It was no fun to watch Acting IRS head Steve Miller testify before the House Ways and Means Committee last week. Miller simply had no real explanation for the troubling actions at IRS.

Even his terminology induced cringes. Miller’s mea culpa was for “horrific customer service.”

Customer service? That’s a stretch.

A customer holds a position of honor in a free society. Businesses spend billions on advertising — just to gain our favor. We have the power to make a business succeed or fail according to our decisions.

We don’t have to be well connected or part of the political or social elite to share this power. The most ordinary of customers can have a powerful impact. When I was a kid, customers in my state helped build a small business, Wal-Mart, into the envy of the retail world.  In 1956, ordinary bus riders in Montgomery, Alabama, used their “buying power” to help change the world.

As customers, we make demands. We make sure we’re satisfied. Sometimes we negotiate price; when no negotiation is possible and we don’t like the deal, we walk away. We have a choice. We decide.

Does this same type of empowerment exist when dealing with folks at the IRS?

Not so much. They tell us the price. We submit or go to jail. That’s no customer.

Cowering serf might sadly serve as the more apt moniker.

As the IRS grows bigger and more intrusive each year, and as its agents shake us down for ever larger sums, we should at least be able to keep the word “customer” away from them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Since 1990, the federal government has placed a stranglehold on the forest industry in Oregon and Washington and California in order to save a species of bird, Strix occidentalis caurina, better known as the Northern spotted owl.

The program has not been successful, experts tell us, with spotted owls declining 40 percent over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the common striped barred owl, Strix varia, has horned in on the spotted owl territory. It’s a more aggressive bird.

What to do?

Why, call the barred owl an “invasive species” and shoot the interlopers, of course!

The slaughter, approved over a year ago, is now going forward, at the cost of a million dollars per year.

Though the government and reporters like to call the two species of owl “distant cousins,” they apparently interbreed, and their offspring — called “sparred owls” — look just like spotted owls. You might think that this is a problem that takes care of itself, but no. On with the slaughter!

Meanwhile, as Teresa Platts of the Property and Environment Research Center notes, vast sectors of national forest remain unlogged and unmanaged, while wildfire suppression continues . . . which leads, of course, to mega-fires. Coming soon.

The ways of animal flourishing, in the wild, are not the ways of the governments that aim to protect the wild. Both are cruel, but at least one can understand the processes of nature.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry says “no one was fundamentally harmed” by the IRS’s targeting of Obama-unapproved applicants for tax-exempt status. (Go to 4:00 of the video to skip the preceding lies.)

Elsewhere, detestable Bill Maher inquires: “Is it unreasonable [for IRS] to target an anti-tax group?”

Good lord.

I’ve discussed the case of Frank VanderSloot, a wealthy businessman minding his own business preferring Romney to Obama when the Obama campaign attacked him for being a wealthy discredit-worthy Romney supporter. VanderSloot’s operations were forthwith audited by several government agencies.

VanderSloot is a big fish. Catherine Engelbrecht is not.

Engelbrecht is one of many right-leaning applicants for tax-exempt status forced to deal with endless intrusive questions, the ostensible result of innocent mismanagement by harried low-level IRS clerks. Her two political organizations are True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, and King Street Patriots, a discussion group.

As soon as Engelbrecht applied for tax-exempt status, the FBI began investigating King Street Patriots. Then the IRS audited the couple’s tax returns. Then the agency began its rounds of grilling about True the Vote and King Street Patriots. Then the ATF audited the machine shop. Then OSHA came.

“No one was fundamentally harmed”? Do we need corpses?

Reports about the IRS’s special targeting of non-liberal applications for tax-exempt status indicate that many folks gave up on forming their organizations. Other attempts have been delayed for years. Such time-wasting, money-wasting, action-stopping obstructionism makes it harder to pursue one’s mission during the run-up to a national election, nyet?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Senator Lamar Alexander compares the latest Obama administration scandal to Iran-Contra . . . he says it’s “even bigger.”

One hates to continually harp on the president and his scandals, but he and his big government keep producing them. So here we go again!

Obamacare was supposed to save money. It hasn’t. And it should be no shock to learn that the plan has already overshot its budget. Its implementation budget. And Congress balked at throwing more money at the “Affordable Care Act,” perhaps on the grounds that  we can’t afford it.

So Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius passed around the hat to the major players in the managed medical insurance industry — the folks previously demonized by Democrats as the greedy bloodsuckers who singlehandedly caused industry price inflation — to push the plan through on a “shoestring budget.”

Trouble is, it’s not obvious that this is legal. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch called Sebelius’s private fundraising effort “absurd,” and promised to inquire about conflicts of interest.

It’s easy to see why the Republicans in the House and Senate are suspicious. Such a move rubs up against the grain of what a republic is. But I’m sure Democrats are shrugging. It is just another business-government partnership, after all.

Well, it’s not “just another.” It might end up being the biggest ever. And you have to draw the line somewhere. Ancient Romans drew the line to protect their republic at the Rubicon — which Caesar crossed, ushering in empire.

It’s not just armies that cross important boundaries.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s no surprise to long-time observers of the Obama administration, the Internal Revenue Service, or government in general that the IRS has targeted non-lefty groups for reasons the agency laughably contends are non-ideological.

The current brouhaha is only part of the story. Here’s another part. Frank VanderSloot is a businessman who donated to the Romney campaign. In April of last year, an Obama campaign website chastised several Romney supporters for such high crimes as being “high-dollar donors” with “less-than-reputable records,” interested in “pursuing a specific agenda.” Just the kind of persons that government agencies might like to especially investigate, perhaps?

In any case, within two weeks of the publication of this enemies list, a recent employee of Senate Democrats began rooting around in VanderSloot’s divorce records. Next, the IRS launched audits of his tax returns for 2008 and 2009. He’d never before been audited. Next, the Department of Labor decided to audit the three workers he employed on a cattle ranch under the terms of a visa program for temporary workers.

Coincidence(s)? VanderSloot himself suspects that the audits were retaliation for his political leanings. Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel noted at the time that to what extent the harassment had been centrally planned was both undiscoverable and somewhat beside the point. “If this isn’t a chilling glimpse of a society Americans reject, it is hard to know what is. It’s why presidents are held to different rules, and should not keep lists.”

At least, not lists of political enemies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.