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Sean Paige |
| sean@limitedgovforum.org |
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Before becoming editor of Local Liberty Online, Sean Paige for 5 years served as editorial page editor at The Colorado Springs Gazette, where he vigorously championed the paper’s libertarian editorial philosophy. He spent 14 years before that in the belly of the beast, Washington, D.C., straddling the worlds of politics, journalism and think tanks. His Washington work included stints at the White House and on Capitol Hill. He’s a former communications director and spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste, a fiscal watchdog group; a former investigative writer for Insight, a one-time news weekly at The Washington Times; and he was Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the year 2000. His foothold in Washington came courtesy of a National Journalism Center internship in 1988. In 2006 Paige won second place in the “public service” category from the Colorado Associated Press Editors and Reporters Association for a series of editorials demanding greater transparency in city government. His writing has appeared in many of America’s top newspapers and periodicals. |
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| The opinions expressed here are those of the blogger and do not necessarily reflect the views of Local Liberty Online, The Limited Government Forum, our officers or our programs. We provide this space in keeping with our goal of serving as a true forum, where a variety of viewpoints can be freely and responsibly expressed. |
Page by Paige |
Analysis and commentary by LLO Editor Sean Paige |
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June 2008 |
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A Nation of Laws . . . and more Laws
June 30, 2008
It’s frequently said that we’re a nation of laws.
Boy are we.
We also seem to have become an irony-free zone.
Independence Day looms but the papers in Colorado, in what has become an annual ritual, are full of stories about a slew of new laws that become effective July 1st -- the “fruits” of law-manufacturers (a term I prefer to the vainglorious “lawmakers”) cranking out new rules and regulations like so many widgets. The media encourage this by measuring a legislature’s success or failure based on production. Quality control is an afterthought.
The widgets officially become law tomorrow. Whether we’re better off as a result is doubtful. On this issue I tend to agree with Tacitus, who said: “The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.”
We have a new anti-ticket scalping law in Colorado: I’ll sleep better as a result. Massage therapists now need to be licensed by the state. Drivers exceeding the speed limit face stiffer fines. The state’s insurance commissioner has been granted new powers to deny health insurance rate increases he or she deems unjustified. A new Passenger Tramway Safety Board will keep tabs on the state’s 374 “tramways” ��" meaning it’s ski lifts ��" although there have been no recent ski tram disasters I can recount, and resorts that want to stay in business have every incentive to monitor their safety.
There are only two new laws on the books that expand, rather than contract, freedom in Colorado. Grocery stores are now permitted to sell a bottle of wine on Sundays, and art galleries may now serve complimentary alcoholic beverages at art shows or other events ��" though they can’t serve alcohol more than four hours a day and 15 days a year. The state’s art gallery police will be coming down hard on scofflaws who break the rules.
Colorado is blessed to have a part-time legislature. While lawmakers in other states continue cranking out the widgets -- some do it year-round -- our citizen-legislators thankfully have gone home, to live under the often-inane laws they and the governor just approved. We’re vastly better off, therefore, than many other states. It’s undoubtedly true that a lot of damage can be done by a legislature in a hurry ��" we in Colorado can testify to that. But I would bet that there’s a direct correlation between the length of time a state legislature stays in session and how screwed-up the state is, in terms of the tax and regulatory burdens it imposes on its businesses and people.
A part-time legislature is something we in Colorado can celebrate this 4th of July. We can take a little solace in the fact that things could be worse.
Happy Independence Day everyone. Now go out there and Obey The Law! [Read More]
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Skepticism gets a little respect
June 26, 2008
The skeptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, has a typically sensible and insightful opinion piece published in today's Washington Post, which is as important for what it signals as for what it says. Lomborg, as many readers may recall, has been dragged through the mud by unskeptical environmentalists and climate change alarmists for daring to question sensationalist dogma. Not only his ideas but his integrity and intellect were put on trial -- the same treatment that routinely gets doled-out to all other heretics and "deniers," in a campaign of vilification that can best be described as eco-McCarthyism. It therefore must madden eco-inquisitors to see Lomborg and his ideas get play in such a prominent venue. Can't you just hear the grinding of teeth? Let's hope this emboldens other skeptics, inside the "scientific community" especially, to continue to act as voices of reason, sound science and dissent, at a time when hysteria seems to be carrying the day. [Read More]
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Mysteries of Modern America
June 25, 2008
Indians and Chinese by the millions annually turn in their pushcarts and bicycles for motorized transport, surfing on a wave of newfound prosperity and oblivious to the carbon treadprints they leave behind. Yet at least one major American metropolis, Salt Lake City, is plotting a bicycle-centric makeover that will have its streets looking more like Shanghai or Mumbai. Read all about it here. Denizens of the developing world, when they can afford it, want to stretch out and give themselves room to breathe, while America’s professional and amateur master planners envision densely packed downtowns where workers walk, bicycle, and commute in slightly sanitized versions of Third World transport.
