Great Moments in Human Rights: Mandated “Emotional Support” Animals in College Dorms

I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent.

• I semi-confessed that I may have set off fireworks in a stairwell at my high school.
• And I’ve already confessed my role in an “attack” on a float during a homecoming parade.
• So I may as well admit that I got in trouble during college for having a pet snake in my dorm room.

Given that last bullet point, you would think I would sympathize with people who want to bring pets to school.

And I do, but I don’t sympathize with the notion that the federal government should compel colleges to allow pets – even if they’re for “emotional support.”

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening, thanks to some bureaucrats at a Department that shouldn’t exist. Here are some blurbs from the Wall Street Journal about a new breakthrough in human rights.

College freshman suffering from separation anxiety, take heart: The federal government says universities have an obligation to admit “emotional support” animals into school housing. …emotional support animals (dogs, mostly) provide therapy through companionship and affection.

The pinheads at the Department of Housing and Urban Development say this is required by the Fair Housing Act.

Housing providers must offer people with disabilities a “reasonable accommodation” for emotional support animals under both the Fair Housing Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1974, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a notice to its regional offices late last month. …The April 25 notice was sent about a week after a federal judge ruled that student housing is covered by the Fair Housing Act, in a lawsuit filed by HUD against the University of Nebraska, on behalf of a student there.

Meet Fido, your new dorm neighbor

Best of all, you can bring any animal you want so long as it doesn’t have a track record of bad conduct.

Housing providers can’t exclude animals based on breed, size or weight. They can, however, refuse an animal that poses a direct threat to the health and safety of others or would wreck havoc on the property, but such refusals must be based on “objective evidence about the specific animal’s actual conduct – not on mere speculation or fear,” the notice says.

So that doberman pinscher is innocent until proven guilty!

Another great development in “human rights” around the world. Indeed, it belongs with these momentous breakthroughs.

• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.
• Both the United Nations and the Obama Administration think there’s a right to taxpayer-financed birth control.

Speaking of subsidized birth control, you can enjoy some laughs at Sandra Fluke with this great Reason video, this funny cartoon, and four more jokes here.

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Is Underwear a Legitimate Function of the Federal Government?

Here’s another entry for our UK vs US Government Stupidity Contest. Or perhaps it belongs in the great-moments-in-government-waste category.

The spendaholics in Washington have squandered $400,000 on underwear that detects cigarette smoke.

I’m not joking. Here are some details from CNS.

Coming Soon to Victoria’s Secret: Trendy and Sexy Government-Funded Underwear

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded more than $400,000 to a research project involving underwear that can detect when a person smokes cigarettes. …the project…so far has produced a “very early prototype” of the monitoring system, which — in its current state — fits like a vest. …“The modern methods of monitoring smoking, primarily you rely on self-report,” said Dr. Edward Sazonov, an associate professor at the University of Alabama… The PACT Sazonov created is a “very early prototype,” that fits like a vest with multiple straps and wires, far from the “non-invasive, wearable” underwear the project developers had in mind. “It’s not very user friendly,” Sazonov said.

And it’s definitely not taxpayer friendly either.

Why is Uncle Sam wasting $400,000-plus on ugly and clunky underwear? The excuse for this boondoggle is that it will help monitor whether people smoke.

I fail to see how this would promote smoking cessation. I assume 99.99 percent of smokers are aware that they smoke.

Or are we going to have some sort of nanny-state program with the government forcing people to wear the underwear so the snoops in DC can monitor our private lives.

But even if that type of intrusive system would work, why is smoking any business of the federal government? It’s certainly not one of the enumerated powers in Article I, Section VIII.

This is yet another reason why there shouldn’t be any discussion of tax increases. Any government that has $400,000 to spend on a cigarette vest obviously has far too much money on its hands.

P.S. An odious and ridiculous subset of the UK-US Stupidity Contest is anti-gun political correctness. You can read absurd examples here.

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If You Outlaw Pencils, only Outlaws Will Have Pencils

I wouldn’t blame foreigners for thinking the United States is a bit schizophrenic.

This is a nation where you can own a tank or a machine gun, and it’s a country where there are probably more guns than people.

Yet it’s also a country where little kids get suspended for throwing imaginary grenades while playing alone on a playground. A country where cops arrest 10-year olds for having toy guns. And a country where small children get kicked out of school for pretending their hands are guns and saying “pow, pow.”

And now, apparently, it’s a country where kids can’t point a pencil at a buddy and make shooting noises.

Oh my God, It’s an assault pencil!

Here are some of the absurd details from a local CBS news report.

Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.” Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted. …Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades. It also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner. Marshall said his son has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so. He said school administrators failed to use common sense.

I’m almost at a loss for words. This wasn’t just one brainless bureaucrat. At the very least, both a teacher and an administrator were involved in this farce.

These are the people we want educating our children?!?

At least the dad had the cojones to criticize the bureaucrats.

With apologies to Martin Niemöller, I can’t resist this bit of satire.

First they came for the pop tarts,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t care for breakfast pastries.

Then they came for the pink bubble blowers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a bubble blower.

Then they came for the cupcakes,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cupcake eater.

Then they came for pencils,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

By the way, the United States is not the only nation suffering from a pathetic and wimpy form of political correctness. Here are some examples of how our cousins across the ocean have gone bonkers about guns.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

These are all example from my series comparing brainless policies in the United States and United Kingdom. Though I’m ashamed to say that this latest story puts the United States in the lead in this government-stupidity contest.

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Preposterous Waste, Pentagon Style

National defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government, but that doesn’t mean the military should get a blank check to spend unlimited amounts of money.

To make sure taxpayers get the best bang for the buck (no pun intended), there should be a sober assessment of threats to national security and a plan to defend against those threats without adding superfluous expenditures.

That being said, America already accounts for close to 50 percent of world military spending, with another 25 percent of the global total coming from nations that are allied to the United States, so I’m fairly confident that we’re not under-spending on the Pentagon.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t worry that much about the sequester, particularly since military spending actually climbs by about $100 billion over the next 10 years.

But I would like the Defense Department to have some flexibility to reallocate funds so that we spend money on national security rather than boondoggles.

And there are some absurd examples of waste at the Pentagon, including “green” jet fuel that costs 15 times as much as regular fuel. Here are some of the mind-boggling details from the Washington Examiner.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently warned that sequestration would cause “suspension of important activities, curtailed training, and could result in furloughs of civilian personnel” but the spending cuts haven’t killed the green fuels program, as the Pentagon has continued purchasing renewable fuel at $59 per gallon. “In March, Gevo entered into a contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to supply the U.S. Army with 3,650 gallons of renewable jet fuel to be delivered by the second quarter of 2013,” Gevo announced this week in its first quarter financial report. “This initial order may be increased by 12,500 gallons.

This is even worse than the bizarre $600,000 frog statue than the Defense Department selected to adorn a new $700 million office building.

I realize that the $700 million office building should be the bigger issue, but I can’t help but be irked by the thought that taxpayers are being raped and pillaged for the frog.

In any event, the $700 million for the office building is pocket change compared to the amount of money we misallocate to subsidize Western Europe to protect against a Warsaw Pact military alliance that no longer exists!

Yes, it’s true that America’s main fiscal problem is entitlement spending. And, yes, domestic discretionary spending is a bigger problem than the defense budget.

But wasting money in those areas is not a reason to also have waste at the Pentagon.

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Are You Happy that Your Tax Dollars Subsidized the Tsarnaev Family?

The bad news is that there are despicable and evil people seeking to kill innocents.

The worse news is that some of these pathetic excuses for protoplasm are subsidized by taxpayers.

It’s happened in France, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

And we now know that the Tsarnaev family was on he dole as well.

Which makes this cartoon funny, but at the same time not funny at all.

I used to think it was outrageous that the welfare state funded bad behavior (as illustrated by this humorous poster), as well as general laziness and moral depravity.

But there should be a special wing of the Moocher Hall of Fame for taxpayer-subsidized terrorists.

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Canada Wants to Join the Government Stupidity Contest

A recurring feature on this blog is the US vs UK government stupidity contest, which features examples of idiotic behavior by politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic.

Recent winners of this dubious honor include a rather amazing example of British road painting and a horrid incident of anti-gun political correctness by American school bureaucrats.

Our neighbors to the north must be envious that they’re not part of this contest. Based on what just happened in Quebec, Canada probably deserves to be in the conversation.

Mon Dieu!

First some background, courtesy of a story from the Guardian. It seems that the provincial government actually has language police.

They are known as the language police, a unit within the regional Quebec government that seeks to protect French from the rising tide of English. It deploys inspectors to rein in recidivist anglophones, take on big corporate transgressors such as Guess, the Gap and Costco and conduct spot checks to follow up thousands of public complaints.

But sometimes, these tax-funded Keystone Cops go too far.

Le Crime

Now, however, zealots in the Office québécois de la langue française (Quebec Board of the French Language) may have gone a step too far in picking a fight with an Italian restaurant… After a five-month investigation into an anonymous complaint, Massimo Lecas received a letter from the board telling him that his establishment, Buonanotte, had broken the law by including the words “pasta” on the menu and “bottiglia“, the Italian word for bottle, instead of the French word bouteille. Outraged, Lecas posted the letter for 2,500 of his Facebook friends to see. In doing so, he unleashed a political tempest over one of the most sensitive topics up for debate in the province. The outcry has forced the Quebec government to rein in its language inspectors, ensure exceptions to the rules are made for ethnic food and restaurant menus and order a review of how it handles public complaints.

Job security

By the way, this is not an isolated incident.

Lecas’s decision to go public with the letter from the language inspector has prompted other restaurateurs to come forward. One told how he was ordered to cover his microwave’s on/off switch and the redial button on a telephone with tape because they were in English. The chef’s grocery list, which was written on a kitchen chalkboard, was also found to have broken the law: steak frites may be a staple of Parisian bistros but, according to Quebec law, biftek is the only acceptable term. …Quebec’s recent budget included one notable increase: the yearly allotment for the language police.

