Government

There are so many different ways that our government could modernize itself in order to better use technology to communicate with the people.  The problem is, our "leaders" usually see communicating with the people to be a one-way sort of thing: they talk, we listen.  That's why we need ideas like this one to shake things up a little.  It's impossible for politicians to keep track of this stuff even with dedicated full-time staffers.  How can ordinary citizens be expected to form an opinion of how their representatives are managing the nation's budget without the tools to do so in a reasonable amount of time and effort?  

One of the big advantages of a decentralized system of personal transportation technology (like, say, personal automobiles and public roads) is that it reduces the dependency of individuals upon the State for their daily lives.  It's hard to screw up a road, although governments certainly put a lot of effort into it! 

Generally, city governments seem to spend all their time complaining about traffic while begging for money to build extensive public transportation systems that aren't used.  Austin, for example, keeps putting silly "light rail" public transportation systems on the ballot, then scolding the public when they say no -- and nevermind that the bus system is so inefficient that it would be cheaper to buy each passenger a humvee.  (No, I didn't do that math, and I don't have a link handy to the person who did -- sorry).

Now a local news channel is complaining that Katrina evacuees who depended on public transportation in New Orleans are now stuck walking around Austin, because our public transport system sucks.  Here's one story:

Every morning and every evening, rain or shine, hot or cold, Ivy Harris walks one mile from her apartment on Decker Lane in Northeast Austin to the nearest bus stop to get to her job downtown.

"I was going to quit, but I talked to my job and they cut my hours, unfortunately, to get me home before it gets dark. Because one night I walked home and it was dark I couldn't see my hand in front of me," Harris said.

Her plan is to save up for a car and insurance so she can work more hours and fulfill her other responsibilities to her children. Right now, she must rely on cabs to get to the grocery store at a cost of $25 each way.

Here's one case where "tough love" is encouraging the right decision.  Relying on the State to provide your personal transportation may leave you without such transportation and unable to fulfill your own responsibilities.  The appropriate response, rather than quitting your job, is to take steps to become responsible for yourself.  In fact, the article closes on this note:

Some subjects interviewed for this article have since found ways to purchase vehicles, at times at the expense a tighter budget for food and other basic bills.

Heavens, you don't say that they are making cost-benefit tradeoffs!

So what's the clear subtext of this article?  "Vote for public transport to help the Katrina victims."

And that's why I titled my post "Do it again, only HARDER."  Because this news story is doing nothing less than pushing everyone to fund the exact sort of system that produced individuals dependent upon the State for their personal transportation.  The people they interviewed seem perfectly capable of learning from their mistakes and adapting to their new situation, so why is it so difficult for journalists to do so?

It used to be that Captain Ed could be relied upon for accurate, if partisan, analysis of politics and political news.  Though I did not always agree with him, I respected his opinion and ability to express it. 

Unfortunately, while I still admire his ability to express his opinion, I no longer have confidence in his ability to analyze a situation and come to the correct answer without the guidance of a partisan weathervane.  Here's why:

Nowhere in that resolution does it restrict the Bush administration from conducting its war operations within the US, and contrary to what Russ Feingold and Tom Daschle would have Americans think, laws do not enable government power but restrict them. That which is not explicitly forbidden is therefore assumed to be legal, and not the other way around, as a moment's thought will clearly show.

This flatly contradicts the enumerated powers doctrine.  Our constitution authorizes a limited federal government to take certain specified actions.  While a case could be made for State governments operating in that fashion, the Federal government is explicitly limited by the Constitution and doubly so by the 9th and 10th Amendments.

Sigh.

Did you think government was about solving problems?  No.  Government is about getting votes, even if it means creating a problem to pretend to solve.

Yes, like any other kid, I ate Oreos and now an attorney in California (aka Kalifornia) wants to ban Oreos. No, don't laugh, this is a real live prospective lawsuit! Oreos, so the attorney alleges, contain trans-fatty acids or "trans fats" as they are now known. Well, so does Crisco or other vegetable shortening, margarine and hundreds of other products we eat daily. We usually see them on labels as "partially hydrogenated" soybean oil or other vegetable oil product.

