Monthly Archives: October 2014

Excessive

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The Dearborn Heights District 7 Board of Education chose a less severe punishment for the honor student who was initially expelled after a pocketknife was found in her purse at a football game.

On Monday, after two hours of deliberation, the board voted 6-0 to allow [the high school senior] to take online classes. She then will be able to graduate with her class in 2015.

A lesser punishment than originally imposed? She still was punished, severely. Because zero tolerance. Because, the Board of Education persons claim, state law.

State law or bureaucratic timidity, it makes no difference. This young woman, who maintained her status as an honor student while working two jobs (how many of our young people have the initiative to do that? How many of our young people in the broader 16-25 demographic can find any job?), was thrown out of school—her path to a better life—because she had a knife (all 3¼” of it) given her by her grandfather for protection, since she bicycles to and from those jobs.

She forgot it was in the bottom of her purse, else she would have honored the state’s law of no knives in school longer than 3″. Think of an earlier time, when personal responsibility mattered more than responsiveness to government. An American general in WWII was messaged an order to stop a movement on Sicily that was a deviation from the battle plan. He decided the message was garbled in transmission and asked for a retransmittal. He continued his movement, meanwhile, which contributed critically to capturing the island far ahead of the plan’s original schedule and with far fewer overall casualties.

The Dearborn Heights Vice Principal Cheryl Howard, who was conducting random bag searches and discovered the knife, could have said, “That knife looks real close to exceeding the allowed size limit. Get it home and be more careful.” But no. Because zero tolerance. Because personal responsibility is so 20th Century.

Think, also, of the larger implication of this. This toy knife was given to this young woman by a well-meaning grandfather so she could protect herself as she bicycled to and from her jobs. Or in any other situation in any other location.

What the Michigan law is saying, what the Dearborn Heights District 7 Board of Education is saying, is that we’re not supposed to protect ourselves. Government will do that for us. Authority figures placed over us will do that for us. When the bad man comes…. But no, we’re to leave it to our survivors to seek justice for us since our Betters are to be responsible for our safety—which means only for the safety of our survivors. Which, to unroll this one more step, means no safety for them, either, since the police are only minutes away from them, too.

Yet Another Reason for Smaller Government

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German factory orders fell 5.7% in August, real GDP is stagnant or falling in many European countries, Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France to AA from AA+….

There’s more.

[T]he 18 euro area countries had zero real growth in the volume of production during the second quarter of 2014. Euro area real GDP grew only 0.5% in 2013 after falling 1% in 2012. In other words, output was lower in mid-2014 than it was at the end of 2011.

And yet—or because:

Euro area government spending was 49.8% of GDP in 2013 versus 46.7% in 2006. In other words, euro area governments have co-opted an additional 3.1% of GDP (roughly €300 billion, or $383.6 billion) compared with before the crisis—about the size of the Austrian economy.

France spent 57.1% of GDP in 2013 versus 56.7% in 2009, at the peak of the crisis. This is the opposite of austerity—but the French economy hasn’t grown in more than six months. It is no wonder S&P downgraded its debt rating.

Italy, at 50.6% of GDP, is spending more than the euro area average but is contracting faster.

And so on.

There seems to be a pattern developing. An old, old pattern.

You can’t take money out of the private sector of an economy and give it to government without both growing government and shrinking the private sector. Government is simply incapable of spending the money as efficiently as the private sector (if only from a confluence of greater internal friction due to bureaucracy and an in-built lack of concern for the cost of money, with which the private sector must always contend, while leaving aside a system of graft that grows faster in a bureaucracy than in a private sector entity that will surely be punished by the market).

Redistribution of money from the private sector to government holds back growth, at best. As we’re seeing in Europe. Smaller governments have a harder time doing that than Big Governments.

Another Reason for Smaller Government

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Even with lives at stake—lives in the middle of a budding pandemic—Big Government bureaucracies are more interested in protecting turf and responsibility ducking than they are in their fundamental task of protecting American citizens’ safety from foreign problems.