So Canada definitely can make a claim that it belongs in the government stupidity contest. Though, to be fair, I should acknowledge that other governments also merit consideration.

1. In Germany, the government misplaced the sensitive blueprints of its new $2.3 billion spy headquarters.
2. In Italy, the government of supposed technocratic experts managed to appoint the wrong person to a job that shouldn’t exist.
3. In the European Union, watching free soccer broadcasts is now a human right.
4. In Greece, bureaucrats actually demand stool samples from entrepreneurs applying to set up online companies.

The moral of the story is that government – in all nations – is a festering black hole of waste. And if you ever feel that these incompetent and foolish people deserve more of our money, then I suggest you move to France, where the nation’s President generously has promised that nobody will have to surrender more than 80 percent of their income to the government.

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False Alarm: The Libertarian Revolution Has Not Begun

I just saw a headline that made me think that libertarian fantasies somehow had turned into reality.

As you can see, 24 IRS employees were just arrested for stealing. But what about the other 105,976 bureaucrats at the Internal Revenue Service who seize our money under the implied threat of violence?

Shouldn’t they be arrested for stealing from us as well?

But then my bubble burst. The story has nothing to do with the injustice of the internal revenue code and the shakedown of American taxpayers.

It turns out that these IRS bureaucrats were busted for getting unauthorized government handouts.

…authorities say Internal Revenue Service employees in Tennessee were stealing unemployment and other benefits while fully employed. On Thursday, 13 of those employees were indicted on federal charges that they lied to get unemployment, food stamps, welfare and housing vouchers. An additional 11 have been indicted on state charges of theft greater than $1,000.

In other words, these “public servants” were guilty of a form of triple dipping.

1. They took money from taxpayers as part of their excessive compensation packages.
2. Their day job was to then enforce a coercive and reprehensible tax system that took money from taxpayers
3. And they then bilked taxpayers yet again by mooching from various handout programs.

I’m actually surprised that they got arrested. Based on Keynesian economics, they should get medals for “stimulating” the economy.

P.S. All humor aside, non-anarchist libertarians face an interesting mental challenge. Many of them view the tax system as a form of theft. And there’s no question that it is enforced – ultimately – at the point of a gun. But with the exception of anarcho-capitalists, libertarians support the kind of limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. So how do you justify the taxes needed to finance that limited public sector? Most people would justify tax systems if they’re the result of a democratic process, but libertarians believe in rights rather than untrammeled majoritarianism. So how can they rationalize taxation? I freely confess that I don’t have the right answer. As I’ve noted before, I’m a practical libertarian, not the theoretical type. My job is to somehow figure out how we can shrink the federal government back to 3 percent of economic output. After that, the theoretical libertarians can figure out the thorny issues.

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The United Kingdom Boldly Rejoins the Government Incompetence and Stupidity Contest

I periodically compare the actions of brainless politicians and bureaucrats in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

One of the most bizarre examples I cited was from England. It showed how a local government decided to install the most pointless sign in the history of the world.

Our British friends are famous for their sense of humor (as illustrated by this glossary of financial terms and this guide to terror alerts in selected nations), so perhaps the sign was meant to be a joke.

Nonetheless, taxpayers picked up the tab.

And now we have another example of incomprehensible government stupidity. Taxpayers in one community just paid to have road markings painted in an alleyway.

I’m not kidding. Check out the photo and this excerpt from a BBC report.

Lines have been painted on both sides of the passageway, off Newhall Street in Swindon, leaving a gap of just 13in (33cm). Nathalie Fisher, a local resident, said it was a “bit of a mystery” as “you couldn’t even fit a motorbike down it.” …The council said local residents had asked the authority to “deal with illegal parking in alleyways”.

Gee, I hope the guy in the picture is being careful. He may get a traffic ticket since his left foot is almost on the double yellow line.

To be sure, I’m not sure this story means that U.K. government official are worse than U.S. government officials. Just look at some of these examples of PC-run-amok and you’ll have plenty of evidence of foolishness on this side of the Atlantic.

The moral of the story is that bureaucrats and politicians want to run our lives, but they’re some of the world’s least competent people.

P.S. While it’s amusing to highlight examples of government stupidity, let’s not forget there are real-life victims of bad government policy in the United Kingdom, particularly if you look at the healthcare system and welfare system.

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Apparently Learning Nothing from the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac Disaster, the Obama Administration Wants to Subsidize Banks to Make More Dodgy Loans

Let’s assume you didn’t understand how a garbage disposal worked and, for whatever reason, you decided to stick your arm in one and turn it on. You would do some serious injury to your hand.

The rest of us would wonder what motivated you to stick your arm down the drain in the first place, but we would feel sympathy because you didn’t realize bad things would happen.

But if you then told us that you were planning to do the same thing tomorrow, we would think you were crazy. Didn’t you learn anything, we would ask?

Seems like a preposterous scenario, but something very similar is now happening in Washington. The Obama Administration is proposing to once again put the economy at risk by subsidizing banks to give mortgages to people with poor credit.

“Let’s party like it’s 2006!”

Even though we’re still dealing with the economic and fiscal damage caused by the last episode of government housing subsidies!

Here are some of the unbelievable details from a report in the Washington Post.

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit…officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default. Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Brings to mind the famous saying from George Santayana that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But what’s especially amazing – and distressing – about this latest scheme is that “the past” was only a couple of years ago. Or, to recall my odd analogy, one of our hands is still mangled and bleeding and we’re thinking about putting our other hand in the disposal.

Some people understand this is a nutty idea.

…critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars. “If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

What’s also discouraging is that the government already is deeply involved in the housing market – even though this is an area where there is no legitimate role for the federal intervention.

Deciding which borrowers get loans might seem like something that should be left up to the private market. But since the financial crisis in 2008, the government has shaped most of the housing market, insuring between 80 percent and 90 percent of all new loans, according to the industry publication Inside Mortgage Finance. It has done so primarily through the Federal Housing Administration, which is part of the executive branch, and taxpayer-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, run by an independent regulator.

So I guess the goal is to have taxpayers on the hook for 100 percent of loans.

“Don’t worry, it’s not our money”

Anybody want to guess whether this will end well?

By the way, this is bad policy even if we somehow avoid a new bubble and big taxpayer losses. Even in a”best case” scenario, the federal government will be distorting the allocation of capital by discouraging business investment and subsidizing residential real estate.

And as shown in this powerful chart, that will have adverse consequences for wages and living standards.

The part of the article that most nauseated me was a quote from the head bureaucrat at the Federal Housing Administration.

“My view is that there are lots of creditworthy borrowers that are below 720 or 700 — all the way down the credit-score spectrum,” Galante said. “It’s important you look at the totality of that borrower’s ability to pay.”

Gee, isn’t that nice that Ms. Galante thinks there are lots of borrowers with good “totality” measures? But here’s an interesting concept. Why doesn’t she put her money at risk instead of making me the involuntary guarantor on these dodgy loans?

I’ve already said on TV that we should dump Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the Potomac River. And I’ve  argued that the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development should be razed to the ground.

But perhaps this cartoon best shows the consequences of the Obama Administration’s new subsidy scheme.

P.S. We also should get rid of housing preference in the tax code. Our economy should cater to the underlying preferences of consumers, not the electoral interests of politicians.

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This Wins the “Booby Prize” for Great Moments in Government-Run Healthcare

I’ve posted some horrifying examples about what happens when you put politicians and bureaucrats in charge of health care.

The story that makes every guy wince comes from Sweden, where a man wound up having his penis amputated because of government incompetence.

And I’ve shared numerous examples of substandard care from the United Kingdom, in part because I can’t resist mocking Paul Krugman.

Speaking of the U.K., here’s a story that may lure some young men into supporting government-run healthcare.

Did taxpayers get good value for their money?

…22-year-old Josie Cunningham recently was approved for breast enhancement surgery that cost more than $7,000, and paid for entirely by taxpayers, reports Opposing Views. Why? Because she told her General Practitioner that being flat-chested was causing her emotional distress. “My GP referred me for the operation because I wasn’t just flat-chested — I didn’t have any boobs whatsoever,” Cunningham said. “I could never go on holiday as I lived in terror of ever being seen in a bikini and could never set foot outside without a padded bra.” Her doctor’s prescription to counter the “emotional distress” was to enhance her breast size from a 32A to 36DD.

I’ve never heard of the website that contains this story, and I’ve never heard of Opposing Views, where it supposedly originated, so I confess to being a bit skeptical of this story.

Then again, who would have guessed that the government in the United Kingdom would provide taxpayer-financed sex trips to Amsterdam? Or that the bureaucrats at the European Commission would be able to get penile implants at public expense?

Closer to home, let’s not forget that Obamacare allows taxpayer-subsidized viagra for sex offenders! And Medicare pays for penis pumps, which creates frightening visual images.

So even if this specific story isn’t true, I have no doubt that the British government has squandered money in similar ways.

P.S. Speaking of breast augmentation, one of the few well-functioning parts of the American healthcare system is cosmetic surgery. Why? Because consumers largely pay out of pocket and, as a result, costs are restrained.

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Great Moments in Government Waste

Taxpayers all across America send lots of money to Washington, DC, in part because we’re supposed to believe that redistribution is a legitimate and desirable function of the federal government.

But this is a very perverse form of redistribution. All that money going to Washington helps subsidize a network of overpaid bureaucrats, fat-cat lobbyists, corrupt politicians, and well-heeled interest groups.

Indeed, as shown in this map, 10 of the 15 richest counties in the country are in the Washington metropolitan area.

One of those wealthy areas is Arlington County, VA, just across the river from Washington. Home to thousands of federal bureaucrats and other DC insiders, Arlington is similar to Washington in that there is a lot of wasteful spending. Sort of makes you wonder if local bureaucrats and federal bureaucrats ever meet at bars after work and brag about who wasted the most money that day?

Anyhow, here are some sordid details from a Washington Post story.

