Category: nannyism

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets ideological culture local leaders moral hazard nannyism property rights too much government

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Is …

Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Seattle, taxes, homeless tax, business

A half a year ago, when trying to make sense of the much-publicized search for Amazon’s “HQ2” — a second headquarters city, away from Seattle — I concentrated on the subsidies that cities and metro areas were apparently throwing at Amazon.

It all seemed desperate, indecent.

But there was a story behind the story. Amazon has every reason to be looking for an escape route from the Evergreen State’s biggest city.

The city’s leadership is nuts.

“Seattle City Council members have finally released draft legislation,” the Seattle Times’ Daniel Beekman wrote last month, “for a new tax on large employers that would raise $75 million next year to address homelessness.”

The council blames the big companies for enticing workers into the city, thereby driving up rental costs and housing prices.

The tax would be on employee hours, would go into effect next year, and “in 2021, it would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax on the same category of companies,” explains the Seattle Times.

Now, if you tax something you discourage that something. That’s why progressives like sin taxes on sodas and fast foods. To discourage consumption.

So when progressives seek to tax big producers, they are apparently trying to tax away the housing crunch by driving away big business.

Amazon reacted. It put a halt to an expansion project.

“Jeff Bezos is a bully,” said Kshama Sawant, the confessed socialist, speaking for the council. “I think we are in broad agreement on that.”

If that is her attitude, and that of the council — and the consensus of the city’s denizens — then what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos really is?

A “good businessman.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo by JD Lasica

 

Categories
Accountability education and schooling folly government transparency insider corruption local leaders moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Reading, Writing & Racketeering

schools, corruption, D.C., Washington, education, cheating, incentives, teachers, union

When I attended a public school — many decades ago, in a galaxy far, far away — teachers told students that cheating was unacceptable and would be punished.

Harshly.

Today, the idea has students laughing — all the way to graduation.

Last year, after DC Public Schools officials breathlessly announced massive improvements in graduation rates, several honest teachers broke ranks, and an investigation uncovered massive fraud: a whopping one of every three graduates across the city resulted from falsified records.

Many students played hooky for a third or even half the school year. Administrators also pressured teachers to improve grades to hike the graduation rate.

“The problem,” Washington Post columnist Colbert King concluded, “is systemic indeed.”*

You see, employment evaluations and cash bonuses for teachers and administrators were — and still are — tied in part to student graduation stats. It turns out that an incentive to good work can also serve as an incentive to cheat. Could it be that government employees grading their own work does not encourage honesty?

Just months after confirmation of the worst fears of public school corruption, new allegations against teachers and administrators at Roosevelt High School more than suggest fudging attendance records is ongoing.

“This growing environment of fear and mistrust,” asserts Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, “has never been addressed and continues to be a disservice to students and teachers.”

City officials have had plenty of time to address the issue. And of the common sense idea that the best way to avoid fear and mistrust is to follow the rules?

Crickets.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Nor is the fraudulent behavior limited to dishonestly boosting graduation rates. Former DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson resigned back in February after it became public knowledge that his daughter jumped 600 other students on a waiting list for her school. A recent Post story about enrollment fraud, whereby non-residents grab spots at prestigious schools such as the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, without paying the non-resident fee, was entitled, “Stop enrollment fraud? D.C. school officials are often the ones committing it.” Two-thirds of pending cases involve a current or past DCPS employee.

 

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Grading Democracy on the Curve

public schools, education, democracy,, propaganda, ignorance

Voters, we are told, are amazingly ignorant. So, what to do?

“Ultimately, the ideal democracy is one in which as many citizens as possible vote,” writes Dambisa Moyo at The Guardian, “and the voters are armed with the most objective information. Yet today only a fraction of the electorate are voting, and many are armed with a diet of hyped-up statistics and social media propaganda.” Among her proposals is a voting booth access test: “why not give all voters a test of their knowledge?”

