BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

Friday

10

January 2014

Reducing Political Power is the Only Defense Against Its Abuse

Written by , Posted in Big Government

The latest political scandal, the so-called Bridge-gate, to consume the media involves revelations that a top aid to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie deliberately jammed traffic in the district of a mayor who refused to endorse Christie’s reelection. It’s nice that the media is obsessed with something – abuse of political power- that actually matters for once, though I can’t help but wonder where they were when the National Park Service was using the government shutdown as an excuse to harass citizens for the purpose of scoring political points  for the administration against Congress. And it’s worth noting that there’s already been 17 times more coverage on the big three networks for Christie’s scandal than there has been in the last six months for the IRS, a major instance of political abuse that has yet to be fully resolved.

It’s unclear at this point whether Christie ordered or knew of his staffer’s actions, but that’s a political question that will sort itself out. I’m more interested in the policy implications.

As political payback goes Bridge-gate is rather weak sauce. David Boaz notes that it pails in comparison to the more open and direct abuses of Progressive hero FDR:

FDR knew the rule, “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” He wasn’t so squeamish when it came to retailers who defied his preferences. Sewell Avery, chairman of the big catalog company Montgomery Ward, opposed labor unions, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Roosevelt’s re-election. In 1944 Avery refused FDR’s order to extend his company’s labor contracts to avoid a strike. Roosevelt ordered the War Department to seize the offices of Montgomery Ward. Attorney General Francis Biddle flew to Chicago to oversee the army’s physical removal of Avery from his office, as the photo shows.

FDR was in fact a godfather of sorts when it comes to the abuse of political power. Aside from being wasteful and ineffective, the massive spending and public works programs he established during the Great Depression were routinely used to reward political allies and punish opponents. He hardly invented the practice of political patronage, but he drastically increased its scale and impact.

We’ve since witnessed numerous other examples of political abuse, from Richard Nixon to J. Edgar Hoover. Each case demonstrated in its own way the dangers of concentrating too much political power in a single person.  Indeed, the only sure fire way to reduce the abuse of power is to reduce the amount of power itself. The less power any one individual or group is able to wield, the fewer cases of abuse we will witness. And the key to reducing political power is to reduce the size and scope of government itself.

Friday

10

January 2014

Notable Quotations

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Economics & the Economy

Richard Rahn, “Fumbling the crystal ball:”

I am reasonably confident in saying the world is headed for a major financial crisis, because the numbers show that most large economies are projected to further increase their debt-to-gross domestic product ratios this year, which are already at record-high global levels. However, I cannot forecast with a high probability (nor do I know others who can) when this financial crisis will occur.

A forecast that the world will have a new major financial crisis is really a forecast that the world’s political leaders are incapable or unwilling to make the necessary changes to avoid the crisis (e.g., substantially reducing government spending). If a new Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan suddenly came forward, or if current leaders of major countries decided to make the necessary changes, my forecast of the crisis would become less likely.

Chris Edwards, “Why Is the Federal Government So Wasteful?”

There is no straightforward, technocratic way to “reinvent” the federal government to make it work with a decent amount of efficiency. Some of these problems can be reduced to an extent, but as long as the federal government is as large as it is, it will sadly continue wasting hundreds of billions of dollars from misallocation, mismanagement, and other problems.

The only real solution to the ongoing waste in the federal government is to downsize it.

Don Boudreaux, “Perhaps They’re All Unconsciously Biased:”

A perennial “Progressive” nostrum is the notion that other people’s consciousness must be “raised.”  A powerful belief among “Progressives” seems to be that there are only two possible reasons why someone might disagree with “Progressives’” plans to reconstruct society with government force: either the disagreeable person has a financial stake in publicly expressing disagreement or the disagreeable person suffers a “bias” that must be “corrected” by “consciousness-raising” or “awareness” campaigns.

 

Wednesday

1

January 2014

Redistribution and the Human Prosperity Deniers

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Economics & the Economy, Liberty & Limited Government

Writing for the Washington Examiner, Randolph May highlights President Obama’s recent declaration that that income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” May harkensd back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient warnings in Democracy in America:

Tocqueville argued that a democratic regime, by the sheer force of the majoritarian canon it embodies, would ceaselessly move in the direction of striving for ever greater degrees of what he called “equality of condition.”

This continual push for more equality of condition would lead inexorably to an ever-increasing encroachment of government authority at the expense of individual freedom.