A wall made of etched glass opens the rear vista to newly planted landscaping. Embedded in the floor are heating elements intended to ward off the cold weather and keep winter-weary feet cozy. …And the price tag: $1 million. “Is this made of gold?” asked commuter Yohannes Kaleab, examining the concrete-and-stainless-steel bench that is part of the new, seven-figure bus shelter. “What?” asked Robin Stewart as he learned of the cost of the structure while waiting for a bus there last week. “That’s ridiculous. From a citizen, from a voter, whoever put that budget through needs to get their butt canned. It’s an outrage.” The “super stop,” which opened March 11, is the first of 24 new bus stops that will also accommodate Arlington’s long-planned streetcars. …It will shelter 15 people at a time.

$1 million for this bit of glass, metal, and concrete?!?

That sounds kind of expensive, but we can be comforted by the fact that thoughtful public servants predict future savings.

“When you do a prototype, you end up heavily front-loading on the costs,” said Dennis Leach, Arlington’s transportation director.

So how much will taxpayers save on the remaining 23 stops? Well, the good news is that they won’t cost $1 million each. The bad news is that the government doesn’t exactly save a lot of money when doing bulk purchases.

“Our goal if at all possible is to do it for less,” Leach said. The county has budgeted $20.8 million for the remaining 23 stops, or about $904,000 for each one.

Gee, knock me over with a feather. The additional bus stops will “only” be $904,000!

That’s not counting cost overruns, which are an inevitable reality with government budgeting, so I think it’s safe to assume that the final cost will be far higher.

So why do governments waste money like this?

Part of the answer, of course, is that politicians are inherently wasteful. But there’s another factor at play. Politicians are especially wasteful when they can spend money that isn’t collected from their own taxpayers.

And readers from other parts of America doubtlessly will be overjoyed to learn that their paying for a big chunk of this boondoggle.

Federal and state transportation money paid 80 percent of the costs.

With taxpayers outside of Arlington paying such a high share of the cost, we should think of ourselves as lucky that the bus stop didn’t cost $10 million!

But here’s the most amazing part of the story.

What’s the most important part of a bus stop? In theory, a bus stop can be nothing more than a sign indicating the spot where you should wait for a bus.

But if you’re going to build a structure, the most valuable feature – at least from the perspective of riders – is that you will be protected from the weather. So what sort of protection are riders getting as a result of this $1 million boondoggle? Meh, not so much.

…the bus shelter is “pretty, but I was struck by the fact that if it’s pouring rain, I’m going to get wet, and if it’s cold, the wind is going to be blowing on me. It doesn’t seem to be a shelter. It doesn’t really shelter you very much . . . you can get pretty soaked in two minutes.” Her opinion was shared by some on Columbia Pike trying it out.

Gee, isn’t this wonderful. Some contractors doubtlessly lined their pockets building this white elephant. Some consultants doubtlessly fattened their bank accounts with all the nonsense that is now part of the “planning” process.

But taxpayers, as usual, got the short end of the stick. They got taken for a ride, figuratively. And if they actually use the bus stop, they can get taken for a ride, literally, so long as they don’t mind getting wet.

P.S. And let’s not forget that Obama wants some more class-warfare tax hikes to finance more of this “investment.”

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Great Moments in State Government

Back in 2010, I shared parts of a Dave Barry column that mocked the government for bizarre examples of stupid law enforcement.

Barry was specifically making fun of OSHA bureaucrats for fining a company for the horrible transgression of saving a worker when a trench collapsed. But there are many other examples of law enforcement run amok.

1. The Food and Drug Administration raiding a dairy for the terrible crime of selling unpasteurized milk to people who prefer unpasteurized milk.
2. New York City imposing a $30,000 fine on a small shop because it sold a toy gun.
3. The pinheads at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission going after Hooters for not having any male waiters in hot pants and tight t-shirts.
4. Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources is legally attacking a family for rescuing a baby deer.

And now we have another Kafkaesque episode.

Here are some of the strange details from a local newspaper.

Anthony Brasfield saw romance when he released a dozen heart-shaped balloons into the sky over Dania Beach with his sweetie. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper saw a felony. Brasfield, 40, and his girlfriend, Shaquina Baxter, were in the parking lot of the Motel 6 on Dania Beach Boulevard when he released the shiny red and silver mylar balloons and watched them float away Sunday morning. …Brasfield was charged with polluting to harm humans, animals, plants, etc. under the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act. …Between 2008 and 2012, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said there were 21 arrests statewide under the rarely used environmental crime statute. The third-degree felony is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Let’s now think about what this means.

We have a guy who almost certainly had no idea he was committing a crime. He presumably isn’t rolling in money since he was staying at a Motel 6. Yet now he faces a harder life because he has a felony arrest on his record.

I’m assuming, by the way, that the government surely won’t send him to prison. I’m also guessing – or at least hoping – that the state won’t even impose a heavy fine. And perhaps the prosecutor’s office will drop or reduce the charges so he won’t have a felony conviction on his record. Though maybe I’m being too generous in those assumptions.

Anyway, my main point is to question why the unfortunate Mr. Brasfield was arrested in the first place. What was the cop thinking, that a felony arrest would help fill his quota?

By the way, I’m not claiming that there shouldn’t be a rule against releasing balloons near a nature preserve. It may be that imposing some sort of sanction is the right way, from a cost-benefit perspective, to preserve and protect the environment.

But Mr. Brasfield wasn’t a big corporation dumping chemicals into the water with full knowledge of lawbreaking and potentially doing millions of dollars of damage. That’s the situation where felony arrests and prosecutions are completely appropriate.

Releasing a few balloons, by contrast, should be treated more like jaywalking or littering. Though I realize that would require common sense from lawmakers, law enforcement, and the justice system. So good luck with that.

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Colorado School Official Courageously Rescues Community from Vicious 7-Year Old Terrorist

While writing yesterday about a bureaucrat who might need to give up doggie day care service for his pet because of make-believe “deep spending cuts,” I mentioned that we need something akin to a medal-of-honor award for bureaucrats who endure untold suffering.

In that same spirit, we need some sort of national award for school officials who engage is spectacular acts of heroism to save their communities from the youth brigade of al Qaeda.

If we had this kind of award, some of the past winners would include:

•  The bureaucrats who suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• The bureaucrats who busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• The teacher in Rhode Island who caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• The bureaucrats who evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• The bureaucrats in Florida who kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

And if we had such an award, Valerie Lara-Black might have an early favorite for the 2013. What did Ms. Lara-Black do to put herself in position for such a high honor? Well, she went above and beyond the call of duty.

A 7-year-old Mary Blair Elementary School student says he’s confused about getting in trouble…Thompson School District officials contend that the boy broke one of the school’s “absolutes.” Parent Mandie Watkins said Mary Blair principal Valerie Lara-Black called her Friday afternoon to inform her that her second-grade son, Alex, had been suspended.

Another thwarted terrorist!

What did this nascent young criminal do? What horrid offense against the community did he commit? Why was he suspended?

…for throwing an imaginary grenade during recess on the playground. Alex did not have anything in his hand at the time and made no threats toward other people, Watkins reportedly was told.

Thank goodness that Ms. Lara-Black was able to nip this crisis in the bud. Showing a mastery of bureaucracy, she quickly deployed her school’s policy against play weapons and she decided that an imaginary play weapon was just as dangerous as a real play weapon.

The rules are laid out by Mary Blair Elementary School in a list of “absolutes” that are posted on the school’s website and are aimed at making Mary Blair a safe environment. Included in those absolutes are no physical abuse or fighting – real or play – and the no-weapons absolute also covers real or play weapons.

I hope the school also has a policy against playing tag as well. After all, that’s a militaristic game that sometimes involves aggressive touching.

And if the kids play kickball during recess, I hope there’s a rule that all games end in ties so there are no winners and losers (or perhaps just require the kids to play soccer, where all games seem to end in scoreless ties anyway).

You can’t be too careful. It takes a lot of care and planning, after all, to raise the next generation of social workers!

Though I am a bit surprised that this happened in Colorado. The folks I’ve met at the High Lonesome Ranch, for instance, obviously were not lobotomized and emasculated while at school, so perhaps mind-numbing stupidity is a recent phenomenon in the state.

At least this type of thinking hasn’t spread to Texas, where policymakers are more likely to let teachers carry guns rather than turn them into enforcers of political correctness.

You can get a sense of how folks think in Texas from this coyote joke and this mock police exam.

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Another Great Victory in the Drug War

I’ve shared some very interesting commentary and opinions on the Drug War from folks such as John Stossel, Mona Charen, Gary Johnson, Pat Robertson, Cory Booker, and Richard Branson.

And I’ve shared some horror stories about “asset forfeiture,” an odious procedure that allows the government to steal private property without any finding of guilt.

• The DEA trying to confiscate a commercial building because a tenant sold some marijuana.
• The government seeking to steal a hotel because some guests sold some marijuana.
• The feds grabbing cash from innocent bystanders in legal cases.
• A local government trying to steal a man’s car because someone else drove it while intoxicated.

But sometimes an anecdote is the best way of exposing the silliness of the War on Drugs.

Here are some surreal tidbits from a Yahoo Sports report.

Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni, 65, and her husband were driving home to Plano, Texas from Columbus after attending her mother-in-law’s funeral when a pair of black police SUV’s stopped the couple a few miles outside of Memphis. “Knowing I wasn’t speeding, I couldn’t imagine why,” Jonas-Boggioni told the Columbus Dispatch. “They were very serious. They had the body armor and the guns.”

What was the supposed “probable cause” that led the police to make this stop? Ummm…..

On the back of Jonas-Boggioni’s car was a Buckeye leaf decal, similar to the one players’ have on their helmets, and cops mistakenly thought it was marijuana leaf. Yes, really. “What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” one of the cops asked Jonas-Boggioni. After trying to explain that the sticker was not a marijuana leaf and that she and her husband were not trafficking drugs cross-country, the police advised Jonas-Boggioni to remove the sticker as to not cause any more confusion.