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons, as can Ilya Somin, over at Volokh Conspiracy, who considers just a few. One of the more interesting is this: whereas Moyo has no wish to shove poor people out of the voting booth, and so envisions public schools to teach to the test — “the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum” — Somin quotes John Stuart Mill about the very political dangers of the very idea of public schooling: “A general State education,” wrote Mill in On Liberty, would inevitably be devised to please and serve “the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation” and must constitute “a despotism over the mind.”

Though Moyo does observe incumbency and political careerism as big problems, she is innocent of the more fundamental issues.

Indeed, she does not consider the obvious: today’s voter ignorance of politics and government is in no small part the result of government schools.

For politicians, general ignorance is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Let’s look for solutions to political problems that do not give politicians more power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Studio System: The Sequel

Studio System, antitrust, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon

Evermore virtue signaling, everless virtue — that pretty much encapsulates Oscars’ night. The industry that brought us Harvey Weinstein and the occasion for #MeToo made the 90th Academy Awards two months ago unwatchable for most of us.

Now, as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences loses touch with audiences around the country, Netflix appears to have decided to horn its way into the Oscars. “Netflix will reportedly begin purchasing movie theatres,” informs The Independent, “to help it get ahead in the race for Academy Awards.

The streaming giant has aimed to land an Oscar nod since the release of its first original feature in 2015, Beasts of No Nation. 

I have not seen that film, but I have made time for some entertainment (and a few documentaries) on Netflix. After Stranger Things and Wormwood, I think I can safely repeat a point I’ve made before: this is the new Golden Age of Television.

But Netflix wants more prestige than the TV industry’s “Emmys.”

Whether the company succeeds with the Oscars, notice: Netflix is becoming a major studio — complete with “vertical integration.” Just what the Supreme Court tried to kill in 1948 when it ruled against the studio system’s “monopoly” status.

That decision, plus the rise of broadcast television, dealt a death blow to the studios — and arguably movie quality.

Maybe a new studio system (also courtesy of Amazon Prime, Apple, and other players) will make for a renaissance.

For feature-length films.

If we can just keep government out of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability general freedom nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

How Bernie’s Like Trump

Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, minimum wage, jobs, anchor, bait and switch, negotiation, bargaining

Yesterday I made fun of Bernie Sanders’ jobs guarantee idea. Today, let’s take it seriously.

Not as policy, mind you. As propaganda.

It’s not worth talking about as a policy because there is no policy yet. “It is not clear when Sanders will announce the plan,” Fox News relates, “and a Sanders spokesperson told the Post that it was still being crafted.”

It is mere advocacy. A press release. Vaporware.

But that’s the key to it, really. The jobs guarantee isn’t policy.

It’s a ploy.

Bernie Sanders knows there is hardly a hope of passing such a bill. He probably understands that the current fiscal mess precludes it. He might even understand that it is literally a horrible notion, the worst policy idea in the world, and he would still have reason to pitch for it relentlessly.

Because what he is really after is the hiking of the national minimum wage to $15/hr. That is the next Democratic ratcheting up of government. And by insisting that the government guarantee $15/hr jobs, he is readying everyone to accept, as a compromise, the hiking of the minimum wage to that very figure.

Yesterday I noted a link between socialism and slavery. But minimum wages link up not with slavery but unemployment.

Which Bernie knows all too well. Before he got in politics, he was a layabout, a bum.

Not like President Trump at all, that way.

But by fixing on one key, “anchor” concept ($15/hr) and demanding the Moon, he might just get his mere lunacy, er, minimum wage hike.

And that is a Trumpian* ploy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Though Trump’s better. His “linguistic killshots” are far more memorable . . . because funny and (usually) visual.

 

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Accountability folly general freedom incumbents media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Twirling Towards Freedom?

Citizen Kang, Simpsons, Bernie Sanders, socialism, health care, income, welfare

Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?

Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.

What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.

One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.

In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.

But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.

And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.

I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.

Or for Kodos.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.

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