We’ve witnessed just such an encroachment and it appears to be accelerating despite vast growth in overall human prosperity. That’s the thrust of a piece by Marian Tupy that challenges overly pessimistic accounts of the state of the world:

The dystopian world that Francis describes, without citing a single statistic, is at odds with reality. In appealing to our fears and pessimism, the pope fails to acknowledge the scope and rapidity of human accomplishment—whether measured through declining global inequality and violence, or growing prosperity and life expectancy.

The thesis of Evangelii Gaudium is simple: “unbridled” capitalism has enriched a few, but failed the poor…

Just how free the free market really is today is debatable. The United States is perceived as the paragon of free-market capitalism. And yet over the last two decades, according to Wayne Crews of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington has issued 81,883 regulations—or nine per day. Maybe the marketplace should be regulated less, and maybe it should be regulated more. But unbridled it is not.

…

As for the negative consequences of “trickle-down” economics that the pope bemoans, let’s look at them in turn.

First, consider inequality. Academic researchers—from Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University, to Surjit Bhalla, formerly of the Brookings Institution and Rand Corporation, to Paolo Liberati of the University of Rome—all agree that global inequality is declining. That is because 2.6 billion people in China and India are richer than they used to be.

…Paradoxically, the shrinking of the global inequality gap was only possible after India and China abandoned their attempts to create equality through central planning. By allowing people to keep more of the money they earned, the Chinese and Indian governments incentivized people to create more wealth. Allowing inequality to increase at home, in other words, diminished inequality globally. And global inequality, surely, is the statistic that should most concern the leader of a global religion.

Tupy is also the editor of new Cato Institute project HumanProgress.org, which documents the dramatic improvements in human well-being that have taken place primarily over the last century. The site is needed because public perception is much more negative than reality, driven by cynical politicians who conjure ever more reasons to continue expanding government, as well as their own power.

Speaking of prosperity deniers, Donald Boudreaux recently provided a list of salient questions to ask of redistribution’s proponents, questions which they are unlikely able to answer. Here’s a sample:

Do you not worry that creating government power today to take from Smith and give to Jones — simply because Smith has more material wealth than Jones — might eventually be abused so that tomorrow, government takes from Jones and gives to Smith simply because Smith is more politically influential than Jones?

Suppose that Jones chooses a career as a poet. Jones treasures the time he spends walking in the woods and strolling city streets in leisurely reflection; his reflections lead him to write poetry critical of capitalist materialism. Working as a poet, Jones earns $20,000 annually. Smith chooses a career as an emergency-room physician. She works an average of 60 hours weekly and seldom takes a vacation. Her annual salary is $400,000. Is this “distribution” of income unfair? Is Smith responsible for Jones’ relatively low salary? Does Smith owe Jones money? If so, how much? And what is the formula you use to determine Smith’s debt to Jones?

I highly recommend reading the rest of Boudreaux’s piece. And if you happen to favor redistribution, I suggest you try answering the questions and seeing if you still do.

Friday

27

December 2013

Overgovernment: Foreign Follies Edition

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

Federal, state and local governments within the United States are all prone to overgovernment, and the problem has certainly gotten worse as government has grown in recent years. But they still lack in bureaucratic prowess compared to their foreign counterparts, as evidenced in part by these two recent stories on international governmental excess.

In France, kindness is a fine-able offense. Or at least it is for bar owners who allow their customers to demonstrate consideration by bringing empty glasses back to the bar:

French officials have fined a pub in Brittany €9,000 for “undeclared labour” after a customer returned some empty glasses to the bar.

For customers at the Mamm-Kounifl concert-café in Locmiquélic, carrying drinks trays and used glasses back to the bar was a polite tradition.

But for social security agency URSAFF, it was also an infringement of labour laws because customers were acting like waiters, French local newspaper Le Télégramme reported.

Surprisingly, some commentators on the story actually sided with the government! They share the fallacious reasoning behind the law, which supposedly exists to protect labor, i.e. jobs. Doing a task that another could be paid to do, in other words, is seen as a threat to their employment. But where does one draw the line with this sort of thinking? Should I be fined for mowing my own lawn instead of hiring a lawn care service? For cleaning my own house instead of hiring a maid? Or, in the case of New Jersey, pumping my own gas? Any activity we engage in for ourselves could be performed by another, thus creating a “job.” But does pursuing employment growth in this fashion make economic sense?

Ultimately, what this comes down to is an erroneous understanding many have regarding the nature of employment. Jobs don’t exist to fulfill demand for employment. Jobs exist when something needs doing. Production is the goal and employment is a byproduct. After all, if we could produce all that we needed without working, would that not be the ideal world? Reducing productivity to increase employment thus defeats the purpose of work and makes us all unnecessarily poorer in the process.