As a fan of SEC football, I certainly agree that there’s something wrong with supporting the Ohio State Buckeyes. But bad judgement shouldn’t be against the law, much less a cause for a legal encounter with the government.

Particularly when the cops are showing their lack of knowledge.

Tennessee police apparently aren’t botany experts. If they were, they’d know a marijuana leaf has seven leaflets (see above picture) and a narrow shape as compared to the Buckeye leaf, which is fat and has five leaflets. …As for Jonas-Boggioni, she acknowledged the cop’s wishes, but got back in her car without removing the sticker. “I didn’t take it off,” Jonas-Boggioni told the paper. “This little old lady is no drug dealer.”

But that doesn’t mean other little old ladies aren’t drug dealers.

Click here is you want to read about a grandmother’s encounter with the Drug War.

Now ask yourself why we should be paying higher taxes to support this failed effort.

And remember that you can do something about it, as shown by some good people in Montana.

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In a Remarkable Display of Government Stupidity on Steroids, Cops Arrest a 10-Year Old for a Toy Gun

As part of my US v UK government stupidity contest, I’ve shared some really bizarre examples of anti-gun/anti-self defense political correctness.

At first I thought the Brits were more brainless.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

Though, to be sure, there’s lots of foolishness in America.

• A Rhode Island boy got in trouble for bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• A little boy got suspended for making a pistol shape with his fingers.
• Another little boy got suspended for playing cops and robbers.

The Brits were in the lead because they actually arrested people who did done nothing wrong.

But now the United States may deserve this booby prize. Here are some details of a Kafkaesque story from RT.

School administrators in Virginia suspended a 10-year-old boy earlier this month after he was caught with an orange-tipped toy gun in his backpack. Now as he awaits his next meeting with his probation officer, his mother opens up about the incident. …she is still in disbelief over what the entire event has done for her son, herself and the community.

But he wasn’t just suspended. He then got arrested.

Just one day after her fifth-grader’s toy gun was discovered on a school bus leaving Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, his mom says he was arrested, dragged to court and questioned, photographed and fingerprinted. “Any time we get a call like this, we take it very seriously until we can determine the extent of the weapon, if it’s real or not, and what the student intends to do with it,” Alexandria Police Department spokesman Jody Donaldson told the Washington Examiner after the boy’s arrest.

Now that the bureaucrats are getting laughed at, they’re beginning to say the whole episode may have been a mistake. Gee, you think?!?

Today, though, Donaldson admits that things may have been a bit different had the authorities taken a breath before they rushed to respond. “If we were able to investigate right away, the outcome might have been different,” she tells the Post. Ms. Gilbert agrees and thinks authorities acted a little too overzealously. Even the mother who first reported the gun that her daughter saw on an Alexandria school bus tells the paper, “It’s such a bad handling of the situation, it was ridiculous.”

But this isn’t a laughing matter. The little boy’s life has been turned upside down.

…the boy has been forced to switch schools and has been entangled in a legal nightmare surely to serve as a thorn in the side of his family for years to come. That, of course, isn’t even taking into consideration what sort of effect the entire incident will have on the boy, who now has a record with local authorities.

It’s quite embarrassing that this happened in my state of Virginia.

You’d expect this kind of vapid political correctness in New York, not in the south.

But the infectious disease of bureaucratic brainlessness is spreading all over Dixie.

Here are some excerpts from a story about some first-rate government stupidity that recently was on display in Alabama.

A high school student in Florence said he has been suspended because of a picture of a gun. Daniel McClaine Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School, said he saved the picture as his desktop background on his school-issued computer. A teacher noticed it and turned him in. …the district policy states students are prohibited from “sending or displaying offensive messages or pictures,” and cannot access, send, create or forward pictures that are considered “harassing, threatening, or illegal.”McClaine said he read the guidelines but does not consider the picture threatening to anyone. …Daniel’s father said after ABC15 contacted the school, the administration backed down and will let his son return to school on Monday instead of Wednesday.

The good news, so to speak is that Daniel wasn’t arrested and the school’s bureaucrats backed down and canceled the suspension.

But it’s hard to be optimistic about the education system after reading this type of story.

If bureaucrats don’t have common sense, how can they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Maybe the bigger lesson (especially given the shocking lack of results after record levels of staffing and funding) is that we should break up the government school monopoly and let parents choose better-quality schools?

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Special Employment Rights for Crooks: Our Tax Dollars at Work

As an economist with a boring personality (sorry to be redundant), I sometimes focus on numbers. And when contemplating the cost of regulation and red tape, there are some numbers that should frighten all of us.

• Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
• The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.
• For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.
• The Obama Administration added $236 billion of red tape just in 2012.

But normal people are probably more likely to understand the cost of red tape when you share specific examples of absurd regulation.

And apparently that’s why we have an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC bureaucracy has become famous for ridiculous examples of red tape. It first became famous many years ago when it went after Hooters for hiring attractive young women instead of fat old men to serve as waitresses (and now the bureaucrats are going after a business in Rhode Island for the same reason).

In more recent years, the pinheads at the EEOC have harassed a trucking company for the supposed crime of discriminating against alcoholics and pushed multi-billion dollar regulations to accommodate “pee-shy” employees.

Now the clowns from the EEOC have jumped to the aid of a new “protected class.” Who are these unfortunate and mistreated people that the bureaucrats want to defend?

Get ready to pick your jaw off the floor. Jim Bovard has a column in the Wall Street Journal that seems like satire from The Onion.

Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory “guidance” to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders.

I’m sure employment lawyers are delighted at the thought of all the billable hours that will be required to peruse 20,000 words of bureaucratese, but what on earth is the EEOC thinking?

Well, it seems the bureaucrats have a long track record of seeking to “protect” the criminals amongst us.

…the EEOC began stretching Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to sue businesses for practically any hiring practice that adversely affected minorities. In 1989, the agency sued Carolina Freight Carrier Corp. of Hollywood, Fla., for refusing to hire as a truck driver a Hispanic man who had multiple arrests and had served 18 months in prison for larceny. The EEOC argued that the only legitimate qualification for the job was the ability to operate a tractor trailer. U.S. District Judge Jose Alejandro Gonzalez Jr., in ruling against the agency, said: “EEOC’s position that minorities should be held to lower standards is an insult to millions of honest Hispanics. Obviously a rule refusing honest employment to convicted applicants is going to have a disparate impact upon thieves.”

But even though the bureaucrats were slapped down by the courts, the EEOC continues to harass companies that seek to hire honest workers who aren’t a threat to the general public.

…the EEOC guidance frowns on such checks and creates new legal tripwires that could spark federal lawsuits. …If a background check discloses a criminal offense, the EEOC expects a company to do an intricate “individualized assessment” that will somehow prove that it has a “business necessity” not to hire the ex-offender (or that his offense disqualifies him for a specific job). …It is difficult to overstate the EEOC’s zealotry on this issue. The agency is demanding that one of Mr. Livingston’s clients—the Freeman Companies, a convention and corporate events planner—pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.

To understand the stupidity and venality of government, re-read the last sentence of that excerpt. The EEOC actually wants a business to give money to applicants who were rejected because they lied about their criminal records.

I’m at a loss for words.

Actually, just joking. I have a lot more words to write, particularly when I see that the bureaucrats at the EEOC also launched a legal attack against a firm that understandably didn’t want to hire crooks for sensitive jobs such as guarding nuclear power plants.

…businesses complying with state or local laws that require employee background checks can still be targeted for EEOC lawsuits. This is a key issue in a case the EEOC commenced in 2010 against G4S Secure Solutions after the company refused to hire a twice-convicted Pennsylvania thief as a security guard. G4S provides guards for nuclear power plants, chemical plants, government buildings and other sensitive sites, and it is prohibited by state law from hiring people with felony convictions as security officers. …The EEOC’s new regime leaves businesses in a Catch-22. As Todd McCracken of the National Small Business Association recently warned: “State and federal courts will allow potentially devastating tort lawsuits against businesses that hire felons who commit crimes at the workplace or in customers’ homes. Yet the EEOC is threatening to launch lawsuits if they do not hire those same felons.”

Oh, by the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the EEOC refuses to say whether it conducts background checks on its own employees. Remember, the ruling class shouldn’t have to worry about all the laws imposed on you and me and the rest of the peasants.

…the EEOC is practically rewriting the law to add “criminal offender” to the list of protected groups under civil-rights statutes, [but] the agency refuses to disclose whether it uses criminal background checks for its own hiring. When EEOC Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff was challenged on this point in a recent federal case in Maryland, the agency insisted that revealing its hiring policies would violate the “governmental deliberative process privilege.”

What’s particularly tragic about this farce is that it will almost certainly hurt the minorities that the EEOC supposedly is trying to help.

…studies published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum and the Journal of Law and Economics have found that businesses are much less likely to hire minority applicants when background checks are banned. As the majority of black and Hispanic job applicants have clean legal records, the new EEOC mandate may harm the very groups it purports to help.

Remarkable…and typical.

And if you want a few more examples of government stupidity:

• Putting a store out of business for selling toy guns.
• Year-long sting operations by federal milk police.
• Rules harassing coffee shops with bikini-clad sales staff.
• OSHA requirements for expensive safety harnesses for people working 11 feet off the ground.
• The IRS making banks put foreign tax law above US tax law.

Simply stated, government is a disaster waiting to happen – just as shown in this satirical poster.

P.S. If you didn’t get suicidally depressed after reading this post, Jim Bovard has a column about the Department of Housing and Urban Development that is equally mind-boggling.

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Great Moments in State Government: Pinhead Bureaucrats Threaten Family with Possible Prison Sentence for Rescuing a Baby Deer

As a public finance economist, I normally focus on big-picture arguments against excessive government.

If the public sector is too large, for instance, that undermines economic growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy.

The damage is then compounded by a needlessly destructive and punitive tax system.

But I’ve also discovered that it helps to personalize the analysis by pointing out examples of ridiculous and wasteful behavior by government.

