[28th J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense on Broad View, KBZZ 1270 AM Reno.]

This past week, GM, which stands for either General Motors or Government Motors depending on your viewpoint, announced that it was suspending production of the Chevy Volt.  That’s not a big surprise for anybody with common sense.  Battery powered cars were a great idea for the Lunar Rover (LRV) in 1971 but if you think batteries are going to move cars down American highways forty years later, I’ve got a box of moon rocks to sell you.

It’s not that electric cars are a bad idea.  It’s the batteries that are a bad idea.  Once the engineers work the kinks out of carbon nanotube capacitors and/or fuel cells to run the electric motors, then we can think about electric cars.  Meanwhile, no matter how much taxpayer money President Obama pours down the Chevy Volt toilet and no matter how many speeches he gives bragging about it, nobody really wants to buy the stupid thing.  Hence the GM decision to stop making them.

It’s another embarrassment for Obama on top of all the solar plants and windmill companies he shoveled money into that are now bankrupt or laying off employees.  According to Obama, next in line to slurp from the federal money spigot will be algae companies.  Seriously, he thinks we can produce power from algae.  Pond scum.  Whether that’s possible or not is irrelevant.  The two things we know for sure are that putting the federal government in charge will guarantee failure and the Democrat Party will collect millions of dollars from companies who want federal money for algae research.  That’s the two things we know for sure.

This is why Michael Savage calls liberalism a mental disease.  It’s not just that humanity spent the 20th century experimenting with various forms of centralized government power that all failed, all of them turning into oppressive, inefficient monstrosities and causing three world wars, but also that we can list so many areas where the federal government couldn’t deliver yet liberals keep expecting government solutions for problems.  When you keep doing something that doesn’t work, that’s the definition of mental illness.

Everything the federal government touches turns into a miserable failure, even things that were working perfectly before the federal government got involved.  Like light bulbs.  Light bulbs worked perfectly from the moment Thomas Edison invented them until the feds mandated CFLs—which cost more, make less light, and are full of poisonous mercury.  And toilets.  Toilets were invented centuries ago and worked just fine, thank you, until the government decided to mandate smaller water tanks to save water.  Now we stand there looking at our own poop and flushing repeatedly, probably using more water than we did before.  And after we use the toilet we stand under government-mandated low-flow shower heads trying to rinse the soap off our bodies.

How about our schools?  Schools were pretty much the same for millennia: teachers who know the subject explaining it to students who don’t.  Then Jimmy Carter decided we needed a federal Department of Education, so now teachers are forced to ignore the students’ needs and teach them how to pass federal tests instead.

(By the way, speaking of Jimmy Carter, he thought we could produce power from algae, too.  That was almost forty years ago.  How's that algae energy working for you?)

Do I need to mention Social Security?  It used to be that people saved money for their twilight years on their own.  In 1935 the federal government got involved and started making people save money.  This is a simple concept: deduct money from paychecks, put it into a trust fund, pay benefits to retirees.  But after 75 years of management by the federal government, there isn’t one penny in the trust fund, just a pile of IOUs.

Watching the federal government in action is like watching a sitcom on television.  A friend sent me an email yesterday pointing out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proud to be distributing more food stamps than ever before in its history, but the U.S. Department of the Interior warns people not to feed wild animals because they might grow dependent and forget how to take care of themselves.  What can you do but laugh at stuff like that?

The word “sitcom” is short for “situation comedy,” an entertainment genre featuring characters who share the same common environment in every episode.  That’s us.  We’re living in the federal government sitcom with a new story every week about the government taking over a new aspect of our lives and screwing it up.

At some point, we need to regain our sanity and cancel this show before it’s too late.

That’s... today’s dose of common sense.

“Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail.” —Benito Mussolini

“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” —Sid Caesar

From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet

March 4, 2012 - The indefeasible conceit of men who are awarded public office is that the electorate must therefore have blessed their intellects, their knowledge, and their overall deftness. This is so far from the case that it isn't even laughable. But that assumption, on the part of both honest, well-meaning officials and the venal types who attain high office just as often, gives rise to notions anyone qualified to cross the street unassisted should reject – and would, if we applied the same criteria to politicians as we do to our neighbors and co-workers.
Isabel Paterson once wrote that if a man were tasked with choosing a president from among his neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, he'd reject all of them after a few seconds' thought. Why? He knows them too well. Yet every four years he votes the awesome powers of the presidency into the hands of someone he doesn't know at all. His ignorance prevents him from recognizing his candidate's defects as clearly as those of his neighbors. Worse, he never stops to think how unlikely it is that a man who seeks power over others will have every fault he's ever detected in everyone he's ever known... and more, and worse.
Constitutionally constrained government was supposed to prevent the worst aspects of men – roughly and broadly speaking, the Seven Capital Sins – from dominating the operations of the State. It took a while for power-seekers to find their ways around the Constitution, but they've done so, and quite thoroughly at that. Subsidies, subventions, "safety nets," and special privileges for special groups have bribed a majority of Americans into accepting the consequences. The government-run schools have pitched in eagerly, such that the typical high-school graduate no longer grasps freedom, the nature of individual rights, or the principle of constitutionalism at all.
The American experiment has failed. What's next? - Francis W. Porretto, Connecticut

March 3, 2012 - Let's remember the great Republican party who got us in this mess. Maybe its the reason you come up with so much bull ...you think we will forget. As a Democrat we appreciate the 4 idiots seeking the republican nomination which makes it easier for us. Thanks to rush limbaugh and glen beck ....keep alllowing the ignorance to fall out your mouth ...great rally material. OBAMA 2012!!!! - Daryle, Virginia

March 3, 2012 - I also don't like the word poop, lol. I think the politically correct terminology for 'poop' would be fecies. - Jason L., Michigan

J.P. replies: Does that really sound any better?