Worse, one of the bureaucracies involved in this cynical ego-based Federal road block has nothing to do with the medical questions involved. First, the experts, at least by training and experience, if not by smooth performance:

The hazardous waste protocols in place for hospitals require staff to place any potentially infected substances—whether it is medical equipment or protective gear—into special hazardous waste containers. That waste then is supposed to be turned over to licensed hazardous waste companies, where it is incinerated or chemically sterilized, according to the CDC.

However, because that other Big Government agency thinks it must have something to say about handling hazardous medical waste, we get this [emphasis added]:

Due to specific Ebola-related regulations issued by the US Department of Transportation (DOT), which governs what medical waste companies can and cannot transport, the usual waste haulers or medical waste disposal companies are prohibited from accepting Ebola-contaminated waste until it has been properly packaged in accordance with DOT guidelines.

And so we get this problem, delineated by [Dr Jeffrey, National Global and Public Health Committee Chairman for Infectious Diseases Society of America] Duchin:

The medical waste companies are refusing to come and pick up the waste because of the DOT regulations, which the CDC does not agree with.

Never mind that the sole experts in the matter, the CDC, has said the Ebola waste ready for safe handling by medical waste companies.

Just to add to this ego-ridden fiasco, we also have this, demonstrating that it’s not only the Federal government that’s gotten too big, too turf-ridden, with too many egos embedded:

[A] Louisiana waste disposal facility, Chemical Waste Management Inc-Lake Charles, says it will not accept the ashes generated when Duncan’s belongings were incinerated, at least not until state officials agree that it would pose no threat to the public.

And this nonsense: The Louisiana Attorney General, Buddy Caldwell, has sued in state court to block the transportation of the waste to the Calcasieu Parish facility (the waste disposal facility in question), and a Louisiana state judge has agreed and blocked the shipment. Because these guys—a state government lawyer and the state government’s judge—know better.

These are yet others reason for shrinking government.

Who Pays for Political Campaign Travel?

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In the case of some Democrats, like President Barack Obama, it looks like us taxpayers pay a significant fraction of the costs. As Mark Knoller of CBS News noted the other day,

Under Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules, the government must be reimbursed for parts of presidential political travel.

“When a trip is for political or unofficial purposes, those involved must pay for their own food and lodging and other related expenses, and they must also reimburse the government with the equivalent of the airfare that they would have paid had they used a commercial airline,” states the Congressional Research Service in a 2012 analysis of “Presidential Travel: Policy and Costs.”

Further, when a presidential trip includes both political and official appearances, the White House is permitted to prorate the reimbursable costs.

However,

As President Obama embarks Thursday on a three-day Democratic fundraising trip to California, the White House again refuses an umpteenth request from CBS News for the political travel information.

[R]epeated requests are turned down for a breakdown of the costs and an explanation and specific examples of how the White House calculates how much is paid by taxpayers and how much must be reimbursed to the government by the Democratic National Committee or others.

The Obama White House justification? They insist that prior administrations also have refused such disclosures.

There’s that Democrat morality with which we’re all so familiar: the rightness or wrongness of a thing isn’t inherent in the thing; it’s entirely in whether someone else did first, or is doing it also.

Crony Capitalism and Big Government

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California’s health insurance exchange has awarded $184 million in contracts without the competitive bidding and oversight that is standard practice across state government, including deals that sent millions of dollars to a firm whose employees have long-standing ties to the agency’s executive director.

Several of those contracts worth a total of $4.2 million went to a consulting firm, The Tori Group, whose founder has strong professional ties to agency Executive Director Peter Lee, while others were awarded to a subsidiary of a health care company he once headed.

It isn’t just state government, though, nor is this problem limited to government-run medical “care.” Think, also, Solyndra and A123, Tesla in Nevada, “green” energy subsidies, Dodd-Frank and too big to fail, farm subsidies, loan guarantees for big corporations like Boeing and GE (roughly $6 billion between them, via the Ex-Im Bank), even the Senate barbershop (!).

If our government weren’t so big, so taxing, so spending; if we turned the rascals out more often in our biennial elections, our government wouldn’t have the wherewithal with which to engage in crony capitalism, and we citizens could get back to capitalist capitalism and general prosperity.