From England: The world’s most useless sign

That’s one of the reasons I share horror stories as part of the U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest.

Some actions by government, however, belong in a different category. I’m not sure what word I would choose to describe them – perhaps venal, evil, despicable, reprehensible, or disgusting would be good options.

Am I being overly dramatic? Perhaps, but is there any other reaction when the government persecutes a family with possible jail time for rescuing Bambi?

Here are some absurd and disturbing details from the Indianapolis Star.

When Connersville police officer Jeff Counceller first encountered the baby deer, she was curled up in the corner of a front porch.It was clear the fawn was injured. Counceller could see the wounds… If left to its own, the animal would surely die… So the Councellers took in the deer, which they named Dani, cleaned and dressed its wounds and nursed it back to health, all with the intention of turning it out into the wild once it was big enough and strong enough to have a chance on its own. …she was unable to stand, and her maggot-infested wound was ugly. The Councellers contacted DNR at the time but were told to return the deer to the wild and let nature take its course. “It would have been a death sentence,” Jeff said.

So the family did what any decent people would do. They nursed the deer back to health. But decency and government often are in conflict.

Trouble is, what the Councellers did is against the law. Now, more than two years after rescuing the deer, more than six months after conservation officers began an investigation, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources wants them prosecuted. …DNR officials began an investigation that entailed half a dozen visits to their home and numerous calls to local authorities. In July, the agency issued an eight-page report and asked for a special prosecutor from another county to handle the case. Why the charges are being sought now — six months later — isn’t clear.

Bureaucrats wanted to kill this baby deer

I think the answer is obvious. The bureaucrats from the Department of Natural Resources are sulking because their imperious demands weren’t obeyed.

So they’re lashing out at an innocent family, as indicated by the following excerpts.

…when the DNR came calling, the Councellers say they were almost ready to release Dani back into the woods. They were just waiting for the summer drought to pass and the nearby corn crops to mature enough to offer cover and food for Dani. They say they weren’t aware it was illegal to keep the deer.

That’s when the bureaucratic nightmare began.

When the DNR began its investigation, the Councellers say the conservation officer suggested they obtain a rescue permit. But that was denied. Soon, the DNR said the deer must be euthanized, that it was a safety threat to humans.

Fortunately, an unknown good Samaritan intervened and freed Dani before the government could kill the helpless animal.

But on the day of Dani’s scheduled execution, the deer turned up missing, its enclosure left open. The Councellers say they didn’t arrange the escape or know how the deer was freed but acknowledge that they didn’t probe too deeply to find out.

But no good deed goes unpunished when spiteful bureaucrats are involved.

…there was nothing but silence from the DNR until the Councellers received notice of the charges earlier this month. They plan to fight the case, even though jail is unlikely and the lawyer costs — which could reach $5,000 — are significantly higher than a likely fine. It’s a matter of principle, they say. They don’t want to plead guilty for trying to help an animal and when they had no criminal intent.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the community is on the side of the deer (and the persecuted family). Indeed, there’s even a Facebook page for folks who want to register their displeasure with this example of government thuggery.

“People are outraged at the DNR and that the government has nothing better to do than harass these people,” said John Waudby, an Indianapolis man who created the Facebook page after hearing about the story. “Anybody in their right mind would have done the same thing.”

All things considered, this story from Indiana shouldn’t be part of the government stupidity and incompetence contest. Given the venality of the bureaucrats, it belongs with this list of horrifying examples of government thuggery.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Cops legally stole $17,000 from a man who committed no crime.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

In a just world, a court will immediately dismiss the charges against the Counceller family.

I would urge that the family then be awarded damages, but that’s not the right response. The bureaucrats would merely shrug and let taxpayers pick up the cost.

The only good outcome is to unceremoniously fire every bureaucrat who played a role in this outrageous episode.

Like most bureaucrats, I suspect the pinheads at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources are overpaid. So losing their pampered positions would be genuine punishment and it would send a message to the rest of the paper pushers not to harass innocent and good people.

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Courageous Pennsylvania School Officials Nab 5-Year Old Terrorist

It appears that my contest between the United States and United Kingdom for the most inane government policy how has to be augmented by a new contest between Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Just yesterday, I mocked Maryland officials for suspending two little boys for the horrific crime of playing cops and robbers (and noted that this is not the first time such stupidity has been displayed by Maryland school officials).

Preferred Weapon of al Qaeda

Apparently, the pencil-neck bureaucrats in Pennsylvania are jealous that their neighbors are getting a lot of attention, so they’ve branded a five-year old girl as a terrorist threat for talking about her pink toy gun that shoots bubbles.

Yes, bubbles.

Here are some of the absurd details from a local news report.

Talking with a friend about a pink toy bubble gun got a five-year-old kindergarten girl in the Mount Carmel Area School District labeled as a terrorist threat, according to an attorney.The incident occurred Jan. 10 while the girl was waiting in line for a school bus, said Robin Ficker, the Maryland lawyer retained by the girl’s family. …Talking with a friend, the girl said something to the effect “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself” in reference to the device that shoots out bubbles. The girl did not have the bubble gun with her and has never shot a real gun in her life, Ficker said. Elementary school officials learned of the conversation and questioned the girls the next day, Fickler said. He said the girl did not have a parent present during the 30 minutes of questioning. The result, he said, was that the student was labeled a “terrorist threat” and suspended for 10 days, Ficker said. The school also required her to be evaluated by a psychologist, Ficker said. “This little girl is the least terroristic person in Pennsylvania,” he said.

In yesterday’s post, I speculated that it was a teacher who reported the little boys for playing cops and robbers and I said that teacher should be suspended.

I also said the principal should be fired for punishing the boys for acting like boys.

But after reading this story, I realize that I was being wimpy. These stories show that the time has come to end the government school monopoly.

We already know that government schools do a rotten job, consuming ever-larger amounts of our tax dollars for a system that produces very mediocre results (check out this chart if you don’t believe me).

But that’s just part of the argument for school choice.

We also need to protect our kids from being exposed to bureaucrats who are jaw-droppingly stupid.

“I want to work for the IRS when I grow up”

Actually, WordPress is telling me that “droppingly” isn’t a word. So maybe instead we should take Instapundit’s advice and reward these idiot officials with some tar and feathers.

And I hope the tattle-tale punk from the bus stop who ratted out the little girls is condemned to some sort of grade-school purgatory featuring never-ending wedgies.

On a more serious note, I hope the parents sue the you-know-what out of the school.

Then I hope Pennsylvania’s state legislature and Governor quit screwing around and implement a sweeping school choice plan, as they supposedly were going to do two years ago.

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Suspending a Little Boy for Playing Toy Gun with His Hand? I’m Embarrassed for my Country

I’ve shared several horror stories of government incompetence and bureaucratic nonsense as part of my series comparing stupid policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

This has been a neck-and-neck battle, with the United Kingdom recently throwing down the gauntlet with a decision to take kids away from their foster family because the mom and dad didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The United States responded by paying to have a bunch of bureaucrats attend a conference so they could learn how to respond to a zombie attack.

I’m not sure which of those decisions wins the prize for government stupidity, but today’s story suggests that it’s time to start chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

After all, surely the United Kingdom can’t surpass the moronic decision by Maryland school bureaucrats to suspend a little boy for pretending his hand was a gun and “shooting” another child.

Here’s all you need to know, as reported by the Washington Examiner, about this laughable – yet nauseating – example of nanny-state political correctness.

I guess he should play with dolls instead

A Montgomery County elementary school student was suspended for a pretend gunshot… The 6-year-old, who attends Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, made a gun with his hands, pointed it at another student and said “pow,” according to Robin Ficker, the boy’s attorney. He was given a one-day suspension, with a conference on the matter planned for Jan. 2, the day students return to school from winter break.

This is not an isolated incident. There are other examples of embarrassing stupidity in America.

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.

Seems like the United States wins this contest for government stupidity.

But, wait, maybe I was blinded by patriotism. Perhaps I wanted America to win and that caused me to overlook equally inane decisions in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, that was the case. Showing that stupidity can reign supreme on both sides of the Atlantic, it turns out that two boys in England were reprimanded for make gun shapes were their hands.

But that’s not all. There have been other idiotic episodes of anti-gun lunacy in the United Kingdom.

• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.
• A bookstore putting shooting magazines in the porn section.

And let’s not forget the woman who got in trouble with the police for trying to scare away some thugs by brandishing a knife in her own home.

So I guess that means we still have a tie. In the contest for government stupidity, the United States and the United Kingdom are both winners.

And the citizens of both nations are losers, but let’s not allow that pesky little fact take away from this exciting contest.

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Montgomery County is a suburb of Washington, DC. And, as you can see from this map, it is filled with overpaid bureaucrats and lobbyists. Since these are the people imposing so much bad policy on the rest of the nation, at least they’re being consistent and subjecting themselves to foolishness as well.

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When Gun Control Satire Becomes British Reality

Back in my less sophisticated days (shocking as it may seem, I wasn’t always the mature, statesmanlike figure I am today), I sometimes resorted to silly arguments when debating gun control, such as, “does this mean you want to ban knives since they also can be used to kill people?”

Smarter opponents would scoff and accuse me of knocking down straw men, assuming a non-existent slippery slope, or engaging in reductio ad absurdum.

I wasn’t even sure what the last one meant, but I secretly felt chagrined because I also thought the argument was nonsense. But it’s not like we had the Internet back in those days so I could quickly peruse the writings of John Lott or David Kopel.

Well, I no longer need to feel shame. It turns out that my straw man came to life and he’s sliding down a slope into a big pool of whatever that reductio thing is.

I kid you not. There’s a supposedly civilized nation that is seriously talking about banning long kitchen knives.

I’ll give you a couple of hints to help you figure out what country is considering this bizarre policy.

• It’s the country that wanted to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• It’s the country that arrested a man for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• It’s the country that imposed a prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.

Yes, I’m talking about our friends in the United Kingdom.

