Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Official Ballot Lies

initiative, voting, elections, democracy

With Republicans controlling most state legislatures, legislative assaults against the citizen initiative petition process tend to come disproportionally from Republicans. Just last week, Missouri voters smashed a legislative initiative petition “reform” on the primary ballot with greater than 80 percent voting NO.

In Democratic controlled states, however, attempts to thwart democracy bear Democrats’ fingerprints. A Wall Street Journal editorial recounts cases in California, Colorado and Washington where citizen petitions have been or are being deep-sixed on dubious legal grounds.

“In 2023 California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued to block a citizen initiative that sought to require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and vote of the people for major fee and tax increases such as the cap-and-tax program,” the paper explains. Let’s vote! 

But the California Supreme Court labeled the measure a “constitutional revision” preventing a vote of the people.

Colorado Democrats have been hiking fees, rather than taxes, because their constitution requires a public vote to raise taxes. Citizens petitioned a measure onto this November’s ballot to more clearly define fees and require a vote to hike them. 

Colorado’s all-Democrat appointed Supreme Court blocked a vote, arguing there was “a danger of log rolling because it may attract a ‘yes’ vote from voters who support statewide voter approval of fees, but who would not support narrowing the definition of existing and new fees under Colorado law.”

In Washington state, Democrats passed a 9.9% tax on income above $1 million. Then, voters “launched a ballot campaign to repeal the tax and bar the state and localities from enacting income taxes in the future,” The Journal reports. “The initiative qualified for the November ballot [last] month.”

Now, through a new law passed by the Democrats, the attorney general is required to place this specific language on the ballot after a short summary of the proposal: “This measure would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education (including universities and community colleges), and human services (primarily healthcare).”

Yet, the ballot measure would repeal a tax that hasn’t yet begun collecting money — no cuts would ensue. Moreover, even if spending reductions had been required, the legislature would be free to make cuts in other programs and not these three areas. 

So, the mandated language put to voters on their ballot? A lie. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Taine

Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body.—And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has perished. Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the law, loyalty, voluntary subordination, foresight, moderation, patience, preseverance, practical good sense, every disposition of head and heart, without which no association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have died out for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful co-operation, as practised by a free people, is unattainable; men have arrived at social incapacity and, consequently, at political incapacity.

Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France: The Modern Regime, vol. I (John Durand, trans.).
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Today

General Leclerc Victorious

On August 12, 1944, French forces under General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque liberated Alençon from Nazi rule — the first city in World War II France to be rescued by the French themselves.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture tax policy

Uh & Other Naughty Words

Francesca Hong, Wisconsin, socialism

The love of other people’s money is the root of so much political evil. 

Francesca Hong, the Democratic front-runner in today’s gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, embraces that evil. She’s even willing to add curse-words to declare her dedication to soaking the rich: “Tax. The. Fucking. Billionaires.” Or so she says on Facebook.

So edgy.

But Hong blanks out when it comes to the negative fallout of taxing the rich at higher rates. Says lame things; doesn’t use the f-word. She uses the u-word: “uh.” When challenged in last week’s debate, about what she’d do “if all the millionaires leave the state,” she responded with “You know, uh, discussing that hypothetical is, um, a little bit, uh — I’m confused about that.”

“Like most socialists, she is in denial about the costs and consequences of her proposals,” argues The Washington Post editorial board. 

“To fund ‘free’ child care, state-run grocery stores and more health care subsidies” she pushes an additional 1 percent in taxes on the top income bracket. “This might sound fine to a taxpayer who doesn’t make a million dollars, but Wisconsin — like every other state — relies on wealthy taxpayers to support state infrastructure, public schools and social programs,” WaPo explains. “The top 5 percent of earners pay about 40 percent of the state’s net income taxes.”

For years, journalists have enabled demagogues to lie about how much the highest income earners actually pay in taxes, fooling many voters into thinking that the goose that lays golden eggs can be plucked and plundered without consequences. A turnaround on the issue at WaPo is refreshing.

