Second Thoughts

By Charley Reese from the Orlando Sentinel.  July 11, 2011.

(This column originally ran in the Orlando Sentinel on March 7, 1995. Former columnist Charley Reese retired from the Sentinel 10 years ago. His final column ran on July 29, 2001.)

Politicians, as I have often said, are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Everything on the Republican contract is a problem created by Congress. Too much bureaucracy? Blame Congress. Too many rules? Blame Congress. Unjust tax laws? Congress wrote them. Out-of-control bureaucracy? Congress authorizes everything bureaucracies do. Americans dying in Third World rat holes on stupid U.N. missions? Congress allows it. The annual deficits? Congress votes for them. The $4 trillion plus debt? Congress created it.

To put it into perspective just remember that 100 percent of the power of the federal government comes from the U.S. Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not authorized.

Then read your Constitution. All 100 percent of the power of the federal government is invested solely in 545 individual human beings. That’s all. Of 260 million Americans, only 545 of them wield 100 percent of the power of the federal government.

That’s 435 members of the U.S. House, 100 senators, one president and nine Supreme Court justices. Anything involving government that is wrong is 100 percent their fault.

I exclude the vice president because constitutionally he has no power except to preside over the Senate and to vote only in the case of a tie. I exclude the Federal Reserve because Congress created it and all its power is power Congress delegated to it and could withdraw anytime it chooses to do so. In fact, all the power exercised by the 3 million or so other federal employees is power delegated from the 545.

All bureaucracies are created by Congress or by executive order of the president. All are financed and staffed by Congress. All enforce laws passed by Congress. All operate under procedures authorized by Congress. That’s why all complaints and protests should be properly directed at Congress, not at the individual agencies.

You don’t like the IRS? Go see Congress. You think the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agency is running amok? Go see Congress. Congress is the originator of all government problems and is also the only remedy available. That’s why, of course, politicians go to such extraordinary lengths and employ world-class sophistry to make you think they are not responsible. Anytime a congressman pretends to be outraged by something a federal bureaucrat does, he is in fact engaging in one big massive con job. No federal employee can act at all except to enforce laws passed by Congress and to employ procedures authorized by Congress either explicitly or implicitly.

Partisans on both sides like to blame presidents for deficits, but all deficits are congressional deficits. The president may, by custom, recommend a budget, but it carries no legal weight. Only Congress is authorized by the Constitution to authorize and appropriate and to levy taxes. That’s what the federal budget consists of: expenditures authorized, funds appropriated and taxes levied.

For those who are fans of Parkinson’s First Law, “Work expands to meet the time available for its completion,” will thoroughly enjoy his hilarioius explanation of his Second Law, “Expenditure rises to meet income” explained in this book.
The following is the preface to C. Northcote Parkinson’s The Law and the Profits. Houghton Mifflin. 1960.

THE first purpose of this book is to show that there are limits to the collection of revenue and that evils multiply when these limits are ignored. There is a law by which public expenditure is governed and obedience to this law is universal, eternal and all but inevitable. The existence of this law needs to be widely recognized, and its recognition would imply a revolution in public finance.
The second purpose of this book is to show that a greatly reduced revenue would bring about an improvement, not a decline, in the public services. It is the paradox of administration that fewer people have less to do and more time, therefore, in which to think about what they are doing. When funds are limitless, the only economy made is in thinking. The worst inefficiencies do not stem from a lack of funds but from an initial failure to decide exactly what the object is. It is this muddled thinking that leads to waste, and often to waste on a colossal scale. Toward, eliminating public waste an essential step is to reduce the total revenue. Officials are less inclined to squander what is not there. A knowledge of the law which governs expenditure should ensure that the profits from taxation are seldom thrown away.
I would wish to express my thanks to all those who have sent me information and encouragement. With great reluctance I have decided to name no one of them. To Include all would be impossible, for some prefer, and with good reason, to remain anonymous. To list the remainder would still mean printing a whole page in which the names of the active and influential would be mingled with those of the merely sympathetic or aggrieved; and yet it would be invidious to distinguish some correspondents and relegate others to oblivion. Faced with these difficulties of choice, I have decided to mention none but express my thanks to all. Without the generous help of many people personally unknown to me, this book would have had a far narrower basis of experience and fact. They are in no way responsible for any shortcomings in accuracy, still less for any of the opinions expressed, but I am deeply grateful for their help. The only allies I shall name individually are my American publishers, who have been unfailingly helpful, Robert Osborn who did the illustrations, Mrs. Sykes who typed the manuscript, and my wife to whom, as always, I owe so much.

