too much government

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.

You’re a businessman. You see a need for low-cost apartments. A property owner is happy to sell you the plot on which the complex may be built. The local senior housing center has a long waiting list, so your units would clearly be snapped up just as soon as available.

Everything’s a go, except . . . your project is against the law. A zoning law. Therefore, you are out of luck, as are the persons who would rent from you.

Such bans don’t proliferate in a vacuum, of course. Enforcement of zoning laws is often ardently demanded by the residents of the neighborhoods in which developers wish to build.

That’s what happened a few years back in Darien, Connecticut, where townsfolk were up in arms over a proposal to build condos for seniors. Residents felt entitled to forcibly prevent others from moving in. (It is dangerous to play with fire, though. Zoning laws can be used against insiders as well as outsiders. Some Darrien dwellers recently learned, for example, that the eaves of their homes were “too big” for regulators’ tastes.)

Another zone-ified town mentioned in John Ross’s review of Lisa Prevost’s new book Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate is Ossipee, New Hampshire, where workers sometimes live in tents to save on rent. The zoning code prohibits the building of new apartment buildings.

Observes Prevost: “The market is hungry for apartments, condominiums, and small homes, if only zoning restrictions would get out of the way.”

Of course, “the market” is simply shorthand for the needs of lots of people, and the freedom to meet those needs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The federal government encourages a certain “spin” regarding wages and salaries. Both taxation and regulation enforce a kind of accounting fraud in nearly all wage contracts. Employees receive a statement when they get paid, but that statement is not complete. Only half of an employee’s Social Security contributions are listed, for example — though, from the employers’ point of view, that unlisted “employer’s contribution” is just as much a part of a workers’ wage as the amount written on the check.

Most folks don’t see a full dollar-value listing of their benefit package at time of payment, either.

Of course, some things just can’t be accounted for in money terms.

In charming, smaller towns — like, say, Traverse City, Michigan, or Port Townsend, Washington — folks have been known to explain those towns’ somewhat depressed wage rates with a rhyme: “The view of the bay is part of your pay.”

And then there’s job security.

In a 2012 report comparing private sector jobs to federal government jobs, the benefit of public sector job security went unacknowledged. Naturally enough.

What we learn is that government employees tend to make a bit more that private sector employees, but, when you include benefit packages, their rates of remuneration are much higher — 16 percent higher.

But then, if to prove that the government really is all about equality, it’s not at the top end that government workers prove wildly overpaid; it’s at the less-credentialed “low end.” These job pay 36 percent more than comparable private sector jobs.

What is often not addressed in the wage and benefit debate is the fact that lower-skilled private sector workers are also disproportionately harmed by federal regulation, subsidies and other misguided policies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Suppose you get a 4 percent pay cut.

Suppose you can’t borrow; you can only reduce your spending. Your household budget includes rent, videos, food, saving for a rainy day, and a front-door lock to replace the one destroyed when your home was broken into yesterday. What’s the first thing that pops into your head?

“Well! Better forget that lock!”? No.

Now suppose you head the executive branch of the federal government and want to entrench disastrously high spending. So you want to “prove” that even trivial budget cuts must produce blatant, instant pain. Then, for example, school kids en route to DC find that White House tours have been canceled. Then, for another example, airline passengers find that security delays at the airport drag on longer than ever.

Congress has tasked the Federal Aviation Administration with safely and efficiently directing airplanes on and off the tarmac. The sequester reduces the FAA’s budget by some 4 percent. What to do? What else but furlough controllers for one working day out of ten, inflicting delays in an estimated four of ten flights?

That’s what the Obama administration has done, even though many less destructive budgetary changes are not only possible, but far more preferable.

Much more than 4 percent must be cut from government spending. It won’t be painless. But the Obama administration, consulting a very old, very nasty “insider’s” playbook, seeks to “prove” that the only feasible way to even begin to reform is the least sensible way. False.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.