Labor is finite, while that which can be labored over is for all practical purposes infinite. The challenge, and where governments typically fail and thereby cause unemployment, is in having a system which encourages the entrepreneurial exploration of new products and services. Innovations that enhance productivity, whether it be ATM’s, automated cashiers, or even the realization that customers can return their own empty glasses (nevermind that such hardly represents the sum total of a server’s job), are not the cause of long-term unemployment. Innovations that allow us to make more for less, or free labor from doing one task so that it may be allowed to do another instead, make us richer and should be encouraged. Discouraging innovations in order to “protect jobs” is economic backwardness.

Moving from France to Denmark, we find a case of excessive nannyism (Hat-tip: Cato@Liberty):

…scientists have now discovered that too much of the most commonly used type of cinnamon, cassia, can cause liver damage thanks to high levels of coumarin, a natural ingredient found in the spice.

…As a result, the EU has laid down guidelines for the maximum content of coumarin in foodstuffs – 50mg per kg of dough in traditional or seasonal foods that are only consumed occasionally, and 15mg per kg of dough in what it terms as everyday fine baked goods.

Last month, the Danish food authority ruled that the nation’s famous cinnamon swirls were neither traditional nor seasonal, thus limiting the quantity of cinnamon that bakers are allowed to use, placing the pastry at risk – and sparking a national outcry that could be dubbed the great Danish bake strop.

The president of the Danish Bakers’ Association, Hardy Christensen, said: “We’ve been making bread and cakes with cinnamon for 200 years. Then suddenly the government says these pastries are not traditional? I have been a baker for 43 years and never come across anything like this – it’s crazy. Using lower amounts of the spice will change the distinctive flavour and produce less tasty pastries. Normally, we do as we’re told by the government and say OK, but now it’s time to take a stand. Enough is enough.”

Anything taken in sufficient quantities can be hazardous to one’s health. This is especially true of government.

Friday

20

December 2013

A&E/Duck Dynasty Fight Demonstrates How the Marketplace of Ideas Has Devolved

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society

In perhaps one of the most boneheaded business decisions ever made, A&E decided to sabotage its rating juggernaut, Duck Dynasty, in a fit of PC rage over comments from Phil Robertson about homosexuality in an article by GQ. Robertson, in a manner one might expect from a plainspoken outdoorsman from Louisiana, rather crudely expressed his personal inability to relate to same sex attraction through comparison of the various sexual organs involved. While both logically unconvincing of anything and potentially distasteful to the prudish, the statement hardly represented an attack on anyone.

He also he expressed the rather orthodox Christian view that homosexuality is a sin. More specifically, he listed homosexuality among a host of other sins he sees as plaguing the nation, but since adulterers have no grievance group, homosexuality is the only one we’ve heard a big stink about. He also prefaced the discussion with this:

“You put in your article that the Robertson family really believes strongly that if the human race loved each other and they loved God, we would just be better off. We ought to just be repentant, turn to God, and let’s get on with it, and everything will turn around.”

And then he followed up with:

“We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job.”

And in a separate statement he added:

“However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”

How bigoted and closed-minded of him. Oh wait, no, I’m confusing him with those who think silencing others is the best response to hearing anything disagreeable.

I don’t bring up Phil Robertson’s views because I necessarily share them. Some I do and some I don’t, but I’m not starting with the same set of principles as Phil Robertson, so I frequently reach different conclusions. What I did want to talk about, however, was the entirely inappropriate response to his expression from both sides.

First, the attacks on Phil Robertson seem to align with a troubling trend regarding the manner in which the modern left is engaging in political discourse. Which is to say, they aren’t. Rather than debate opponents, they ostracize them. They turn any expression of opposing views into de facto evidence of some moral deficiency (or, if they’re in academia, into evidence of a mental disorder) on part of the speaker that absolves anyone else of the need to hear, process or think critically about what they have to say. Even the mere act of organizing to express views and advance common interests is evidence of some nefarious conspiracy or shady behavior.

These are sad developments for American political discourse that undermine the functioning of our republican system. But the response from the right doesn’t always hit the mark, either.

In defending Phil Robertson from A&E’s boneheaded decision, some – including politicians like Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal – have cited the First Amendment. This is a red herring that serves only to confuse the issue. The First Amendment protects the right of the people to speak without infringement by government. It says nothing of how other private citizens can respond to speech. If anything, the First Amendment is firmly on A&E’s side, as it protects the right of association, which includes the right to not associate, at their pleasure.

