

21

August 2012

1

COMMENTS

What’s Wrong With Gender Specific Clubs?

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society

A lot of the talk around Augusta National’s decision to admit its first two female members has me baffled, just as I was baffled when this whole brouhaha began years ago.  What principle, exactly, are the people upset with Augusta’s membership practices enforcing? What’s wrong with gender specific clubs?

On every college campus in America, you’ll find clubs excluding at least half of the population. No women in the fraternities; no men in the sororities. Who does that harm?

Augusta, up until now, was a private, male-only golf club. So what? There are a multitude of private, women-only clubs, and I don’t see the angry feminists busting down their doors demanding men be let in for the sake of equality. Because this really has nothing to do with equality. Anyone was already equally free to start their own private club and set their own rules for it. That’s equality.

These people, who usually prattle on about the benefits of diversity, don’t seem to actually want any. What’s that, how can I say they don’t want diversity when they are trying to make Augusta more diverse? Because if every club has the same rules, the same membership, and the same demographics, then there is no diversity among the universe of private clubs. They’ll all be the same. What’s the fun in that?

Sure, you can make a particular women’s only college more diverse by forcing them to accept men, but in so doing you’ll have made colleges as a whole less diverse. Take the extreme example and say you eliminate gender specific colleges altogether. People will necessarily have fewer choices when it comes to the type of collegiate environment they can choose, meaning the total universe of colleges has become less diverse.

True diversity means allowing different types of clubs, universities and other institutions to exist. If every institution must cater to the exact same crowd, then people will have less interesting and meaningful options available to them. Yes, Augusta is prestigious and well-known, but should their success mean that they are no longer free to set their own membership rules? Shouldn’t the same be expected of every club, or better yet, none at all?

Saturday

11

August 2012

1

COMMENTS

The Other Problem of Dependence

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Liberty & Limited Government

A lot has been said about the growing dependence of American citizens on the federal government, including in this great CF&P Economics 101 video narrated by Emily O’Neill. But there’s another kind of growing dependence about which we need to be concerned, and that’s the degree to which states are being made dependent on the federal government.

This is an issue in which I take a particular interest, considering how important our federalist and competitive system is in protecting freedom and promoting prosperity. At the time the stimulus was passed, I noted that “funneling federal dollars into the states … leads to significant waste.” I’ve also defended federalism against attack from central planners, and explained how federalism helps preserve tax competition and the ability to flee confiscatory tax rates.

Most recently, I took a rather pessimistic view of the impact of Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling on federalism, despite it overruling the federal government’s attempted Medicaid bullying. Now Veronique de Rugy, writing in the Washington Examiner, makes a powerful case of her own:

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, many claim that the choice of states’ ability to opt out of Medicaid expansion requirements without losing all Medicaid funding was a big victory for federalism. That may be true, but federalism is still seriously in jeopardy.

…[T]the federal government is pouring billions of dollars each year into the states’ coffers.

…This money isn’t free. It comes with strings attached — mandates and rules dictating how the states should spend their money, what services they should provide and how they should provide it.

…These requirements weaken states’ independence, especially since the federal government can bully states into doing what it wants by threatening them with “cross-over sanctions.” The classic example was the threat to withhold highway grants for states that failed to adopt a national drinking age above 21, or adopt federal clean air requirements.

And if the funding is temporary but the requirement permanent, this “aid” becomes even more expensive. Using data from 50 states over a 13-year period, a 2010 paper by economists Russell Sobel and George Crowley shows that temporary grants from the federal government to state and local governments cause the latter to increase their own future taxes by between 33 and 42 cents for every dollar in federal grants received.

Limiting the combined state and federal size of government will require returning to a strong federalist model, where states are again autonomous bodies responsible for the bulk of governance, and more importantly thus constrained by the forces of tax competition. The current trend toward greater and greater state reliance on the federal gravy train to administer federally mandated programs is politically, fiscally and economically untenable.

Tuesday

7

August 2012

0

COMMENTS

Nope, the Science Still Isn’t Settled

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

The Warmmongers like to pretend that all the data supports their non-stop hysteria, and that anyone who disagrees is either ignorant, hates science, or is a dirty liar paid off by the oil industry. Lately, they’ve taken to pointing to current “extreme weather” anecdotes as further proof of AGW. But what does the data say? Dr. John Christy offered testimony to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee exploring that question. From GlobalWarming.org:

Increasingly, we hear experts blame global warming for bad weather. Most acknowledge that no single weather event can be attributed to global climate change. However, they contend, the pattern of recent events – the sheer number and severity of heat waves, wild fires, droughts, freak storms — is exactly what climate scientists have predicted and must be due to mankind’s fuelish ways. Such assertions, Christy shows, are not based on real data.