They make some decent movies and they have cute accents, but they seem totally clueless about how to fight crime and the notion of individual rights appears to be a totally alien concept.

So the nation that once ruled half the world actually has contemplated whether to ban certain kitchen knives. Here are some details from a 2005 BBC report.

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing. …The research is published in the British Medical Journal. The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all. …The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime. …Home Office spokesperson said there were already extensive restrictions in place to control the sale and possession of knives. “The law already prohibits the possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and the possession of knives in public without good reason or lawful authority, with the exception of a folding pocket knife with a blade not exceeding three inches. … A spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: “ACPO supports any move to reduce the number of knife related incidents, however, it is important to consider the practicalities of enforcing such changes.”

Given my low opinion of and low expectations for Britain’s political class, I’m impressed that pocket knives are still legal. It’s probably just a matter of time before than changes. After that, the next step will be fingernail clippers.

And I’m glad that the ACPO person warned that there might be problems enforcing such a silly law.

But I fully expect to see that foolish proposal get enacted at some point. After all, this is the country where a women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.

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Merry Christmas from the TSA

Another good job by Remy and the folks at Reason TV.

Last year, they produced this parody about Grandma’s Christmas visit to Gitmo.

Now we see what happens when Santa tries to slip past the Transportation Security Administration.

And if you’ve ever been curious about what a “hooha” is, here are two additional TSA Christmas videos.

P.S. If you’re in the mood for some more holiday humor, we have a couple of videos from Larry the Cable Guy, one featuring slightly modified Christmas carols and the other telling the politically correct version of “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

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Stories Like this Lead Me to Think there’s No Hope for the United Kingdom

I don’t like bloated government. It undermines economic performance by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy and often leads to destructive tax policy.

But when trying to build support for good fiscal policy, it often helps to cite specific examples of wasteful and foolish government. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been comparing examples of government stupidity and political correctness in the United States and the United Kingdom.

After all, how many people would want to pay more taxes after reviewing these bizarre episodes of government in action?

From the United Kingdom

• A job-placement center got in trouble for discriminating against incompetent people by seeking “reliable” and “hard-working” candidates.
• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• The government wanted to require “competency tests” for pet owners.
• An ID requirement to buy teaspoons.
• The most useless sign in the history of the world.
• A proposal to ban skinny models.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.
• Denying children a home because the foster family didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

From the United States

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• The EEOC hindering trucking companies from weeding out drunk drivers.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• And how can we omit the politicians in San Francisco, who decided that banning happy meal toys was an appropriate use of government coercion.
• We also have regulations in Maryland governing the application of sunscreen at summer camps.
• A local politician in Maryland wanting a licensing process to be a bum.
• And proposals in Seattle to require life vests on swimmers who are more than five feet from shore.

I’ve even shared some instances of moronic behavior from the private sector, and I have another story that may belong in that category.

In this instance, we’re talking about the critical need to protect people from pudding. I’m not joking. Here are some of the details of a very odd report in the Daily Mail.

If you’re lucky enough to look about 18, there’s a good chance you’ll be asked to provide ID at the supermarket to buy alcohol, knives or glue. Now an addition has been made to that list of potentially hazardous items – chocolate pudding. Robert Nemeti was amazed when he was asked for ID while buying a microwaveable pudding at Tesco. Mr Nemeti, 24, was going through the self-service checkout when an on-screen warning announced that his purchase had to be ‘approved’. …‘The woman who was monitoring the self-service checkouts came over and asked me for identification showing I was 18. I asked her why and was stunned when she told me: “It gets hot when you cook it – and you may burn yourself”. Surely the same can be said of many of the products they sell in any supermarket? Health and safety has gone crazy if you now have to prove you can be trusted with a chocolate pudding.’ He added: ‘I explained that I didn’t have any ID. Thankfully she agreed that I looked over 18 and she scanned her staff pass to approve the sale.’ Mr Nemeti managed to cook and eat the dessert that evening without injury.

Gee, I’m glad that Mr. Nemeti managed to eat the pudding without causing a fire or suffering burns.

There’s not much I can add to this story. Is this an example of crazy government over-protectiveness, sort of nanny state run amok? Perhaps somewhat similar to Nurse Bloomberg’s attempt to ban large sodas? I don’t know. There aren’t enough details.

Or maybe it’s the fault of the private sector, with some corporate bureaucrat justifying his job by coming up with idiotic rules? Though, to be fair, that’s less destructive than American corporate bureaucrats who have special skills when it comes to getting bailout money.

No warning label?!? Such reckless corporate irresponsibility!

Could it be because the English are learning about America’s lawsuit culture and businesses are having to defend themselves from preposterous legal claims by imposing equally preposterous rules? That would be the indirect fault of government.

But whatever the cause, it’s a sorry sign for civilization. I’ve previously explained that I’m very pessimistic about the United Kingdom’s fiscal outlook. Based on this story, I also should worry about the nation’s mental outlook.

But I’m not throwing stones blindly. I’m fully aware that the United States is a glass house, whether the metric is reckless fiscal policy or a dearth of common sense.

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Attack of the Taxpayer-Eating Zombie Bureaucrats

A regular feature on this blog is the government-stupidity contest between bureaucrats and politicians from the United States and the United Kingdom.

You can click here to peruse some of the most outrageous examples, including a couple of contestants from the private sector.

This has been a nip-and-tuck race for a long time, but the United Kingdom recently jumped into the lead with two jaw-dropping examples of moronic government behavior.

First, British bureaucrats took some kids away from their foster family because the parents didn’t believe in unlimited immigration, and, second, the U.K. government created a subsidy program that was so convoluted that not one single household in the entire country signed up for the goodies.

You know you’ve reached a special level of incompetence when a government is so bloody stupid that it can’t even give away money.

I was beginning to think the United States was doomed to also-ran status in this race.

But I should have known better. When it comes to finding creative ways to piss away other people’s money and make bone-headed choices, American politicians and bureaucrats are ready to meet the challenge.

This isn’t empty patriotism on my part. For proof, check out this Washington Examiner story about the federal government sending bureaucrats to a posh, $1,000-per-person conference, where they learned…I’m not making this up…how to respond to zombie attacks.

“Give…me…your…wallet”

When zombies attack, the Department of Homeland Security will be prepared. …money from the DHS’s Urban Areas Security Initiative went to buy snow cone machines in Michigan. Places like Fargo, N.D., and Keene, N.H., now have armored vehicles at their disposal, as do many other small towns. Keene said the vehicle was needed to protect its annual Pumpkin Festival. Arizona used $90,000 in DHS funding to install a video monitoring system at the Peoria Sports Complex, because apparently it is in the taxpayers’ interest to monitor the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres during spring training. …But if you think that’s waste, you need to know about the extraordinary training that the DHS was able to provide to first responders this year. They made attendance at the HALO Corp.’s 2012 Counter-Terrorism Summit an allowable expense for federal grant money. Yes, the California-based security company’s five-day event was held at a posh island resort and spa just outside of San Diego and cost $1,000 per person to attend, but that’s not even the best part. The showpiece event of the summit made was a live war game of a zombie apocalypse, complete with 40 actors in full zombie makeup as well as “state-of-the-art structure, pyrotechnic battlefield effects, medical special effects, vehicles and blank-firing weapons” according to a promotional video by HALO President Brad Barker. This enabled first responders to participate in a real-life “Dawn of the Dead” scenario and to know precisely what to do when their neighbors start trying to eat their human flesh.

As the Boy Scouts say, it’s best to “be prepared.” And thanks to federal tax dollars, the Department of Homeland Security is ready to defend us from a zombie attack.

I’m basically at a loss for words. Is anybody minding the store back in DC?

“Must…waste…more…money”

Why did this federal contractor think this was a good idea? Why did the Department of Homeland Security think it should be an allowable expense? Why did bureaucrats think it was a worthwhile way of spending their time?

There are no good answers – other than the fact that folks are far more likely to be frivolous and wasteful when they’re spending other people’s money. And that applies to the other examples cited in the excerpt above.

An armored vehicle to protect a pumpkin festival?!? If the taxpayers of Keene, NH, actually think the Canadians are about to sneak over the border and swipe some pumpkins, they should kick in a few bucks and hire an extra cop.

But so long as the kleptomaniacs in Washington are giving away our money, local governments have every reason to dream up ridiculous wish-lists.

No wonder the burden of government spending has reached record levels.

P.S. Don’t forget that the Department of Homeland Security was created during the Bush years. Another black mark on that statist period.

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For Nutty English Bureaucrats, Ideological Bias and Political Correctness Are More Important than the Well-Being of Children

Earlier this month, as part of my ongoing series comparing bone-headed bureaucracy in both the United States and United Kingdom, I wrote a post about a moronic green-energy subsidy program in the U.K. that was so convoluted that nobody in the entire country signed up for it.

Only government could be so bloody incompetent that it can’t even do a good job of giving away subsidies and handouts.

Since I’m a big believer if fairness (properly defined), I normally take turns in this series, first featuring an example of government stupidity in the U.K., followed by an example of foolish bureaucracy in the U.S., and so on and so on.

But I have to break the pattern. Check out these excerpts from a story about English bureaucrats deciding that a foster family no longer could take of kids because they support the United Kingdom Independence Party, which doesn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The husband and wife, who have been fostering for nearly seven years, said they were made to feel like criminals when a social worker told them that their views on immigration made them unsuitable carers. …Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, described the actions of Rotherham borough council as “a bloody outrage” and “political prejudice of the very worst kind”. …The couple, who do not want to be named to avoid identifying the children they have fostered, are in their late 50s and live in a neat detached house in a village in South Yorkshire. The husband was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse. Former Labour voters, they have been approved foster parents for nearly seven years and have looked after about a dozen different children, one of them in a placement lasting four years. They took on the three children — a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background — in September in an emergency placement. They believe that the youngsters thrived in their care. The couple were described as “exemplary” foster parents: the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them “mum and dad”. However, just under eight weeks into the placement, they received a visit out of the blue from the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency. They were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip. The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, ‘What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’ “Then one of them said, ‘Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries. “I’m sat there and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, ‘I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”

What a disgusting mix of ideological bias and political correctness.