Unfortunately, the right of association is not universally supported by either the courts or the left, which while cheering A&E’s self-destructive overreaction, also oppose the right of other businesses to choose their own clientèle, so long as those clientèle belong to a PC-approved victim group (hint: that excludes Christians). Nevertheless, it is the freedom to associate that matters here. A&E ought to be able to fire whomever they please to advance the chosen vision of their brand.

Part of the problem is linguistic. “Free speech” has evolved to refer to more than just the First Amendment right to speak without government interference, but also the general public desire to encourage a marketplace of ideas through respect for different points of view. Some of then erroneously used the First Amendment as a stand-in for the latter definition of “free speech,” when it really only applies to the former. Thus confusion is unfortunate, as it undermines their case.

Dragging the First Amendment into the discussion of A&E decision to punish Phil Robertson for expressing a widely held religious view that singled out no person or group of people for proposed harm allows those who freely cheer the silencing of opponents to correctly point out that the government did not silence Robertson (indeed, no one did), and therefore A&E is in the right. But that’s not the issue. The issue should be our troubling and growing acceptance of a culture of intimidation that not only seeks to shout down those who utter views not considered politically correct, but which actively seeks to bring them personal harm in retaliation.

The First Amendment itself may not be implicated by A&E’s suspension of Robertson, or with the groups which frequently call for similar responses in other cases, but the principles and desire to promote a healthy and robust civic and political culture which led to the amendment’s inclusion in the Bill of Rights are at the very center of the matter.

Friday

13

December 2013

The OECD’s Latest Demands Prove They Cannot Be Appeased

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Taxes
Coauthor(s): Andrew Quinlan
Originally published in Harbour Times
Download PDF

Earlier this year Hong Kong’s Inland Revenue rules were amended to allow for stand-alone Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) with other jurisdictions even in the absence of a bilateral treaty. The change was made at the behest of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Tax Information is the self-appointed judge, jury and executioner for global tax policy. The OECD’s “recommendation” for Hong Kong came with the threat of being labeled an “uncooperative jurisdiction” for failure to comply, and so the Legislative Council dutifully amended the rules in hopes of salvaging Hong Kong’s fiscal sovereignty. But the joke’s on them, as the OECD is already returning with a new list of demands.

In a letter addressing concerns about the new TIEA rules, Hong Kong’s Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau made assurances to the Legislative Council regarding the protection of taxpayer privacy. The letter noted that Hong Kong would “only exchange information upon receipt of requests and no information will be exchanged on an automatic or spontaneous basis,” and that there would be “no fishing expeditions.” The letter, in other words, recognized that the automatic and routine transmission of bulk taxpayer data, potentially even to the world’s most vile governments, is a threat to basic financial privacy and human rights.

Unfortunately, if Hong Kong wishes to continue meeting OECD demands, it will have to eliminate privacy protections and violate these very assurances almost immediately after having made them.

There was ample reason to question the decision to placate the OECD at the time. Even though it was not yet being demanded directly, the automatic exchange of all taxpayer information between nations, and without the need for any suspicion of wrong doing, was already receiving more than just lip-service from international bureaucracies. The April Communiqué from the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors welcomed “progress made towards automatic exchange of information,” noting further that it “is expected to be the standard.” This means that Hong Kong will be expected to routinely report all the information of foreign nationals to their home governments, including information that Hong Kong does not typically collect because it is not otherwise taxed. Hong Kong and other nations will be expected to bear the burden of collecting information they don’t need in order to help high-tax nations with bloated budgets track down every last potential taxpayer to squeeze.

Just as the G20 warned, automatic exchange is indeed now being asserted as the new standard. The group claims that it will be presenting “a new single global standard for automatic exchange of information by February 2014 and to finalizing technical modalities of effective automatic exchange by mid- 2014.” Following suit, the OECD’s Global Forum recently met in Jakarta, Indonesia, where a new “Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) Group” was established to “prepare the move towards AEOI implementation.”

Like the OECD’s prior standards, demands to implement automatic exchange are likely to come with the threat of blacklisting, sanctions, and other coercive tactics. Hong Kong established itself as an economic powerhouse in part by attracting investment through smart fiscal policy. The Fraser Institute’s 2013 Economic Freedom of the World Report gave Hong Kong its top rating, as did the Heritage Foundation in its Index of Economic Freedom. In fact, Hong Kong has sat atop the Heritage ranking for 19 straight years, an impressive feat that explains why it persistently performs as one of the world’s fastest growing and most competitive economies.