As columnist Paul Craig Roberts has put it, "Law, once a shield of the innocent, is now a weapon in the hands of government." Roberts is referring to a long and dangerous trend to expand the concept of crime to actions and non-actions in which no individual is harmed or threatened with harm. In our time one can be convicted of a felony and put in jail for killing a turtle, chopping down a tree, draining a swamp, polluting a body of water, and generally not doing everything that some bureaucrat says you have to do.

Remember 'squeegee kids'? They may still exist in your town, but I haven't seen any since the early '90s. The '80s were probably their heyday in the US. Squeegeeing was an especially aggressive sort of panhandling practiced at busy urban intersections where a kid armed with a bucket of filthy water and a squeegee would dash out into the street when the light was red, splash some water on your windshield, made perfunctory wiping motions with the squeegee to streak up the windshield nicely, and then demand/beg a 'payment' for the 'service' they had rendered. Of course the level of aggressiveness and the quality of the wipe varied wildly, but this was the basic mode of operation. A squeegee-intersection was sort of like a bandit's tollbooth - pay the price or face the unpleasant consequences ranging from vague guilt to physical damage to your car.

During testimony before the House Financial Services committee last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan indicated that he is prepared to maintain low interest rates for ıas long as it takesı to energize the listless economy. Unfortunately, this will only prolong the painful economic consequences of his own easy money, easy credit policies.

Once again Ron Paul hits the nail on the head.

Whenever someone says that this or that government program is absolutely necessary, I always wonder, "What did people do and how did they survive before the program?"

If someone says food stamps are absolutely necessary for poor people's survival, I wonder how America's millions of poor immigrants made it. Unless I missed something, mass starvation is not a part of our history. Was there a stealth food stamp program during the 1700s and 1800s?

Wouldn't it be great if no one ever took any harmful drugs and the violence associated with the drug trade was ended? Wouldn't you like to see how much better the world would be if poverty were ended? Don't you agree that discrimination against individuals and groups because of their race, creed, color, gender or sexual orientation by others, is intolerable and must be dramatically reduced and if possible ended? Shouldn't something be done to end terrorism, pollution, crime, molestation, rape, slavery, disease, and all of our social ills?

Republicans and Democrats have made good on the promise that by whatever means necessary they will work to end these social ills. No matter what it takes. So what does it take?

Congressional investigators said Monday that Vice President Dick Cheney had stymied their investigation into his energy task force by refusing to turn over key documents.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it was impossible to tell how much energy companies or industry groups may have influenced the task force's 2001 report because the administration withheld important records.

A bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to apply for financial aid at California community colleges was approved by the state Assembly on Thursday.

The bill, by Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Norwalk, would direct the board of governors to establish a process so students without legal immigration status can apply to have tuition waived.

It's sobering to realize that this proposal was passed in the middle of a fiscal crisis that has already caused a recall of the governor. The Libertarian ideology includes the concept of open borders, but open borders don't work in the presence of a welfare state.

This touches on several interesting areas. First, the question of whether felons should be allowed to vote; frankly, I see very little about being a felon that necessarily removes your right to political representation permanently. Felons certainly have a self-interested position with respect to criminal law, but that is not necessarily wrong; governments are quite capable of abusing criminal law to restrict the number of voters or to exclude those unlikely to support the present government from the process at all. At present, according to this survey, more than 2% of the potential voters are felons and thus barred; that seems clearly excessive. So, I don't see anything wrong with felons voting in the long run; whether they can vote while incarcerated is a different question.

Second, would it have changed the election? Apparantly so, but it was a remarkably close election. Since my vague knowledge of this issue suggests to me that most felons are racial minorities convicted of drug offenses, should we assume that felons would have voted for Gore because they are a minority (traditionally voting heavily democratic), because they believe Democrats are softer on drug issues, or because of some other factor?

Declaring there "are no sacred cows in my administration," Mayor Richard M. Daley fired one of his cousins Monday for his role in a scandal involving $40 million a year paid to politically connected trucking companies, some with mob ties.

"It doesn't matter who they are or whether they know me, they have to do the job," Daley said in announcing the firing of Mark Gyrion from a Water Department job.

Gyrion was the third city official to lose his job in the burgeoning scandal over the no-bids Hired Truck Program, now under investigation by federal prosecutors. The first was Angelo Torres, the former head of the truck program, who is charged with extortion. Last week, William Abolt resigned under pressure as city budget director.