One way to measure trends in extreme weather is to compare the number of state record high and low temperatures by decade. Many more state high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades. Even more surprising, “since 1960, there have been more all-time cold records set than hot records in each decade.”

…One might object that state temperature records are not informative, because the number of data points — 50 — is so small. So Christy also investigated “the year-by-year numbers of daily all-time record high temperatures from a set of 970 weather stations with at least 80 years of record.” He explains: “There are 365 opportunities in each year (366 in leap years) for each of the 970 stations to set a record high (TMax).” Adding the TMax days by year, Christy found that there were several years with more than 6,000 record-setting highs before 1940 but none with record highs above 5,000 after 1954. “The clear evidence is that extreme high temperatures are not increasing in frequency, but actually appear to be decreasing.”

So keep that in mind the next time some media commentator breathlessly attributes “unusual and extreme weather” to global warming.

Tuesday

31

July 2012

1

COMMENTS

Overgovernment: Nanny Knows Breast Edition

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Health Care, Welfare & Entitlements, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

I could probably populate this blog entirely with the stupid things Nanny Bloomberg does if I so wanted. His latest outrageous policy is to hide baby formula from new mothers in an effort to force them to breast feed:

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is locking up the baby formula, because he wants newborns to drink breast milk instead.

He’s using his mayoral power to direct maternity-ward nurses to hide baby-milk formula after Sept. 2 so that new moms feel pressured to provide breast milk to their newborns.

Bloomberg’s mammary-mandate is supported by white-coated public-health officials, who say the scientific data shows that mothers’ milk aids infants’ digestive systems and shields them from some diseases.

His wishes are law because he controls much of the city’s health network in a city-wide version of Obamacare.

Thus illustrates a central problem with granting government control over health care, which is that it gives government the power to throw its weight around when it comes to the most intimate and personal of decisions.

As with most things, there are both pros and cons to breast-feeding, and no one but the individual mother should have any say in the matter. But as usual Nanny Bloomberg thinks he knows breast… er, best.

Saturday

28

July 2012

0

COMMENTS

Free Speech Is Not a Partisan Issue

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government

A lot has been said about the various threats that have been lobbed at Chick-fil-a because of the owner’s views regarding gay marriage. Just to recap:

  • Boston’s Democrat Mayor, Thomas Menino, said “Chick-fil-a doesn’t belong in Boston” and vowed to block it from opening a chain in the city.
  • Chicago’s Democrat Mayor, Rahm Emanual, said “Chick-fil-a values are not Chicago values” and supported the efforts of Alderman Joe Moreno to block for precisely that reason the opening of a Chick-fil-a.
  • San Francisco’s Democrat Mayor, Edwin Lee, tweeted his strong recommendation that Chick-fil-a not come any closer to his city than the current closest location 40 miles away.

I think each of them has since backed off their threats, which brings me to the subject of this post. The degree to which the liberal intellectual class has responded in defense of free speech has been heart-warming (though the defense of the threats by a not insignificant number of rank-and-file liberals on Twitter and Facebook, and in blog comment sections, has been simultaneously disheartening).

It’s become a cliché in Washington to say that such-and-such is not a partisan issue (often follow by declaring it an “American issue”). This is meant to shame the other side into agreeing with the speaker, though I can’t imagine anyone finds it convincing. But the thing about free speech is that it actually is not a partisan issue, in the sense that once speech is not equally protected depending on the partisan content of that speech, then there is no such thing as free speech anymore. And that’s precisely the issue we were facing with the attacks by government thugs on Chick-fil-a.

This is not to say that there aren’t partisans that don’t believe in free speech (see Fairness Doctrine, campaign finance reform, etc.), but that free speech can’t be partisan in its application if it is to survive. Left-leaning commentators and outlets like Glenn Greenwald, Mother Jones, Andrew Sullivan, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, and Time Magazine, and a host of others, have weighed in against the threats targeting Chick-fil-a and in defense of the First Amendment. I’ll let the words of another liberal, Kevin Drum, provide my thoughts on the matter:

[T]here’s really no excuse for Emanuel’s and Menino’s actions. If you don’t want to eat at Chick-fil-A, don’t eat there. If you want to picket them, go ahead. If they violate the law, go after them. But you don’t hand out business licenses based on whether you agree with the political views of the executives. Not in America, anyway.

