Vin Suprynowicz

A reader writes in:

In response to a recent editorial, entitled ‘Higher gasoline taxes?’ that stated that because ‘family paychecks barely cover basics, the money [needed to repair our country’s crumbing infrastructure should come from] somewhere else.’ What could this ‘somewhere else’ be? … Is the Review-Journal advocating higher Federal income taxes, or a new national sales tax, or new toll road like user fees to pay for this? Also, how would higher withholding or sales taxes or higher user fees put more money in the pocket of the U.S. consumer? However defined, ‘somewhere else’ is just cost shifting.

Aside from noting the inappropriate capitalization of the word “Federal,” above, the way one might capitalize the word “God,” does anyone else notice a whole category of places omitted, where the central government could quickly and easily “get the money”?

In an admittedly very incomplete list, how about closing down the federal Department of Education — ending all federal subsidies and interventions in schooling, overnight?

We were a much more literate, independent, and productive nation 140 years ago, before government got massively involved in schooling. More »

Three years ago, Mary Jo Pletz of Walnutport, Pennsylvania — about 70 miles north of Philadelphia — learned her 6-month-old daughter had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. To care for her child, Mrs. Pletz, 33, had to give up her job as a dental hygienist and look for some kind of home-based employment that would help her husband pay the bills.

She started selling stuff over eBay. When she ran out of her own stuff, she offered to sell other people’s items, for a commission. She ran the operation out of her garage.

Then, right after Christmas, 2006, the state regulators came calling. In what many view as a test case designed to put the fear of God — of the state, at least — into other such entrepreneurs, the state agents contended Mrs. Pletz was running an auction house without proper licensing. They proceeded to shut down her business, forcing her to spend thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees as she fights their efforts to fine her, well … thousands of dollars.

Who’s behind the crackdown? Greedy politicians hoping for a new stream of tax revenue aren’t too far in the wings. Eight states have considered new regulations for Online sellers, though The AP reports all have backed down in the face of opposition, mainly from eBay.

But other online sellers think the pressure to crack down on such electronic sellers comes from the established auction houses, whose proprietors may believe they’re losing market share

“We feel it’s important that they be regulated, so consumers have peace of mind,” says Chris Longley, a spokesman for the National Auctioneers Association, based in Overland Park, Kansas. “Public trust is being lost because of the fraud involved in Internet auctions.”

Oh, please. More »

A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a “sole source” for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect — making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted “whole word” method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.

In July of 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York’s Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in The Wall Street Journal.

Let’s look at that essay, and see if we can find our “second source”:

“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history,” Mr. Gatto begins. “It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

“Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be ‘re-formed.’ It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. …

“David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, ‘special education’ fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

“In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths. …”

These are not the words of some sour-grapes loser who “couldn’t make it” as a teacher. Testimonials from Gatto’s former students fill a whole book.

“That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation,” Gatto continues. “There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won’t. …

“Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices. … I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. …”

Over the next nine years, Mr. Gatto was invited to give 750 talks “in fifty states and seven foreign countries. I had no agent and never advertised, but a lot of people made an effort to find me. It was as if parents were starving for someone to tell them the truth.” More »

In Washington Tuesday, a special commission appointed to study the need to repair the nation’s aging bridges and roads said the answer is to more than triple federal gasoline tax — increasing it by 40 cents per gallon over the next five years.

The two-year study by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission is the first to propose broad changes since a devastating highway bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August.

But in a 10-page dissent, the commission’s chairwoman, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, and two other members sharply criticized the gas-tax-hike proposal.

She and the two commissioners call instead for sole reliance on tolls and private investment, which Secretary Peters said would avoid sending millions of dollars of new tax revenue to Washington to end up as congressional pork.

“Relying on increases in the federal fuel tax and inviting political earmarking is a recipe for failure that we, as a nation, can no longer afford,” she and the two commissioners wrote.

Well, the big oil companies can afford to pay a lousy additional 40 cents per gallon out of their profits, can’t they?