Hmm... A relative of Mayor Daley, who bans firearms in his city of Chicago, is accused of corruption and mob ties? Why am I not surprised?

Well, this may be the season for the long rumored retirements from the Supreme Court. As speculation grows, and factions position themselves to go to battle, will confirmation hearings turn into the Borking of another jurist or two? With the prospects of another shameful saga, one might imagine that the majority on such a court could pick the next president! Appointees for life become entrenched political creatures - who would think it possible? It seems like the liberals, and those who claim to be progressive, are determined to forestall anybody remotely tainted with that conservative label. For these groups, a strict constructionist is anyone who can read the text of a law and rules on its constitutionality based upon the original document. Far too dangerous to have such judges elevated to the top court.

I was raised to believe that law is the glory of decent society; that the rule of law is the sine qua non of civilization; that international law is the greatest protector of human rights; that lawyers should be coupled with doctors as an elite profession to which a young person can aspire; that making laws is the great work of legislatures; that law schools are among the noble places of learning in society; that the title "judge" was perhaps the highest appellation in society; and that the jury system is an essential component of a just society.

While the feds spend billions of American taxpayer's money trying to create a semi-democratic government in Iraq, they ignore the realities of how our system at home is failing to function properly in a truly republican form as the founders planned. The feds claim to want to provide for the Iraqi people a democratic government, as if this implies they are going to give the Iraqi's what we have. That is something the Iraqis most likely don't really want. Perhaps it isn't so much the feds are ignoring how our own system of government is failing, as it is they are enabling it to fail.

Under a little-known loophole of the California Vehicle Code -- one that was designed primarily to get unsafe elderly drivers off the road -- anyone can file a complaint against any driver for whatever perceived infraction they want. Didn't signal before you made that lane change? Not going fast enough? Someone thinks you're ugly? You're the wrong ethnicity? Got an IMPEACH BUSH sticker on your bumper? With a license-plate number, perhaps a bit of colorful elaboration and no proof or witnesses whatsoever, it's shockingly simple for someone to commit what's essentially a sort of bureaucratic road rage -- vengeance via inconvenience. You could lose your license, and in Southern California, that means you could lose your life.

People "want the government to be their friend," Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith once wrote, "and despite the evidence, they've tried to convince themselves it is." Many rational defenders of capitalism view bureaucrats as little more than threats to "capitalist ideology." But ideology matters, and bad ideology means that some innocent person faces the wrong end of a loaded firearm. In America, that firearm is often an MP5, and the person holding it is a bureaucrat.

The experience of "regime change" in Iraq raises fundamental questions about political economy and philosophy. For example, the looting and vandalizing occurring after the military defeat of the Saddam Hussein government in Baghdad has been cited as proof of the necessity of a state, a living refutation of the idea that a natural order of private property can produce orderliness within the framework of liberty.

Critics regularly bash President Bush for excessive secrecy in government. But it?s federal bureaucrats who can?t be bothered with public accountability who are slowly but surely strangling the federal Freedom of Information Act.

I believe that there's going to be a war in this country soon, and government does too. There's a reason that the people's second amendment rights are being violated so openly. There's a reason that "The Patriot Act" was passed and "Patriot 2" will also be passed. There's a reason why people with any sort of record of serious noncompliance are prohibited from owning firearms.

If you want to understand what is going on in Iraq; why, for example, the US is confiscating weapons and forbidding people from taking their small arms out of their homes, turn to a timeless essay: Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State. Here we find the definition of the state, an examination of the ideological props for the state, the fallacies behind the usual justifications for the state, a contrast between state means and social means, a model for understanding relations between states in a federal system and an international system, and arguments concerning the impossibility of a limited state.

Do you think your federal tax dollars should be used to influence the outcome of state and local elections? Would you mind if an administration bureaucrat flew to your city- at taxpayer expense and on behalf of the federal government- to campaign against a local candidate or referendum you supported? Should certain candidates in your local election have the stamp of federal approval, much like a newspaper endorsement? Are state and local laws valid only if approved by the federal government?

You know the electronic voting system that people have been going on about in Ireland for the past year? We were thinking... let's do the bleedin' obvious: instead of talking in the abstract, let's get a copy of its source code and give it a good gander. So last month we put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department of the Environment and Local Government, which is responsible for the new system.