Thursday

26

July 2012

0

COMMENTS

Overgovernment: Save Our Balls Edition

Written by , Posted in Big Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

Put your mind to ease! America is no longer going to be held hostage by little magnetic balls, thanks to the fine efforts of our beneficent overlords:

The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Wednesday sued the maker of the popular magnetic desk toy Buckyballs to stop the sale of the product because of the risks posed to children.

Some major retailers, including Amazon, Brookstone and Urban Outfitters, have agreed to stop selling these and similar products at CPSC’s request. Children who swallow the tiny magnetic balls can require surgery when they become stuck in their intestines.

Menace to society

Well thank goodness. Without the millions spent on the CPSC, America might have to suffer another horrendous bout of almost two dozen Buckyball accidents over the next four years. Can you imagine the horror?

So here we have a product marketed to adults that, if used improperly by children (i.e. swallowed) can be harmful. Can anyone think of any other adult products that can be harmful to children? Oh, I don’t know, how about all of them!

With millions of Buckyballs sold to date, the CPSC is reacting to 20 or so incidents. That’s it. Meanwhile, how many thousands of kids die in traffic accidents each year? Who cares that cars are for adults, a child could still get the key and take it for a spin! We must outlaw cars! Why won’t you just think of the children?

And remember chemistry sets? Sorry, you can forget about teaching little Johnny about science, what if the tyke chugs a chemical!? And forget about bikes, too…they’re just death on wheels!

If it were up to the big government nanny’s, we’d all live in padded rooms while being fed through straws and forced to watch Obama documentaries for the rest of our lives. Life is full of risk. If each one, no matter how minuscule, provides a sufficient excuse to curtail our liberty, then we’ll quickly find that we have none left.

P.S. You can still purchase Buckyballs here, and help support their efforts to, as they say, “fight hard to keep our products on the market… and our balls in your hands.”

P.P.S. They’ve also released this ad in response:

Tuesday

24

July 2012

1

COMMENTS

The Gun Grabber Onslaught Continues

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Gun Rights, Liberty & Limited Government

I noted on Friday the incredible speed with which gun grabbers pounced on the Aurora shooting to advance their anti-gun rights agenda. The usual suspects have now piled on or, in Nanny Bloomberg’s case, doubled down.

Michael Bloomberg, who first falsely claimed that violence is getting worse in America, predictably responded to Piers Morgan’s anti-gun pestering by taking his initial stance a step further and declaring that cops should illegally go on strike until politicians are forced to seize guns from law-abiding Americans. Roger Ebert chastised America for being “one of few developed nations that accepts that notion of firearms in public hands.” Piers Morgan chimed in on twitter to note that “now is that time” for America to “do something about its gun laws.” And some guy at the Washington Post wants to require that another party co-sign for someone’s sanity before they can buy a gun, while is despicably pestering shooting victim relatives to endorse gun control.

But what exactly are the knee-jerkers proposing that could have prevented the Aurora shooting? Holmes had no criminal record nor documented evidence of mental illness. The one actual specific proposal offered above wouldn’t work either, as we’ve seen numerous people who knew Holmes state how they couldn’t have imagined him doing anything violent, so it’s no stretch to say one would have co-signed a hypothetical gun application.

The simple reality is that the only way to theoretically keep guns away from the likes of the Aurora shooter is by keeping guns away from everyone – in other words by eviscerating the Constitution and our Second Amendment rights. And I say “theoretically” because even if every gun was outlawed, we know criminals would still get them.

The lack of a practical and realistic solution isn’t the only problem with these reflexive, knee jerk calls to “do something.” The truth of the matter is there just may not be a problem here to solve. I know it’s tempting to react emotionally to any horrific incident, but when it comes to setting policy we need to be logical. Sadly, when it comes to risk management through public policy, logic is often lacking (see TSA).

The shooting in Aurora was horrible, to be sure, but for a little perspective, the equivalent of one Aurora massacre occurs every ten days in Chicago, otherwise known as the gun-control capital of the United States, according to Doug Ross. For even more perspective, 7,630 people died in traffic accidents in the first quarter of 2012, or approximately 7 Aurora massacres per day, or one every three and a half hours.

So we’re essentially talking about shredding our Constitutional rights to prevent another incident whose death toll is matched every three and a half hours on our roads, where nobody cares. Makes perfect sense. And never mind the number of additional crimes that would be occurring or made worse, like this one, once people lose the ability to protect themselves.

The truth is that sometimes bad things happen. It’s part of life, and that you might not always be able to prevent them from happening is part of the price of living in a free society. Sometimes it seems like a high price to pay, but it’s still much better than the alternative.

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About Me

profileI serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.

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