Properly interpreted, nothing of the kind should have happened. The text of the ERA stated that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” One does not have a right to a toilet, really, so it shouldn’t have affected restroom construction.

But leaping to absurdity is, alas, a propensity of government. In Minnesota, today, the state’s Department of Human Rights has declared that the offering of a “ladies’ night” by taverns and bars, etc, is illegal, discriminating (as it does) on the basis of sex.

Economist Robert Murphy has carefully explained why price discrimination is not bad — why it is common and why it benefits us. By setting up “ladies’ nights,” certain businesses attract female customers and (shock of all shocks) male customers, too . . . men actually eager to pay extra, if only to be around women.

I don’t see much point in explaining the philosophical basis for not getting carried away over the “sexual/gender discrimination” involved in this. But it may be good that the ERA fizzled in 1982. It would have been twisted by bureaucrats in state after state, and we’d all endure uncomfortable encounters in public toilets throughout the land.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

But today brings a different connection to Oz: I can’t get the song, “Ding-dong, the Witch Is Dead!” out of my head.

Tuesday, Oklahoma’s Democratic Party primary voters ended Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s gubernatorial bid.

Regular readers of Common Sense know I’m no fan of Mr. Edmondson, who attempted to bully and threaten two others and me, the Oklahoma Three, for daring to push a petition to put a state spending cap on the ballot. Edmondson indicted us, in 2007, on a phony felony charge that carried a ten-year prison term. After a year and a half of Edmondson delaying to deny us our day in court, the trumped-up charge was dismissed.

We certainly weren’t the only victims of Edmondson’s put-politics-before-justice philosophy. A Competitive Enterprise Institute report judged Edmondson to be the third worst AG in the nation for, among other things, abusing “the power of [his] office for political ends.”

At CapitolBeatOK.com, Patrick McGuigan detailed much of Edmondson’s bad behavior, helping hasten the day that Oklahomans would be free of him. In January 2011 that day will come for the man once described as “Barney Fife with bullets — and no Andy.”

Justice is finally sweeping down the plains.

Oh, wrong movie. Here: You-know-who has just met his opportune bucket of water.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

In his column “Candidate Nobody Is Not to Be Underestimated,” George Will reports that the roots of the grandmother’s current campaign lie three decades in the past. Her son was being forced to repeat kindergarten, so she decided to teach him herself. But although homeschooling was legal in Nevada, you couldn’t do it unless you lived at least 50 miles from a public school.

Angle and other parents trooped to the state legislature to demand change. One job-holder there, annoyed by this torrent of interest by mere citizens in legislative doings, said if he’d “known there would be 500 people here instead of 50 and it would take five hours instead of 30 minutes, I would have thrown it [the legislation] in my drawer, and it would never have seen the light of day.” Angle has been “politically incandescent” ever since.

I like this story for many reasons, in part because my wife and I have home-schooled our kids. One thing you have to teach the young is not to expect politicians to look out for your genuine best interests.

Another is that vigilance is the price of liberty.

A third is that if you want something done right, often you have to do it yourself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Count on Lott to confirm that he’s a true-blue partisan of gravy-train politics-as-usual, a dyed-in-the-wool establishmentarian committed to extinguishing each faint, flickering chance to downsize Leviathan.

The man is a rock.

“We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott with calm, sneering authority recently told the Washington Post, as his granite-hard jaw jutted with stern, rectitudinous integrity. “As  soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

What kind of creature is a “Jim DeMint disciple”? What terrible deeds will these zombie-like Jim-DeMintians perpetrate if the heroic former congressmen and his redoubtable cohorts fail to co-opt them in time?

The creatures are affiliated with the Tea Party rebellion against the super-escalating scope and reach of the federal government, as manifested in the looming takeover of the medical industry, trillion-dollar annual budget deficits, etc. Senate candidate Rand Paul told the Post that the goals of Jim-DeMintian Tea Party sympathizers like himself have something to do with fighting for term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and legislation that is consistent with the Constitution.

Sounds like if they make any headway we can expect more freedom, more real wealth, less red ink, less Washington-based strangling of everybody.

Hence, Trent Lott to the rescue.

Thanks a lot, Lott.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

But do they respect our vote? That means keeping their word. It also means supporting ballot initiative rights, so that voters have the last word.

Today, Citizens in Charge and U.S. Term Limits are running two television campaigns to focus attention on respecting the vote of the people for term limits and respecting the right of citizens to petition their government by voting on issues directly.

One spot tells about Oklahoma State Senator Randy Brogdon, who authored two amendments that will appear on this November’s ballot: State Question 747 would term-limit statewide offices and State Question 750 would make it easier for grassroots groups to put measures like term limits on the ballot.