“Recent elections seem to suggest,” its editors conclude, “that Democratic voters no longer fear labels such as ‘socialist’ and are more interested in tearing down the party’s establishment. A better strategy to combat extreme policies is to explain the damage they will cause.”

Too late? I hope not. For Wisconsin and for other states.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Mises

The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybody’s actions aim at the satisfaction of other people’s needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. Everybody, on the other hand, is served by his fellow citizens. Everybody is both a means and an end in himself, an ultimate end for himself and a means to other people in their endeavors to attain their own ends.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, in 4 vols., ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Vol. 2, Chapter 15.
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Today

Out of Vietnam

On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.

Categories
election law national politics & policies Voting

A Plan to Fix Our Elections

Jimmy Carter, voter ID, fraud, elections, democracy

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the late former President Jimmy Carter. But his plan for voter ID has my vote.

I refer to the idea he defended in 2005, viewable in a video clip that’s been making the rounds lately.

The clip is from a C-SPAN broadcast of a hearing about federal election reform focusing on the Carter-Baker Commission Final Report. This report was the product of years of investigating how to fix problems in the U.S. election system highlighted by the nerve-racking Bush-Gore presidential contest in 2000.

In addition to voter ID, the report advocates other efforts to combat fraud, including auditable paper backups of electronic votes.

In the clip, Carter says that we should “have some form of photo ID required, photo ID. . . . [It would include] some very careful constraints to prevent abuse. For instance, these photo ID cards will be free.

“There’ll be a wide distribution of them. The states will be required to go around the state to issue these photo ID cards to as many people as possible, which would be a good system just for recruiting new voters. This will be very important. And so this will be, I think, a move forward in getting more people to vote. It will not restrict people from voting. It’ll be uniformly applied throughout the country. And it will be nondiscriminatory.”

Too bad Carter didn’t live to see universal implementation of the ID requirement that he proposed. It’s something we desperately need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gilson

We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.

Étienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (1919; 1965), Introduction.

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Today

Ecuador, A.D. 1809

On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.

Independence was finally achieved in 1822.

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Update

One Degree of Separation: Somali Fraud Edition

The ongoing unraveling of fraud in the federal government’s welfare system, particularly involving medical subsidies, has gotten politically even more interesting. The egregious Ilhan Omar, Somalian America-hater and U.S. Representative from Minnesota, is now implicated.

Well, at least one member of her family is under investigation.

In Kevin Haggerty’s “Minnesota fraud scandal hits close to home for Ilhan Omar after probe implicates sister,” we learn that the “Squad member has herself been dodging probes related to billions of dollars in fraud in her adopted home state, especially involving her own Somali community. Now, public records have raised serious questions about Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, and her link to an address shared by at least three Feeding Our Future convicts.

“It was at that Hyacinth Ave. address the incorporation records detailed, ‘Afraa opened a company called Sunrise Business Center, Inc. alongside Hanna Marekegn. Marekegn is directly involved in the fraud scandal, pleading guilty in 2022 to wire fraud for stealing $7 million. Marekegn claimed to be feeding 4,000 poor children a day. Instead she bought a mansion for herself, claiming she embodied the “American Dream.” Marekegn testified under oath that she falsely alleged racism to manipulate Minnesota bureaucrats to look the other way at red flags.’”

According to Benny Johnson, on X, “BREAKING: Ilhan Omar’s SISTER Has Been Linked to The ‘Feeding Our Future’ Fraud Scandal

Sahra Noor runs a business that received a $2 million earmark while her sister, Ilhan, was a state representative and she founded a USAID-backed consulting group that “has secured more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives”

Her company was registered at the same address used by key figures charged in the scheme.

70 have been convicted in the scandal.

This story, though not exactly new, has not become well known. It turns out that the Somali subsidy scam culture is a much bigger story than is widely recognized. For partisan reasons, no doubt, major news media outlets have not made much of it.

As is becoming clear, in this story and others, fear of being accused of racism is a good cover for all sorts of crimes and sins, not least of which is massive fraud.