Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment free trade & free markets tax policy

What Pfizer Pfolks Got

Pfizer, drugs, taxes, corruption, Covid

Yesterday, a whole lot of people paid a whole lot of taxes. It was Tax Day — filing day — for most Americans.

Truth is, American workers pay income tax with every paycheck. And they pay other taxes too.

Somehow, though, Pfizer — one of the world’s most profitable companies — did much better than we did. “Drugmakers make big profits in the U.S.,” explains Sydney Lupkin at NPR. “But many pay taxes far below the 21% corporate tax rate. Pfizer’s effective tax rate is so low it’s getting a big refund despite booking $59 billion in revenue.”

Did you get a big refund on top of a huge wage hike? No?

Well, you should lobby Congress more.

Now, Pfizer’s long had a cushy/pushy relationship with the U.S. Government. The company’s had to pay loads of legal penalties for malfeasance, but it’s also received subsidies, immunities, and government-forced clientele — in the rollout of its most famous product. But through thick and thin it faces our byzantine tax code with ease, for it’s that tax complexity that really gives Big Pharma the advantage, compared to smaller companies.

I have never argued for more taxes. I wonder if corporations should even be taxed based on income, which gets complicated to figure since it’s based on profits and losses and investments etc., thus opening the door to corrupt insider politics. Plus, those taxes simply get passed on to us. 

But if corporations are taxed, how indecent that small companies tend not to get huge refunds on years in which they make stellar returns.

Though I suppose if Congress keeps on awarding more to the bigger, that’s a problem that sort of solves itself. 

With the smaller companies just dying out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights ideological culture

A Celebrity’s Defiance

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, censorship, Scotland, freedom

Can J. K. Rowling destroy Scotland’s new anti-free-speech law with a strategic wave of a single wand?

The author of the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series has gotten into trouble. She defied the State by saying that men are men and women are women even when a member of one of these sexes declares otherwise.

To some, the author’s statements are “hate” speech. Speech now prosecutable in Scotland, where Rowling lives.

On April 1, 2024, legislation went into effect there making it a criminal offense to “stir up hate” against members of a protected group, including transgender individuals. This is a “crime” that can be punished by up to seven years in prison. 

The law’s terms are encompassing and vague.

So far, Rowling has escaped arrest, though offering herself as the subject of a test case. After the law went into effect, she penned a series of posts declaring that various men who say they’re not men are in fact men: blatant “misgendering.”

“If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested,” she wrote.

When the Scottish police declined, she added: “I trust that all women — irrespective of profile or financial means — will be treated equally under the law.

This trust is, I fear, misplaced. As long as the law exists, Rowling’s very visible defiance cannot protect everybody else who might be targeted under it. 

Scotland needs more Harry Potters, er, heroes … to stand up to this terrible law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly

Crime Fighters Give Up

Canada, Toronto, police, crime, prevention

Fight crime — give criminals all your stuff today!

This isn’t my view. But it’s the apparent view of some — I hope not many — Canadian police officers.

At a recent public meeting about coping with crime, a Toronto police officer told people that to reduce the chances “of being attacked in your home, leave your [car key] fobs at your front door. Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

To reduce the risk to you personally, give up in advance.

Are you following the reasoning? Because I’m not. And I am very disinclined to leave my car keys and cash and my Taiwanese history library in a heap near the front door to buy off home invaders.

Instead, perhaps everybody in high-risk neighborhoods should install a trap door in their vestibule, rigged in such a way that anybody who forcibly breaks into the home is immediately dropped into a vat of starving piranhas.

AIER’s John Miltimore sees an “obvious problem” with the policeman’s helpful advice. The problem is that he is asking people to encourage burglary and theft, to make it “easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.” If a lot of people follow the advice, this would tend to increase car thefts.

It all reminds Miltimore of the movie Robocop and its crime-ridden landscape. “There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence. . . .”

To avoid dystopia, let’s defend ourselves instead.

And our cars. And car keys. And . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Richly Revealing

Donald Trump, gag order, censorship, courts, indictment

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly . . . ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is . . . well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false. 

They object . . . because . . . what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom regulation

Monopoly vs. Monopoly

monopoly octopus, Joe Biden, Apple

The Biden Administration makes much of its pro-consumer actions. President Sleepy Joe never tires of boasting about how his regulations favor consumers over credit card companies. Considering the massive taxation that his administration supports, however, saving a few bucks on overdraft fees looks a bit absurd in context.

As does the administration’s ramped-up anti-trust actions.

The federal government has now attacked Apple. On anti-trust grounds. For being a monopoly.

The humor in this was noted by anti-intellectual property theorist Stephan Kinsella, tweeting on X: “‘U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly’ We grant you patent and copyright monopoly privileges and you use them to build up a monopoly? How dare you!”

Jeffrey A. Tucker of the Brownstone Institute was less amused, and less concerned with Apple’s reliance upon intellectual property, which he claims is secondary to the company’s useful products: “The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more.”

At issue is how Apple products work so well together but not so well with other manufacturers’ products. “The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength,” insists Tucker.

Maybe it’s really about this principle: the government giveth; the government taketh away: blessed be the name of the Biden.

In full disclosure, I have an iPhone, which I hate, and a Microsoft Surface Book, which I also hate. I’m open to any of their competitors, which I might hate less.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture too much government

Fifteen Days to Flatten America

Fauci, Trump, Covid

The most important lesson of “Fifteen days to flatten the curve!” occurred on the 16th, when  governors kept lockdown measures going.

No state limited its lockdown measures to a mere 15 days.

The public rationale for the lockdowns had been to save hospitals from being swamped with COVID patients — though the Army Corps of Engineers had built emergency COVID care centers near pandemic hot spots around the country, which were unceremoniously dismantled, without having been used, even as governors continued their hysterics.

And tyrannies.

Out west in Washington, for example, Governor Inslee shut down the whole state with a March 24, 2020, order, and, on April 3, unilaterally extended it to May 4, despite the fact that most of the state had hardly experienced the virus yet. On May 29, the stay-at-home order was still in effect, with the governor dictating a county-by-county re-opening order that he fiddled with incoherently for the next year. 

Across the country, most hospitals suffered from under-use.

John Stossel just “celebrated” the four-year anniversary of the lockdowns with an article titled “‘15 Days To Slow the Spread’: On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again.” Mr. Stossel provides a concise litany of the idiocy of that brief, if far too long, epoch of . . . . what he calls “government incompetence.

But does incompetence exhaust the fault?

At the beginning I had expressed caution, even suggesting a little lenience for our leaders. Then came the enormity of the mass liberticide.

It was President Trump who put out the “guidelines” for shutting down the country; it was Trump who stuck to his guns on the efficacy of the lockdown “mitigations.” Trump did so because he was mesmerized, perhaps, by Drs. Fauci and Birx — whom he had promoted into the spotlight.

Little did Trump know, however, that Fauci had funded the very disease he was allegedly fighting, and that Birx, privately, had pushed lockdowns not in good faith for reasons stated, but with every intention of pushing “longer and more aggressive interventions.”

Trump? Played, yes; incompetent, sure. 

But Birx and Fauci? Malevolent. Evil. Pick the word.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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