In Missouri, our television ad calls out State Rep. Mike Parson for not respecting the people of Missouri’s 74 percent vote for term limits. Parson voted to gut the limits. Nor does Parson respect initiative rights. He introduced legislation to hamstring citizens in ways already ruled unconstitutional in other states.

Why don’t more elected officials have Dan Maes’s attitude? Maes is a Colorado businessman seeking the Republican nomination for governor. At a business forum, he stood up for citizen initiative rights, saying, “I really want people to have influence in their government.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

That’s why, in public meetings, we should expect citizens to fly off the handle every now and then.

And that’s why those who run public meetings must retain a measure not merely of civility, but lenience. When some citizens disagree, that disagreement will sometimes be . . . disagreeable. But understandable.

I’m preaching the obvious here, but to town officials in Elmhurst, Illinois, I’m preaching a message they don’t want to hear. When citizen Darlene Heslop rolled her eyes and sighed out loud as they moved to hire a state lobbyist, the officials running the meeting objected. They threw her out, saying she was disorderly.

And then they told the city attorney to look into the guidelines for public meetings — you know, everything from state statutes to Robert’s Rules (I kid you not) — to find a definition of “disorderly conduct” that would allow them to keep Heslop out of their hair. Her eyes! Her sighs!

Heslop is all for settling on a definition. Perhaps she knows state law, which defines disorderly conduct as acts of “such unreasonable manner as to alarm or disturb another, or to provoke a breach of the peace.” Her eye-rolling and sighing in no way qualifies — and should be tolerated . . . maybe even as free speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Some things are too painful to report.

Apparently.

The folks who audit the Social Security Administration are late on a set of reports. The reports in question account for the financial and actuarial (un)soundness of Social Security, specifically on the (un)funded liabilities of the pension system and Medicare.

Unlike corporations, which are required to report to the IRS on March 15 each year, and individuals, who must report on April 15, there’s no set date for the trustees of our federal government’s biggest program to make its report. But in recent years the reports have been published early enough to allow summary by May. The last report summary we have is for 2009.

Why so late?

Could it be that things have gotten so bad that it’s difficult to figure out — and embarrassing to sign one’s name to — the actual financial situation? After all, this year Social Security ran out of money to write checks for its promised (and quite immediate) pay-outs.

Sheila Weinberg, CEO of the Institute for Truth in Accounting, writes that she heard the reports were late because “trustees wanted to include the effect the health care bill had on these liabilities.” Ms. Weinberg not unreasonably challenges this rationale. Wouldn’t Social Security’s liabilities have been worth knowing before Congress committed to more entitlement spending?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Louisiana has just abolished the “demonstration” section of the state’s licensing exam for florists. The new law came in response to a lawsuit by florists working with the Institute for Justice. IJ argued that the four-hour demonstration requirement was “arbitrary, subjective and antiquated,” and allowed state-licensed florists to determine the fate of their future competitors.

The outcome represents yet another victory for the “merry band of libertarian litigators” who regularly do battle “in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government. . . .”

Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice has successfully fought to lift caps on the number of licensed taxis in Minneapolis; eliminate laws around the country that prevent competition in every kind of occupation, from animal husbandry and interior design to hair braiding and pest control; restore freedom of speech undermined by vague and arbitrary campaign finance regulation in Florida and enemies of property rights in Tennessee; protect businessmen and home owners from eminent domain abuse in Arizona and Ohio.

IJ’s many successful efforts to defend the rights of individuals are having a major impact. Looking back over the many installments of Common Sense, I find that I mention this group’s work again and again.

With good reason. They keep fighting the good fight, and winning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Bristol Palin — that other “BP” in the news — is engaged to be married.

And the new iPhone’s antenna problems can be fixed by holding it in a special, dainty way — or by adding on a plastic holder.

So, with popular news stories wrapping up, can we now get back to fixing the political mess we’re in?

With the Republicans now said to be divided on whether to actually produce a game plan to fix up the fix we’re in, you can see how all the old perversities of politics still remain in full play at the federal level.

But look closer to home. There’s a lot to fix there.

Throughout the country, politicians have made all sorts of bad deals with public employee unions regarding pay and pensions. They love to spend our money buying their votes. In cities like San Diego, the invested pension funds’ values have plummeted, making renegotiations necessary, and necessarily painful. Your town may be next.

Simple solution? We need constitutional amendments preventing politicians from promising pension pay-outs of any amount. The only kind of pension governments should be allowed to offer is the placement of a negotiated amount of funds in a retirement account to be managed by the employee or the employee’s assigns.

Taxpayers must not be held in hock to the unfulfillable promises of a previous set of politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

We’ve seen some liberalization of financial dealings over the years. It was once illegal to own gold. Travelers can be glad of the rise of interstate banking after governments began to permit it in the 1980s.