“General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars” is an article I wrote for Transportation Quarterly. At the time it appeared there were some significant reviews.
The article discusses the historical transition from streetcars to buses during the period 1915 to 1960 and why it was a normal economic event and had little to do with General Motors despite the pervasive myth that blames GM. Extensive use is made of contemporaneous documents.
The article has been moved to this website.

We write almost daily about the Honolulu rail project on www.honolulutraffic.com

Following is the first three paragraphs of an article by Matt Ridley comparing natural gas extraction to wind farming. I hope it will encourage you to read the whole of this very excellent article.

“Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air. The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5-megawatts (working at roughly 25% capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50% efficiency) in its first ten years.

“Difficult choice? Let’s make it easier. The gas well can be hidden in a hollow, behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on top of hills, because that is where the wind blows, visible for up to 40 miles. And they require the construction of new pylons marching to the towns; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

“Unpersuaded? Wind turbines slice thousands of birds of prey in half every year, including white-tailed eagles in Norway, golden eagles in California, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania. There’s a video on YouTube of one winging a griffon vulture in Crete. According to a study in Pennsylvania, a wind farm with eight turbines would kill about a 200 bats a year. The pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.”

Read on from this link.

By Joel Klein, Wall Street Journal (c), 5/10/2011.

Here are a few paragraphs from Joel Klein’s op/ed today; read the entire piece.

“Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”“costing more than $100 million annually are the more than 1,000 teachers who get full pay to perform substitute or administrative duties because no principal wants to hire them full-time.)

“Then there were the several teachers accused of sexual misconduct—at least one was found guilty—whom union-approved arbitrators refused to terminate. The city was required to put them back in the classroom, but we refused to do so. Of course, the union has never sued to have the teachers reinstated. It just makes sure these deadbeats stay on the payroll with full pay and a lifetime pension.

“It’s little surprise, then, that American kids don’t get the education they deserve.”

“Union power is why it’s virtually impossible to fire a teacher for non-performance. In New York City, which has some 55,000 tenured teachers, we were able to fire only half a dozen or so for incompetence in a given year, even though we devoted significant resources to this effort.

“The extent of the problem is difficult to overstate. Take “rubber rooms,” where teachers were kept—while doing no work—pending resolution of disciplinary charges against them, mostly for malfeasance, like physical abuse or embezzlement, but also for incompetence. The teachers got paid regardless. Before we stopped this charade—by returning many of the teachers to the classroom, unfortunately—it cost the city about $35 million a year. (Still

Here are just three paragraphs from Donald Boudreaux’s brilliant op/ed in today’s Wall Street Journal to encourage you to read the whole piece.

“Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—”for free”—from its neighborhood public supermarket.”

“No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.”

“Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families’ choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.”

To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, When a deranged individual shoots people, there is an immediate call for banning guns while doing nothing whatsoever about deranged individuals.

What follows is the first three paragraphs to entice you to read the whole piece which is linked below:

In the November General Election, 124,000 Hawai‘i voters chose to mail in their ballots. That was a third of all ballots cast and more than double the percentage of those mail-in votes cast in the 2008 election. More importantly, mail-in votes were far greater than the typical difference in the votes cast for the winning and losing candidates.

The danger to all of us is that we really do not have any assurance that all mail-in voters did so free of coercion. Secrecy is vital if we are to assure ourselves that their votes are taken freely. Secrecy concerns should far outweigh the benefit of the mere convenience of mail-in balloting.

We go to great deal of trouble to ensure that secrecy is maintained at the polling place but we have no assurance at all that mail-ins voters have secrecy — and they are a third of the voters now.

Click here for the fully footnoted version of this piece.

Arthur Brooks had a fine op/ed in the Hawaii Reporter yesterday concerning the charitable giving habits of the “selfish” tea-party people and the “caring” progressives.

It turns out that surveys show that as a percentage of incomes the tea-party types give far more of their incomes than do the progressives.

Read Brooks’ whole oped; it is well worth the time spent.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute. This is reprinted from AEI and the Wall Street Journal.