I'm surprised there's no accommodation for donkey carts and rickshaws in Salt Lake City's plan.
Many Americans, no doubt, share in this vision and are willing to surrender their car keys, squeeze onto mass transit, cut down on their living space, go grocery shopping with burlap bags and in all other ways conform to the master planner’s vision of the ecologically-correct lifestyle. No one at the moment is preventing anyone from doing this. But it’s doubtful these Eco-Utopians, as zealous as they are to remake the world, will live and let live — meaning they’ll use what levers of powers they can to make the rest of us conform.
These are what Thomas Sowell called the “coercive Utopians.” And they are a clear and present danger to our personal liberties and lifestyle choices. [Read More]
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Blackfeet belatedly embrace checks and balances
June 25, 2008
A report in today's Great Falls Tribune indicates that members of the Blackfeet Tribe, in addition to voting out a tribal chairman, approved a new constitution that for the first time includes separations of power and checks and balances. "Voters . . . . passed a referendum to restructure the tribe's constitution, adding executive, legislative, judicial, traditional and ethical branches to its constitution,” reports The Tribune. “Supporters previously said these checks and balances would limit the amount of power the Tribal Business Council holds, which could give the tribe a stronger infrastructure.”
That checks and balances were lacking in tribal constitutions — and that tribes have constitutions separate from the U.S. Constitution — might come as a surprise to many non-Indians. But the consequences of vesting too much power in tribal councils have been all-too-real for many American Indians. It has led to corruption, injustice and dysfunctional governance on many reservations, compounding the tragedies and injustices that have befallen Indians. Non-Indians have largely turned a blind eye to this factor, as they turn a blind eye to much of what takes place on reservations.
How do I know? Because I wrote about the effort to re-write tribal constitutions when I worked at The Washington Times and over the years had other opportunities to revisit related issues as a journalist and editorial writer. That doesn’t make me an expert. But as an informed observer, I can’t help but see this as a major step ahead for the tribe.
No one believes that simply writing safeguards against concentrated power into tribal constitutions will fix everything that’s broken in Indian Country. But just as checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution have served as a bulwark against concentrations of power in the federal government, separating powers in tribal constitutions will perhaps do the same on the reservations. Assuming, of course, that rank-and-file Indians demand that the new guidelines be followed and enforced.
Now, we can only hope that happens. [Read More]
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Time to take aim at
June 25, 2008
In its latest edition, Portland Oregon’s Willamette Week poses a question that has probably crossed too few minds in this Mecca of politically- and ecologically-correct social engineering, by asking: Why, when gas prices are skyrocketing and fuel-efficient hybrids are all the rage and state budgets are being squeezed, does the state continue to offer millions of dollars in pro-hybrid tax breaks? “Tax Guzzlers” is a nice little piece of iconoclastic journalism, which illustrates (even if inadvertently) that markets and price-savvy consumers are far greater agents of change than government mandates or tax incentives. Read it in its entirety Here The good news is that most lawmakers, when asked by WW whether they would at least review, and possibly riscend, the incentives, indicated that they would. A politician willing to remove a much-cherished (and widely abused) subsidy? Now, that’s progress. [Read More]
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Will Eco-U educate or indoctrinate?
June 13, 2008
"The University of Washington’s Board of Regents on Thursday voted unanimously to create a new College of the Environment,” The Seattle Times reports, though it is nothing at this point but a “shell” and the concept has encountered resistance from “some state legislators and faculty.” The source of that reluctance is not well explained in the story: Seattle Times story. One regent seems to write it all off as institutional rigidity and resistance to change.
But perhaps some of the more serious, objective scientists on campus don’t want to be associated with an institution that could quickly become the College of Environmentalism, rather than the College of the Environment, polluting pure science with public policy-making. Perhaps some fear that green ideology and sensationalized science will in time come to taint everything the department does. Scientists should be scientists. Missionaries should be missionaries. But in the name of “saving the planet,” some radicals seem determined to co-opt science and conflate the two. Fear of this might help explain why “faculty in four out of the six schools and departments that would form the new college, including the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, have rejected the idea in advisory votes’ according to the Times. “Some are concerned part of their research wouldn't fit within the mandate of the new college.”
A college with a “mandate”? That alone should give one pause. [Read More]
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