But have politicians really offered nothing but “wide-eyed admiration” for “Wall Street” for “decades”? Has the federal government really been hands-off till now?

Take Senators Dodd and Frank. They were out front pushing home ownership on people who could not afford homes, with multiple programs and legislative packages. This bubble-making process was further inflated (quite literally) by the Federal Reserve’s cheap credit policies. Many lenders, encouraged by government-provided (but perverse) incentives, jumped onto the Irresponsibility Bandwagon in the run-up to collapse.

So how can the “solution” be additional bailout authority . . . which will further encourage bankers and others to invest unwisely?

And the new regulations — these, too, are supposed to help? We don’t even know what they are yet, because bureaucrats have yet to write them, as specified (vaguely) by Congress. In addition to their burden, they will allow pols to shake down Wall Street for years to come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

As the state teeters on the brink of insolvency, legislators are considering de-listing the mineral serpentine as the state rock.

Sponsored by State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat hailing from la la L.A., Senate Bill 624 would raise “awareness to protect the health of our citizens. Serpentine contains asbestos, a known carcinogen. Toxic materials have no place serving as emblems for the state.”

The trouble with this is that not all — or even most — samples of the mineral (or, more correctly, mineral group) contain asbestos. Geologists, when they learned about the bill, were all abuzz. What was the Senate up to when it voted to throw out the rock?

Dan Walters, writing in the Monterey Herald, has the answer: Litigation. If the state defines serpentine itself as asbestos-laden — not just those forms that sometimes contain the substance — then trial lawyers can sue more people for having the rocks on their property, etc. Predictably, the “language in the bill was provided by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, an anti-asbestos group whose major sponsors are law firms specializing in asbestos litigation.”

If California legislators toss out the state rock to aid lawyers in plundering others, maybe the state’s citizens can use the initiative to make the rock the official symbol of the California Legislature. But only those chrysotile forms that contain the dreaded silicate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Just before Independence Day, the Coast Guard widened the gulf between official policy and common sense — a gulf that has characterized much of the federal response to the catastrophe. A newly concocted rule prohibited camera crews and others from coming within 65 feet of response vessels or booms without obtaining special permission.

The government’s point man on all things BP-oil-spill, Admiral Thad Allen, at first defended the rule. This was the same man who, Cooper noted, had weeks earlier stressed that “the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations, except for two things, if it’s a security or a safety problem.”

The blanket 65-feet boundary arbitrarily inhibited access. And it raised Anderson Cooper’s ire:

“We’re not the enemy here,” Cooper clarified. “Those of us down here trying to accurately show what’s happening, we are not the enemy. I have not heard about any journalist who has disrupted relief efforts. . . . If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I would move.”

Anderson Cooper’s criticism of the rule, and its widespread coverage, elicited a backlash. In less than two weeks the rule was lifted for reporters.

Openness? Transparency? Governments don’t like it. Citizens do.

The lesson appears to be that we are likely to get transparency only after loudly demanding it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Example? Consider the zany local edict issued in the little town of Lake Elmo, Minnesota. The Institute for Justice — Bolick’s old stomping ground — informs us that the city council there has begun “enforcing a law that makes it illegal for farmers to sell products from their own land unless they were grown within Lake Elmo.”

Two of the farmers being threatened with fines and 90 days in jail are Richard and Eileen Bergman, who have tilled the land in Lake Elmo for almost four decades. They grow pumpkins. But part of their farm extends beyond the city limits, and most of their pumpkins grow on that out-of-Elmo part.

The Institute for Justice has filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the town’s ban on out of-of-town pumpkins. Council members who support the ban must have some ludicrous theory about how such totalitarian edicts goose the local economy. But the ban is certainly no good for folks stopped from buying and selling what they want to buy and sell.

And how, pray tell, do you promote local farming by throwing local farmers in jail?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

South Africa’s sticker price for hosting the World Cup was marked up past $4 billion to nearly $6 billion. The games generated fewer billions in revenue, but the taxpayers of South Africa, one-fourth of whom are out of work, will see little return on their massive investment.

So why would politicians want to “invest” only to lose?

They can’t resist the hoopla. They get to throw a big show with someone else’s bucks. And if some of the money they throw around reaches their pals’ businesses, all the better.

Around the world, governments vie to spend tax money like South Africa just did. In America, we have our city-funded/state-funded sports stadiums. And remember when our president flew across the globe to pitch for the Chicago Olympics?

Rather than soccer fans paying for soccer, baseball fans for baseball, etc., taxpayers support soccer at the expense of those who find the game tedious, baseball fans helped at the expense of opera lovers, etc.

But considering the wages paid to athletes and the profits made by team owners, these subsidies flow bigger not so much from fan to fan but from regular folks to the rich.