Actually, no.

The California state Energy Commission — hardly an outfit anxious to sing the praises of the oil companies — estimates that out of a current $3.33 per-gallon price of branded gasoline, the crude oil cost is $2.22. (If you want to lower that, tell your politicians to approve offshore drilling and the construction of more domestic refineries.)
(http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/)

Of the remaining $1.11 that we pay at the pump, state, local, and federal taxes and fees eat up 62 cents — more than half. That leaves 38 cents More »

Isn’t it interesting the way Iraq news gets reported in our media.

A Jan. 10 Associated Press story begins: “Nine American soldiers were killed in the first two days of a new offensive to root out al-Qaida-in-Iraq fighters holed up in districts north of he capital. …

“The losses came as many enemy militants fled U.S, and Iraqi forces massing in Diyala” — a lot of those guerrillas fleeing north into the province of Salahuddin — AP correspondent Christopher Chester continues.

Read down to the seventh paragraph — halfway through the story. There, we finally learn that our troops “killed 20 to 30 insurgents in the first two days of the operation,” including some in attacks in Salahuddin province.

Now, I’m one who thinks we shouldn’t be in Iraq, at all. In the end, we’ll tacitly endorse some strongman who’ll let us maintain a few military bases in the region — a deal we probably could have cut with Saddam Hussein. Then we’ll declare “victory” and come home.

But if the news report above had been written by the kind of reporters who covered our advance through German-occupied France in 1944, More »

The Treasury Department on Jan. 3 updated 1974 regulations — issued before the age of electronic filing — that require “tax professionals” to get informed consent from their clients before disclosing tax information to third parties or using it for non-return purposes.

The IRS also announced it was considering a ban on tax preparers using information for the purpose of selling products such as Refund Anticipation Loans, under which taxpayers receive “instant refunds” but can be hit with high interest rates.

(If they’re presumed too dumb to check the interest rate on a “refund” loan, one wonders how on earth the government can hold them competent to understand the thousands of intiricate and self-conradicting pages of the Internal Revenue Code, which should thus be ruled “void for incomprehensibility,” don’t you think?)

Consumer groups took issue with these rules when they came out in draft form in 2006, complaining they could actually open the way for preparers to sell information to unrelated marketers, exposing consumers to identify theft.

The IRS responds there’s no change in the basic principle that taxpayers, not the government, should control their own tax information. Sharing the information can’t be banned outright, they argue, since there are some cases in which taxpayers may want preparers to share data, as when they apply for a mortgage.

The new rules — which go into effect in January, 2009 — also stipulate that consent forms must identify the intended purpose of disclosure and the recipients; Taxpayers must be informed that they are not required to sign consents; Consent documents must be in easy-to-read 12-point type; Preparers must not repeat consent requests once taxpayers decline to give their consent, and that when tax preparation is done offshore, Social Security numbers must be redacted.

The changes are OK as far as they go. But they’re a bit like reforming the way we deal with the waste products of the flatulent elephant living in the corner of the dining room, without asking why there’s a flatulent elephant living in the corner of the dining room in the first place. More »

They drink from the same water supply as regular Las Vegans. They attend schools administered by the same district. So it’s unlikely the folks who live inside the boundaries of the landlocked city of North Las Vegas — the “mean/scag ghetto” north of town that Hunter Thompson famously called “Nevada’s answer to East St. Louis — a slum and a graveyard, last stop before permanent exile to Ely or Winnemuca” — are really, um … developmentally disabled.

It’s just that they keep doing things that make you wonder.

For the longest time, law-abiding Clark County gun owners with target or self-defense weapons safely cased in their cars had to worry about inadvertently driving across the line into North Las Vegas, where the victim disarmament laws were more restrictive. (The state Legislature finally told them to knock it off, last year.)

Back in 2005, the North Las Vegas city fathers announced a new plan to pro-actively inspect each of the city’s 23,400 rental apartments annually, rather than wait for tenants to complain about problems.