I agree that government officials shouldn’t place children in homes where there’s racism. So if the bureaucrats discovered that a household had people from the English equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party, then it’s understandable and appropriate that they don’t get to take care of foster children.

But I’ve met many people from UKIP and I keep close track of what’s happening in the English political world. From everything that I can tell, UKIP is a mainstream political party that seems most concerned about the loss of sovereignty to the European Union.

Are there some racists in UKIP? I’m sure that some exist, just as there racists in the Labour Party, Conservative Party, and Liberal Democratic Party. And, for what it’s worth, there are some racist Republicans and some racist Democrats. Like other collectivist impulses, racism is probably an inherent flaw in the human species.

But I’m digressing. The purpose of this post is to express disgust at bureaucrats in England who decided that belonging to UKIP automatically meant a foster family was racist. Even worse, these bureaucrats then took three children from this family, which means they put political correctness and ideological bias ahead of the best interests of the kids.

Let’s hope that those children aren’t now stuck in an orphanage or some other sub-standard form of institutionalized care.

P.S. If you want to be entertained and to learn more about UKIP, I’ve posted some remarkable videos of their MEPs as they speak at the European Parliament.

Farage is the head of UKIP, and he completely skewers the head bureaucrats of the European Commission in this speech.

His most famous speeches specifically eviscerated the “damp dishrag” of the European Commission.

Here’s Nigel Farage mocking European bailouts.

And since you know my favorite issue is tax competition, you’ll understand why I like these two short speeches by UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

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The United Kingdom Throws Down the Gauntlet with a Strong Entry in the Government Stupidity Contest

I periodically compare moronic decisions and policies by governments in the United States and United Kingdom. You can peruse some jaw-dropping examples by clicking this link.

To show that politicians and bureaucrats don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, I’ve also shared a pair of examples that expose foolishness in the private sector.

“Won’t anyone take free money?”

I think the contest has been pretty even to date, but now we have an entry from the United Kingdom that may be hard to beat. The government created a new boondoggle program, but managed to make it so convoluted that no households have signed up for the handouts.

This is astounding. How incompetent does a government have to be that it can’t even give away money? Here are some laughable excerpts from the Telegraph.

The Green Deal encourages homeowners to take out a loan to make their house more energy-efficient. …households have had since October 1 to have their home assessed for the scheme prior to its launch. However Greg Barker, the climate change minister, has admitted that “no assessments have yet been lodged” on the Government’s official register by homeowners. Luciana Berger, the shadow climate change minister, described the Green Deal as a “shambles” and said its launch is “lying in tatters”. The Coalition hopes that owners of up to 14 million draughty homes will sign up to the scheme. …In an effort to kick-start interest, DECC last month announced a £125 million ‘cashback’ scheme, offering homes up to £1,000 if they sign up as ‘early adopters’. Ms Berger said that homeowners are being put off by the Deal’s complicated finance arrangements.

Not only did the giveaway fail to attract any household beneficiaries, only one firm out of 10,000 signed up to be “accredited Green Deal” participants.

As well as lack of interest from homeowners, building companies are also shying away from getting involved. According to the Federation of Master Builders, the UK’s biggest building trade body, only one firm from its 10,000-strong membership has signed up to become an accredited Green Deal installer.

Again, this is remarkable. When a government is too incompetent to give away other people’s money, you know that’s special.

Sadly, this is the exception rather than the rule. The burden of government spending is excessive in the United Kingdom, in part because of the faux budget cuts of David Cameron’s CINO regime.

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If You Want Competent Government, You Should Support Small Government

I’ve written, ad nauseum, about the economic impact of excessive government spending.

But I’ve also acknowledged that Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution grants specific powers to the federal government.

What I’ve neglected to explore, though, is the key issue of how today’s bloated welfare state interferes with and undermines the government’s ability to competently fulfill its legitimate responsibilities.

Imagine, for instance, if we had the kind of limited federal government envisioned by the Founding Fathers and the “best and brightest” people in government – instead of being dispersed across a vast bureaucracy – were concentrated on protecting the national security of the American people.

In that hypothetical world, I’m guessing something like the 9-11 attacks would be far less likely.

I’m mostly thinking about reducing the inefficiency and incompetence of Washington, but the same principle applies to other levels of government.

Using lots of humor and sarcasm, Mark Steyn elaborates on this issue.

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. …John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy. …our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. …one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. “A big storm requires Big Government,” pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn’t have – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multitrillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can’t doanything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government “investment” to approved Obama cronies. …Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that’s leadership 21^st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats. Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s biggest “counterterrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

Amen. Four Americans are dead in part because the idiots in Washington are focused on things that are not the proper responsibility of the federal government.

I don’t know if this was his intent, but Steyn just made a very compelling argument for the libertarian vision.

Here are a few of my favorite examples of Steyn’s writings.

• Obama’s empty posturing on fiscal policy, along with some biting commentary on the fawning coverage from the court eunuchs in the media.
• How the welfare state erodes social capital and leads to societal collapse.
• Describing how Obamacare was a political victory for the left, notwithstanding the 2010 elections.
• The subtle link between porn and government-run healthcare.
• An argument for libertarian foreign policy.
• Why America is different – and better – than Europe.

This post is about the link between effective government and small government, with the obvious implication that the current federal behemoth is largely incapable of handling its legitimate responsibilities. Well, the flip side is that doesn’t do a good job in areas where it shouldn’t be involved, as cleverly illustrated by this cartoon.

P.S. Speaking of libertarianism, here’s some self-mocking humor. We’ll start with a video portraying Somalia as a libertarian paradise, followed by cartoons on libertarian ice fishing and libertarian lifeguards, then an info-graphic showing 24 types of libertarians, and close with a poster showing how the world sees libertarians.

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Political Correctness Run Amok: Some Private Sector Contestants for the U.S. vs U.K. Stupidity Contest

I’ve had some fun on this blog by comparing moronic government policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

In my never-ending search for cheap laughs and juvenile entertainment, I’ve ever turned this into a contest to see which nation has more pathetic and useless bureaucrats.

The United Kingdom has some very strong contestants.

• A job-placement center got in trouble for discriminating against incompetent people by seeking “reliable” and “hard-working” candidates.
• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• The government wanted to require “competency tests” for pet owners.
• An ID requirement to buy teaspoons.
• The most useless sign in the history of the world.
• A proposal to ban skinny models.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.

As a patriotic American, I’m proud to say that we’re giving the Brits a run for their money. As you can see, the United States is filled with equally stupid and clueless government officials.

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• The EEOC hindering trucking companies from weeding out drunk drivers.
• The military was criticized for giving Osama bin Laden an Indian code name (Geronimo) as part of the operation to exterminate the al Qaeda dirtbag.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• And how can we omit the politicians in San Francisco, who decided that banning happy meal toys was an appropriate use of government coercion.
• We also have regulations in Maryland governing the application of sunscreen at summer camps.
• A local politician in Maryland wanting a licensing process to be a bum.
• And proposals in Seattle to require life vests on swimmers who are more than five feet from shore.

These are all amazing episodes of bureaucratic stupidity, but I must confess that I’ve been unfair.

I’ve been sharing stories about moronic government officials and completely overlooking examples of idiotic behavior and decision-making in the non-government sector.

To be sure, you’re more likely to find stupidity in government, but that doesn’t mean it’s non-existent elsewhere.

So, to rectify that oversight, let’s share two examples of jaw-dropping stupidity from non-bureaucrats in the U.S. and U.K. (or perhaps we should call them aspiring bureaucrats).

We’ll start with some clowns at Tufts University (a private school), who have kicked a Christian group off campus because it refused to change its internal policies so that non-Christians could be officers.

I’m not joking. Here are some of the absurd details.

After the student leaders of Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) declined to revise their leadership policies, the Boston-area research university’s Community Union Judiciary (TCUJ) revoked the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter’s status as an officially recognized student organization. …TCUJ originally suspended TCF for its requirement that any student who wishes to hold a leadership position within TCF must affirm basic Christian beliefs. The student judiciary told TCF that those statements violated the student body constitution’s non-discrimination clause by excluding students who do not share these beliefs. TCF was given the opportunity to adapt its constitution and move the belief-based leadership requirement into its mission statement, which is not legally binding. However, TCF declined, resulting in the final TCUJ decision on Oct. 18.

Too bad they didn’t have this policy when I was at Georgia. I could have applied to be an officer in the Black Student Union. Or Hillel, the club for Jewish students.

On second thought, I would have filed suit to join a sorority! Imagine how much fun I would have had hanging out by the showers. And then another lawsuit so I could have been quarterback for the Bulldawgs. After all, how dare they discriminate against the athletically challenged.

To be momentarily serious, I have to wonder about the students at Tufts who first brought the complaint against the Christian group. I bet they feel like big men on campus right now.

Maybe they should demonstrate that they have some real cojones by launching a similar attack on the local Muslim student group. But I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. Just like I’m not expecting the same from the people in Hollywood who think they’re edgy and brave when they mock Christians and Mormons.

Not that I have any objection to humor targeting religious people. Or atheists, for that matter. But I don’t have much use for cowards who engage in empty posturing.

But I’m digressing. Now let’s turn to our example of private-sector stupidity in the United Kingdom. It deals with bookstore chain that has decided to save impressionable British tykes from the life-scarring horror of buying shooting magazines.

Here are some details from the Telegraph on this ideologically motivated example of political correctness run amok.