The major welfare states of the OECD, on the other hand, have seen their economies stagnate. High taxes combined with aggressive, overbearing enforcement efforts have resulted in poor economic performance. But rather than improve their own policies, politicians from these nations have abused the power of the OECD to pressure competitive nations into adopting uncompetitive policies.

Facing Hong Kong politicians is a familiar predicament. The global tax bureaucracy is determined to implement policies that benefit the global political class at the expense of taxpayers   and domestic economies, and are further prepared to punish jurisdictions that choose not to comply with their demands. But the policies demanded by the OECD conflict with the sovereign interests of Hong Kong and its citizens.

The OECD has relied upon the coerced cooperation of targeted jurisdictions to achieve their goals, but this appeasement has so far produced nothing but new demands and continued threats of punishment. There is indeed a risk for standing up to the OECD and asserting the sovereign right to defend financial privacy and maintain pro-growth policies, but the alternative approach of constantly bending over backwards to accommodate the global bullies in hopes that they will go away has proven ineffective.

Perhaps it is time for a new approach, and for Hong Kong and similarly targeted jurisdictions to band together to tell the OECD that the interests of a select group of statist tax collectors will no longer be allowed to override those of taxpayers throughout the world.

Monday

2

December 2013

Most Prudent Congress Ever?

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Media Bias

USA today reported that the current Congress has hit “new productivity lows” (Hat-tip: Reason):

Congress is on track to beat its own low record of productivity, enacting fewer laws this year than at any point in the past 66 years.

It’s a continuing slide of productivity that began in 2011, after Republicans recaptured the House majority in the 2010 elections, and the ability to find common ground has eluded the two parties while the legislative to-do list piles up.

The 112th Congress, covering 2011-12, emerged as the least productive two-year legislating period on record, while 2013 is on track to become the least productive single year in modern history.

Stories such as this do a lot to illustrate the assumptions of journalists that don’t explicitly make it into their reporting (some might consider it, dare I say, bias). The obvious, and also foolish, assumption behind this rather typical approach to legislative reporting is the belief that laws are fundamentally positive in nature, and therefore the more the merrier. Put another way, the Congress which passes the most laws is also seen as the most productive.

We could challenge this assumption by highlighting the plethora of laws passed in recent years that have been anything but productive (Obamacare, Dodd Frank, etc.), but I don’t want to get into the legislative weeds. I’d rather just point out that the logic behind concern-trolling Congressional productivity is internally inconsistent. If, as they presume, legislation is de facto positive and productive, then we should expect the need for new legislation to decrease over time. Since the purpose for passing legislation is, or ought to be, to solve actual problems, there should be fewer and fewer things we need solving over time as more and more laws are passed. In which case, articles like this would not be written.

But the reality is that legislation is not always productive. Sometimes it fails to solve an issue, or creates more problems than it solves. This is why the same people who take the statist view of legislation still implicitly acknowledge there remain a great many problems to solve. The realization that legislation can be either productive or unproductive, rather, should caution against reacting to problems by rushing through legislation without due consideration of the full ramifications of any proposed solutions. Looked at this way, the same evidence USA Today used to declare the current Congress to have “the least productive single year in modern history” can be used to say that is has been the most prudent in modern history.

Obviously, it’s not really so simple. Contrary to the logic of the article, Congress does not operate in a vacuum. Laws must also be signed by the President before enacted into law. Fewer laws are thus to be expected in a split government, as the two branches will agree on fewer issues when controlled by different parties. In this way, we see in practice the theory of our system of checks and balances: it sometimes forces politicians into behaving prudently despite their best efforts and intentions to the contrary.

Wednesday

27

November 2013

Notable Quotations

Written by , Posted in General/Misc.

Nick Gillespie, “Shut Up and Shop This Turkey Day:”

As Calvin Coolidge put it famously to a bunch of newspaper editors back in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business.” Just as you can’t have Thanksgiving without a meal that fully no one actually enjoys (and a guest list that always seems only slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and ill-mannered than the manimals in The Island of Dr. Moreau), you can’t have a functioning free-market economy without massive amounts of shopping. Every day is “Buy Nothing Day” in North Korea and look where that’s got them.

John Stossel, “Thankful for Property:”

This idea that happiness and equality lie in banding together and doing things as a commune is appealing. It’s the principle behind the Soviet Union, Medicare, the Vietnam War, Obamacare and so on. Some communal central planning is helpful, but too much is dangerous. The Pilgrims weren’t the first settlers on the East Coast of the New World to make this mistake.