(City Manager Gregory Rose’s proposal for universal warrantless searches of the poor “would help out low and moderate-income people … and get at some of the slumlords,” explained North Las Vegas Code Enforcement Manager Sheldon Klain. Apparently the Fourth Amendment and all that “probable cause” stuff no longer apply, More »

Defenders of the government compulsion schools were out in force over the holidays.

“Dear Vin,” writes one earnest parent, “I dropped my ‘terrified’ six-year-old off today at Xxx Elementary government-funded School. Wait. Was she terrified? No; She hugged her first grade teacher Mrs. Y. When we went to the book fair at the school gym two weeks ago, she hugged her four or five times and told her she loved her.

“Mrs. Y? What a do-nothing government bureaucrat. She is there two mornings a week before 8 a.m. to help tutor Annabelle with her reading. And when I picked Annabelle up Wednesday at almost 6 p.m. from the Kid’s Club county government funded ($4 a day) after school program, Mrs. Y still was in the classroom helping a child. …

Xxx, like all schools in Zzz County, met No Child Left Behind standards. Every month Mrs. Y and another first-grade teacher hold parents night to show parents how better to help their children read.

“Now as much as I think Mrs. Y and the educational system want Annabelle to learn far too much too soon and far more than I did at 6, I also think we are getting a deal paying her approximate $45,000 a year government salary. Why would I want to end this government school? Is a private school going to do anything more for Annabelle?”

A sincere and loving parent, clearly. I replied: More »

In the early Woody Allen comedy “Bananas,” our hapless hero helps a bearded revolutionary curiously reminiscent of Fidel Castro fight his way to victory in a revolution against his banana republic’s ruthless dictator.

The triumphant freedom fighter strides out onto the palace balcony to accept the adulation of the cheering crowd, declares himself dictator for life, and promptly issues his first orders. Among them: “Everyone will now wear their underwear on the outside, so we can check.”

It’s amusing because it sharply condenses the inevitable process by which those who find no limits on their power gradually take it upon themselves to control every aspect of everyone else’s life “for their own good” (Hi, Comrade Putin) — and also because it’s just so downright silly.

Real-life governments are so tied up with truly important matters that they’d never have time to bother us about anything so trivial as whether we’ve put on clean underwear, whether tavern owners choose to allow their customers to smoke while eating chicken wings in the bar at midnight, or, say, the size of the water tanks on the back of our toilets.

Oh, wait. More »

Police have identified Robert A. Hawkins, 19, as the young nut case who killed eight innocent people — seriously wounding five more — with a semi-automatic rifle (not an assault rifle) at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska Dec. 5.

Chalk up eight more deaths to “gun control.”

Hawkins left a suicide note, in which The Associated Press tells us he wrote “I just want to take a few pieces of (expletive) with me.”

The shooting was at least the fourth at an American mall or shopping center so far this year, following incidents in Salt Lake City, Utah; Kansas City, Missouri; and Douglasville, Georgia.

We don’t have to speculate whether this killer -— like so many before him -— chose a known gun-free zone for his carefully planned rampage.

Nebraska issues permits “allowing” qualified individuals people to carry concealed handguns after they acquire a permit. (The word “allowing” is in quotes because the 2nd and 14th amendments reaffirm weapons-carrying to be a right, not a privilege -— states have no more legitimate power to “allow” or “disallow” weapons carrying than they have the right to “allow” or “disallow” attendance at religious services or the publishing of newspapers.)

Leaving aside this “permitting” scheme, current Nebraska law quite properly does allow property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.

(“Some chains such as Bag ‘N Save have posted signs and shopping malls such as Westroads Mall have added ‘no weapons’ clauses to their posted codes of conduct,” the Omaha World-Herald reported on March 28, 2007.)

“The same was true for the attack at the Trolley Square Mall in Utah in February,” reports John Lott in his Dec. 6 article on FoxNews.com More »