This is a story any blogger should find outrageous:
For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.
This story doesn’t include the angle of politicians using these tools to silence opponents, but that potential is clearly there, as well. What we have here is simply government greed.
I’ve never been a fan of licensing laws, and will continue to proudly flaunt my status as an unlicensed blogger. This issue goes beyond just blogging, however. Licensing laws of all kinds are antithetical to the American spirit. Owning a business is not a privilege granted by government, and should never be treated as such. If I found myself living in the jurisdiction of any local government that so aggressive claimed otherwise, I’d pack up and move. Flee these tyrannical jurisdictions as soon as possible, and then we’ll see what happens to their tax revenues.
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It’s hard to imagine a teacher’s union making themselves even more despicable and obstructionist, but they’ve found a way. First, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis on teacher performance:
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith’s pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar’s but by the end of the year have been far behind.
In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They’ve seen the indelible effects, for good and ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.
Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.
…Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
This is exactly what one would expect from an industry shielded from the competitive pressures of the market, and instead dominated by the influence of powerful unions. In a free market, understanding what makes one teacher successful over others would be a top priority, as schools sought to attract students by providing the highest quality education possible. But our public education system is more like a jobs program for union members, and it’s too much of a bother for them to worry about the little things like whether or not students are learning, and why.
Rather than attempt to improve upon their performance and learn from this analysis, the LA Times reports that union leaders are threatening to boycott the paper.
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.
“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.
Measuring teacher quality based on student performance, how outrageous!
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Reagan is more right now than ever before. This video from the Republican Study Committee speaks for itself:
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Thanks to laws enacted by the government on behalf of the funeral lobby, Monks can’t sell simple caskets:
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Last time I was in Time Square, I passed a couple people selling humorous Barack Obama condoms on a street corner. I was amused and proud of everything represented by this simple act of commerce: freedom, expression, and capitalism. I am sad to learn now that those same individuals might be the ones in this case, who have just been harassed by the government because they don’t have proper vendor licenses.
The defendants argued that their product was a form of speech, and therefore should be protected by the first amendment. This should have been a compelling argument, as I find it doubtful that most of their tourist customers purchased the condoms for actual use. The judge felt differently, “holding that the novelty prophylactics constituted commercial speech, not constitutionally protected persuasive speech.”
While hardly the most outrageous instance of license enforcement, this case is just another in a long line of examples showing how such laws are antithetical to a free society. They prevent people the right to pursue the occupation of their choice, place undue burdens on many entrepreneurs, and even serve as a basis to limit free speech.
Licensing laws are one of the many ways in which the nanny state purports to protect us from ourselves. What usually happens, however, is that such laws are used as a means to protect a cartel and drive up the price of labor (doctors, lawyers, etc.), or as an abusive revenue source for the government, like in the case of little Julie Murphy, the 7-year-old girl who was recently harassed because she didn’t have a license for her lemonade stand.
What’s worse is the number of completely harmless occupations which the government licenses, removing any doubt that their aim is not really to protect. The Institute for Justice, for instance, recently forced the Louisiana government to reconsider it’s outrageously arbitrary licensing regime for florists.
One man was thrown in jail simply for helping someone draft a letter in response to being fined. The cartel of lawyers doesn’t want people moving in on their turf who don’t charge $500 an hour.
Fully 30% of occupations require government licenses. Most of these professions provide no real risk to the consumer that due diligence could not protect them from. The U.S. Constitution protects the right of all to earn an honest living in the occupation of their choice, but these laws stand in the way of that fundamental right. It’s time for the government to get out of the business of licensing business.
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Iain Murray writes at the Washington Examiner that advocacy groups Change.org and the Alliance for Climate Protection are arguing – in an email entitled, “Don’t Let BP Win!” – that “Stalling climate and energy legislation would be a big win for oil companies like BP, but a huge loss for the rest of us.” Someone must have forgot to tell the lobbyists at BP, because as I previously noted, they have endorsed the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. BP and other big corporations understand what the statists that routinely push for government intervention in the market do not: big government policy ultimately benefits big business the most.
The first responsibility of a corporation is to their shareholders, and contrary to popular belief, they are not dependable advocates of capitalism. Given half a chance, they will gladly use the power of government to their own benefit by restricting competition. They always have the greater means and motivation to capture federal regulator agencies, and deploy the force of government to benefit their special interest, than do the high-minded reform groups that often called for intervention in the first place. If Change.org really wanted to ensure that BP does not “win,” they would fight against big government interventionism, thus denying BP and other corporations the ability to manipulate government force for their own benefit.
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Shakespeare would likely describe the latest major legislation winding its way through Congress as a piece of legislation crafted by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Rather than address the systemic distortions created by prior government policies, and which caused the financial meltdown, policy makers are now “[putting] a lot of faith in the watchful eye of regulators to prevent another financial crisis,” according to the Washington Post.
Nearly two years after tremors on Wall Street set off a historic economic downturn, congressional leaders greenlighted a bill early Friday that would leave the financial industry largely intact but facing a more powerful network of regulators who could impose limits on risky activities.
The final bill took shape after a 20-hour marathon negotiation between House and Senate leaders seeking to reconcile their separate versions. The legislation puts a lot of faith in the watchful eye of regulators to prevent another financial crisis. New agencies would police consumer lending, the invention of financial products and the trading of exotic securities known as derivatives. Bank supervisors would have the power to seize large, troubled financial firms whose collapse could threaten the entire system. The bill calls for banks to hold more money in reserve to weather economic storms but leaves the details to regulators.
…”We are poised to pass the toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression,” Obama said at the White House, adding that the bill “represents 90 percent of what I proposed when I took up this fight . . . We’ve all seen what happens when there is inadequate oversight and insufficient transparency on Wall Street.”
Essentially, Congress has decided that all we need is yet more overpaid bureaucrats. No reform of Fannie and Freddie. No efforts to stop politicians from continuing to force banks to issue risky loans so that they can point to expanding home-ownership under their watch. Instead, we get harmful price controls on debit cards, which has nothing to do with the cause of the 2008 recession.
Even the crafters of the bill aren’t really buying their own stance that more government will help. In one of those rare moments where a politician accidentally let’s the truth slip out, Senator Dodd admitted, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” Belief in big government really is all about faith.
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Britain’s Conservative MP Daniel Hannan, made famous in America for the viral YouTube video of his fiscal takedown of Gordon Brown, recently wrote of his regret for supporting Barack Obama in the general election of the 2008 presidential campaign. A European politician’s opinion of America’s president really isn’t of any importance, but his chillingly accurate description of our path toward Europeanization ought to be of concern for all who believe in promoting freedom, limited government, and economic prosperity:
Leave a commentNone of these advantages, however, can make up for the single most important fact of Obama’s presidency, namely that the federal government is 30 per cent larger than it was two years ago
This is not entirely Obama’s fault, of course. The credit crunch occurred during the dying days of the Bush administration, and it was the 43rd president who began the baleful policy of bail-outs and pork-barrel stimulus packages. But it was Obama who massively extended that policy against united Republican opposition. It was he who chose, in defiance of public opinion, to establish a state-run healthcare system. It was he who presumed to tell private sector employees what they could earn, he who adopted the asinine cap-and-trade rules, and he who re-federalised social security, thereby reversing the single most beneficial reform of the Clinton years.
These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.
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The latest video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity:
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Anyone who understands economics knew this would be the result of “Cash for Clunkers:”
Thanks to Coyote Blog for the analysis.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