WH Smith, Britain’s biggest chain of newsagents, has banned youngsters from buying copies of country sports magazines after a campaign by animal rights activists. The retailer…says it has introduced an age limit on such magazines as Shooting Times because children are not allowed to obtain a firearms certificate until they are 14. However, sports enthusiasts point out that this is wrong. There is no minimum age for holding a shotgun licence in Britain…They question why the high street chain does not restrict the sale of motoring magazines such as TopGear to those old enough to drive. “It is extraordinary that in WH Smith you can buy a car magazine at any age, despite the age limit of 17 for driving,” said Christopher Graffius, of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. “You can also buy numerous war magazines which depict the killing of people, yet WH Smith is concerned about children buying shooting magazines, a legal and an Olympic sport. “They are also causing enormous offence to adult shooters who are stopped at auto-scan tills.”

Kudos to Mr. Graffius for exposing the absurd hypocrisy of the company, but I gather his is a lonely voice. It’s remarkable that a nation that once ruled half the world now produces people who decide that shooting magazines should be restricted like porn.

Not that I’ve ever had a reason to patronize a bookstore in England, but I will make sure not to visit WH Smith on my visit later this month.

Since I believe in private property, I want to stress that WH Smith has the right to restrict access to shooting magazines. Or to ban their sale completely. But I sure hope English consumers will exercise their rights to patronize other bookstores.

Feel free to comment on who deserves to win the prize for empty and vapid stupidity, the clowns at Tufts or the buffoons at WH Smith.

P.S. I don’t mean to slight the rest of the world. There are many examples of bureaucratic incompetence and political idiocy in other parts of the world, including Italy, Greece, Germany, and the European Union. So I hope nobody gets offended that their country isn’t on the list. There’s only so much time in a day.

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John Stossel Exposes the Fraud of Government Job Training Programs

There have been lots of studies showing that there’s no benefit to job training programs. People who sign up with these government schemes are not more likely to either get jobs or to earn more money.

Heck, even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that these programs are a costly failure.

To really understand how these programs operate, John Stossel put together an investigative mission. The results excerpted below would be funny, other than the fact that taxpayers are getting ripped off and people are getting lured into lives of dependency.

“There are no jobs!” That is what people told me outside a government “jobs center” in New York City. …I sent four researchers around the area. They quickly found 40 job openings. Twenty-four were entry-level positions. One restaurant owner told me he would hire 12 people if workers would just apply. It made me wonder what my government does in buildings called “job centers.”

So Stossel sent one of his interns to investigate.

Here’s what she found: “First I went to the Manhattan Jobs Center and asked, “Can I get help finding a job?” They told me they don’t do that. ‘We sign people up for food stamps.’ I tried another jobs center. They told me to enroll for unemployment benefits.” So the “jobs” centers help people get handouts. Neither center suggested people try the 40 job openings in the neighborhood.

I shudder to think how many people walking in off the streets get hooked on government dependency. It’s disgusting that the government is encouraging people to ride in the wagon instead of getting jobs.

But Stossel’s intern was told not to give up.

My intern persisted: “I explained that I didn’t want handouts; I wanted a job. I was told to go to ‘WorkForce1,’ a New York City program. At WorkForce1, the receptionist told me that she couldn’t help me since I didn’t have a college degree. She directed me to another center in Harlem. In Harlem, I was told that before I could get help, I had to come back for an 8:30 a.m. ‘training session.’” Our government helps you apply for handouts immediately, but forces you through a maze if you want to work.

Amazingly, the intern was told to show up at 8:30 when the building didn’t open ’til 9:15. But, again, she was under orders to keep going.

Workforce1 directed 30 of us into a room where we were told that WorkForce1 directs candidates to jobs and provides a resource room with ‘free’ phone, fax and job listings and helps people apply for unemployment insurance and disability handouts. This seemed like the only part of the presentation when people took notes. “One lady told me that she comes to WorkForce1 because it helps her collect unemployment. One asked another, ‘What do you want to do?’ The second laughed, ‘I want to collect!’ One told me, ‘I’ve been coming here 17 months; this place is a waste of time.’

The intern, following orders, refused to take the dependency option that the bureaucrats kept offering. She finally got results…sort of.

“Finally, I met with an ‘adviser.’ …she scheduled an interview at Pret, a food chain that trains employees. At Pret, I learned that my ‘interview’ was just a weekly open house, publicized on the company’s website. Anyone could walk in and apply. Workforce1 offered no advantage. Despite my ‘scheduled interview,’ I waited 90 minutes before meeting a manager. He told me that WorkForce1 had ‘wasted my time, as they always do.’ He said, ‘They never call, never ask questions.’ He prefers to hire people who seek out jobs on their own, like those who see Pret ads on Craigslist.’”

The last comment in the excerpt makes a lot of sense. If you’re hiring people, it makes a lot of sense to choose those who show the initiative to seek out positions rather than those who come through some sort of government program that teaches them first and foremost to be a moocher.

Here are some concluding thoughts from Stossel’s column.

It’s easier to get welfare than to work. The government would rather sign me up for welfare than help me find work. America has taxpayer-funded bureaucracies that encourage people to be dependent. They incentivize people to take “free stuff,” not to take initiative. It was easier to find job openings on my own. The private market for jobs works better than government “job centers.” …Job training does help — when employers do it. But government does everything badly. …America now has 47 federal jobs programs. They fail. Yet politicians want more. They always want more.

That’s the problem. The politicians always gravitate to “solutions” that means more government intervention, more government dependency, and more government spending.

One would think that honest left wingers would look at the research, understand that these programs hurt people, and recognize that the right approach is free markets and limited government.

But they don’t, which suggest that there are no honest leftists. Or maybe there aren’t any smart and honest leftists. Because all they ever do is come up with ideas that make this satirical poster a reality.

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Another Disgusting Display of Government Thuggery

When I first read this story about a woman getting arrested because her kids were playing outdoors, I figured it would be a perfect addition for my ongoing series that tries to determine whether the United States or the United Kingdom has the most incompetent, stupid, and/or venal government officials making the most brainless and/or thuggish decisions.

And when you read these excerpts from a newspaper in Houston, you’ll agree that venal and thuggish are very appropriate words.

A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city’s police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors. Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside. …her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away. ..a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home. …He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised. Cooper said she was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and forced to spend the night in jail. …The charges against her were eventually dropped but she still describes the ordeal as humiliating and said her children were even questioned by police and terrified. …”I hope that what I went through doesn’t go unpunished – that there are consequences for a bad decision,” Cooper said.

But as I thought about the story, I got more and more angry. Heck, it’s the kind of story that should get everybody upset. So maybe it belongs in the this-should-turn-everyone-into-a-libertarian category. Sort of like these horrifying examples.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

Though I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding why any ethical person wouldn’t be a libertarian anyhow.

But I’m digressing. Returning to our topic, I very much hope that Mrs. Cooper wins her lawsuit. It’s not against the law for kids to play outside. Even if she was inside watching a soap opera, that shouldn’t matter.

If cops have nothing better to do in La Porte, then perhaps it’s time to downsize the police department. And a good place to start is by firing the thug that arrested a woman for no reason.

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The U.K.’s Upside-Down Approach to Crime: Shoot a Burglar, Go to Jail

Last year, I held an unofficial contest to see whether the United Kingdom or the United States had the dumbest bureaucrats and/or most absurd examples of political correctness.

Since that time, I’ve posted additional examples of gross government stupidity from both sides of the Atlantic. From the United Kingdom, we have these gems.

• An effort to stop children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• The most pointless sign in the history of the world.
• An ID requirement to buy dangerous products such as teaspoons.

But American officials have been busy as well, with impressive displays of incompetence and stupidity.

• Preventing a girl from boarding a plane because her purse had an image of a gun .
• A local school calling the police because a little girl kissed a little boy in gym class.
• An ID requirement in Illinois to buy drain cleaner.

Now it’s time to revisit this contest. The United Kingdom has decided to arrest a man for the horrific crime of shooting some thugs that broke into his home. Here are some details from a column in the Telegraph.

A farm tenant and his wife who were arrested after two suspected burglars were shot at their isolated home had been the victims of a number of robberies. …The man is believed to have grabbed a legally owned gun after they were disturbed by the break-in early yesterday. He is understood to have fired at the intruders who then fled the isolated house at Melton Mowbray, Leics, before calling the police. …The arrested man’s mother said: “This is not the first time they have been broken into. “They have been robbed three or four times. One of them was quite nasty. …the businessman and his wife were arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm. Four men, understood to be the suspected burglars, were also arrested.

“Arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm”? Isn’t that the point when confronting criminals?!?

Though I guess we should be happy that the burglars also were arrested. And given the country’s oppressive gun control laws, I’m pleasantly surprised that there are still a few legal guns in the United Kingdom.

But that’s about the only silver lining I can find to this dark cloud.

Moreover, it turns out that the U.K. has a track record of persecuting the innocent. The column mentions outrageous examples.

The case will reignite the debate over a householder’s right to defend his property, which began in the late 1990s after the farmer Tony Martin shot two burglars at his remote Norfolk home. In 1999, Martin fired at Brendan Fearon, 29, and Fred Barras, 16, after they broke into the house in Emneth Hungate. Three shots were fired, Barras was hit in the back and despite escaping through a window died moments later. Martin was convicted of murder and jailed for life, which was reduced on appeal to manslaughter and five years’ jail. In 2009, the millionaire businessman Munir Hussain fought back with a metal pole and a cricket bat against a knife-wielding burglar who tied up his family at their home in Buckinghamshire. Hussain was jailed for two and a half years, despite his attacker being spared prison. Appeal judges reduced the sentence to a year’s jail, suspended. The case prompted David Cameron to announce that home owners and shopkeepers would have the right to protect themselves against burglars and robbers.

I’m glad to see, by the way, that David Cameron is at least saying supportive things about people having the right to self defense. I’ve hammered Cameron for undermining the U.K.’s system of personal retirement accounts, giving taxpayer money to statist environmental groups, increasing the capital gains tax, increasing the burden of government spending, and whining that it is wrong for people to minimize their tax burdens.

But I also believe in giving credit where it’s due, so I’m glad he wants to change the law. I hope that includes the right to shoot burglars.

That would put the U.K. ahead of Illinois, though that’s a very low bar to clear.

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