John Fund, “Reid’s Law:”

Democrats say the crippling of the filibuster will make government more efficient and allow legislation to pass more easily. But there is a downside to majoritarianism and the “efficiency” it brings. As Phil Kerpen, author of the 2011 book Denying Democracy, told me: “The filibuster change will make it far more likely that major legislative accomplishments can be swept away in the next swing of the political pendulum. Public policy will be less stable and long-term business planning will be confounded.”

Jason Kuznicki, “This One Weird NPR Story about Manure Explains Our Government:”

You mean large farmers love these regulations? Of course they do! In fact, larger firms love regulations in general. And if you happen to love regulation, well, I gotta tell you – your love may or may not be well-founded. But one thing’s for sure: It’s killing the smaller, more local firms. Regulation is one of the main explanations for why corporations must be so large, so impersonal, and so powerful in our society.

Roger Pilon, “Harry Drops the Bomb:”

The Democratic hypocrisy on the subject boils down to this. After sitting on George W. Bush’s appellate court nominees during his first two years when they controlled the Senate—never even holding hearings—Democrats for the next two years, after losing the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, conducted unprecedented filibusters of Bush’s appellate court picks—all of which ended only with the “Gang of 14” compromise in 2005. But now that the Republican minority has used that same practice—directed this session only at the latest D.C. Circuit nominees—Democrats have moved to strip it from them—and not by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, as Senate rules require, but by a simple majority. It’s heads I win, tails you lose.

Tuesday

26

November 2013

Overgovernment: Total Recall Edition

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

General Government Motors is recalling 18,941 Chevy Camaros for violating Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 208, reports Heritage’s The Foundry. Surely the issue with the cars must be one of life and death, and for which we should profusely thank our government overloads for saving us from. Right?

Does anyone believe that? Surely not anyone who has followed the Overgovernment series. No, the horrible violation for which GM had to recall almost 20,000 cars at significant expense was for airbag warning labels that might peel.

This is no small matter, evidently. If the air bag warning label detaches from the visor, the driver and front seat passenger may not be warned of the risks of air bag deployment. Or so goes the reasoning for the adhesion edict. But even when warned via visor label, a driver and front seat passenger have little choice about air bag deployment, since the potentially dangerous equipment is required by the NHTSA itself.

In other words, General Motors is required under NHTSA rules to initiate a recall of 18,941 vehicles because of a danger created by other NHTSA rules. Perhaps it is regulators who should come with a warning label.

The nanny state, ladies and gentlemen.

Thursday

21

November 2013

Notable Quotations

Written by , Posted in General/Misc.

Jonah Goldberg, “Obamacare Schadenfreudarama:”

During the government shutdown, Barack Obama held fast, heroically refusing to give an inch to the hostage-taking, barbaric orcs of the Tea Party who insisted on delaying Obamacare. It was a triumph for the master strategist in the White House, who finally maneuvered the Republicans into revealing their extremism. But we didn’t know something back then: Obama desperately needed a delay of Healthcare.gov. In his arrogance, though, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. The other possibility is that he is such an incompetent manager, who has cultivated such a culture of yes-men, that he was completely in the dark about the problems. That’s the reigning storyline right now from the White House. Obama was betrayed. “If I had known,” he told his staff, “we could have delayed the website.”

This is how you know we’re in the political sweet spot: when the only plausible excuses for the administration are equally disastrous indictments.

Doug Bandow, “Americans Are Living Better Then They Have At Any Point In Human History:”

Look around your home or workplace and you see the fruit of continual innovation.  These products permeate our world.  Human creativity and ingenuity—punctuated with a mix of luck and hard work—constantly transform our lives, leaving us far better off as a result.

Few things better illustrate Adam Smith’s axiom that people can simultaneously benefit the rest of us while pursuing their own interest. Of course people should do good.  But they often do best while trying to advance themselves.

Alex Berezow, “20 Tips for Analyzing Claims of a Scientific Study:”

One of the big problems in science journalism is the tendency to hype scientific research. You’re familiar with the routine: A new study comes out on, say, how coffee might lead to a slight increase in a particular disease. Then, plastered all over the front pages of websites and newspapers are headlines like, “Too Much Coffee Will Kill You!” Of course, the following week, a different study will report that coffee might protect you from another disease, and the media hysteria plays out all over again, just in the opposite direction.

 

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →

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.

Search Site

Categories

Archives