Governments are supposed to serve us all. It ruins the game when governments pick sides through subsidies. That way we all lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Yet, our Founders regarded natural rights as an important restraint on government.

Not so with progressives today and yesterday. As scholar Jim Powell noted in The Daily Caller, progressives don’t like natural rights, or the function they serve. Powell quotes Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t think any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”

TR was wrong. Progress depends not on unlimited power for leaders and bureaus, but on limiting those powers so voluntary co-operation can work its wonders.

Progressives from TR to Kagan oppose natural rights because they run dead against progressivism.

Even the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights limits government too much for progressives, so they twist words to get rid of their practicality.

The idea of natural, basic rights find their most concise defense in the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The question to ask Supreme Court candidates — indeed, any person who must swear to “uphold the Constitution” — is how “the people” can retain their unenumerated rights.

The question is almost never asked.

To our detriment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?

Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

This was a great moment for modern civilization. It bequeathed Europe (and, perhaps, America) a clunky and intrusive (and unsustainable) welfare states, sure . . . but that’s far, far better than Communism.

We may be witnessing a similar groundswell of ideological shift in America’s stronghold of the status quo, the media. This week the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times endorsed budgetary rules that would take power and unlimited budgetary discretion from California’s out-of-control legislature:

It’s unfortunate that automated budgeting is necessary. But it is necessary. The state must continue to invest in the social welfare of its people, but we must do it in accordance with California’s projected growth so that we do not repeatedly yank from the young, the elderly and the poor the very services that we provided only a year or two before.

This may not sound revolutionary. But, as Tim Cavanaugh put it on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, the Times — long an opponent of spending limits — has “acknowledge[d] clearly and publicly that out-of-control spending, not insufficient tax revenue, is suffocating the Golden State.”

And that is revolutionary. Not American Founder-revolutionary, but Social Democrat-compromise-y revolutionary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Now we’re now learning, per “internal White House documents,” that the insurance plans we were told would enjoy grandfathered protection under the new law won’t be immune at all. Looks like more than half of current company plans must be chucked by 2013.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently, the goal has always been destruction of private insurance. But why? Well, so government can swoop in to “rescue” us after private firms collapse under the weight of all the new taxes and regulations.

The State of Massachusetts offers a preview of what awaits us. Insurance regulators there were recently warned by a department in charge of “monitoring solvency” that a new round of price caps on insurance rates would jeopardize private insurers’ solvency. Officials imposed the caps anyway. Now those private firms face losses that, if the price controls persist, can lead only to bankruptcy.

Despite all this, there is a way to keep your current health insurance coverage. All folks in Congress have to do is repeal their recent “reforms.” All you have to do is make sure they do.

To ensure that you have better options in the future? Well, very different reforms will be required. And repeals of different laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong, but what if I’m right? To be on the safe side, all mankind better lapse into hunter-gatherer mode immediately.

If you’re not taking me seriously, well — me neither. But my unserious argument isn’t very far from the approach of certain environmentalist doomsayers, as unable to defend their theoretical house of cards as I am to defend mine.

Exhibit A: Australian journalist Andrew Bolt’s interview with a leading environmental alarmist, Tim Flannery. Bolt does his best to pin Flannery down with respect to some of the wilder claims that Flannery’s made in his career. But it’s no go.

When Bolt points out that Flannery once claimed that Australian towns like Brisbane might “run out” of water by 2007 or 2009, his interviewee first sidesteps the question and then says it’s a lie that he ever said any such things. So Bolt comes up with a quote from Flannery’s writing that belies the denial. Flannery now “responds” by noting variability in rainfall and trying to promote a lecture series.

And so on. Bolt is determined to hold Flannery to account for his alarmism; Flannery insists on persisting with flimsy flimflam.

Read the whole thing. It’s awfully illuminating. (And boy, do I mean “awfully”!)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

But it’s worse than that.

Three years ago I told the sad story of Washington State’s ferry system for Puget Sound. For over a score of years, ferry system managers have been unable to provide a comprehensible audit, unable even to account for cash flow.

Now, a series of stories for Channel 5 in Seattle, by Susannah Frame, has exposed the operation for wasting “millions and millions of taxpayer dollars,” according to Ken Schram, a popular Seattle-area pundit who works for another news service on another channel.

Schram claims not to know “why every news organization in the Puget Sound isn’t outraged.” He sees this as a non-partisan issue, and is befuddled by lack of interest from news consumers. And he’s especially annoyed by Washington State’s governor, who blew off the news story, saying she couldn’t keep track of everything. Schram calls her arrogant, and goes further: “I find her lack of regard and respect for taxpayers offensive.”

I’m on Schram’s side, except I wonder: Is this really all so inexplicable? Maybe everybody just knows, deep down, that government businesses never will run as well as real businesses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.