In case you missed it…
Labor unions
A major labor case comes before the Supreme Court early next year, and it could effectively give every union employee in the nation the right to opt-out of his or her union. While such an event would be a victory for employees who want to be freed from their union, it still wouldn’t tackle the larger problem: Most labor unions currently operate under significantly anti-democratic rules, with little or no accountability to the workers they claim to represent. For example, over 90 percent of union workers in America have never had the chance to vote on what bargaining agent — if any — should represent them at the workplace. Most workers simply inherit unions, whether they want them or not, that were voted on by workers long-since gone. (Read more)
Transparency
Government accountability is directly tied to government transparency. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that police officers who are required to wear body cameras receive fewer complaints from the public. That was the observed result from a yearlong study involving the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. According to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, misconduct and even “use of force” reports fell by almost 40 percent for officers who were equipped with the cameras between February of 2014 and September 2015. (Read more)
Government regulation
The possibility that an Obama-era effort to regulate the internet, known as Net Neutrality, could be overturned has resulted in some very heated rhetoric. Republican congressmen have received death threats, and the children of the FCC Chairman were even harassed by supporters of Obama’s regulation efforts. (Read more about that here.) Proponents of Net Neutrality say that reversing the rules would endanger the internet as we know it — never mind the fact that the “internet as we know it” was humming along just fine before the 2015 regulatory scheme. So what exactly is Net Neutrality? In short, it’s a heavy handed regulatory approach to solve a problem that never actually appeared in the first place. (Read more)
Free markets
Many big-government activists are calling on lawmakers to begin breaking up tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook — as if the sheer size of the companies somehow merits government involvement. Citing antitrust and monopoly concerns, these activists argue the companies somehow harm the marketplace. What these regulation-happy leftists fail to understand, however, is that these giants weren’t always giants — and their ascension actually displaced companies that had previously been demonized in similar terms, such as MySpace, Yahoo and even Walmart. (Read more)
Fiscal and taxes
Big-government advocates continually lament the widening “inequality” of income in the United States. As in this New York Times piece, tax-and-spend leftists bemoan the fact that the “top one percent” control so much of the wealth in this nation. They argue such inequality is evidence for an inherently “unfair” economic system. And yet, even the New York Times itself couldn’t help but notice that the industries seeing the most wealth accumulation tend to be those benefitting “from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.” In other words, government cronyism is the biggest dynamic behind the oft-vilified “income inequality” — far more than free-market capitalism. (Read more)
Repeal the Commerce Tax
Petitions are being circulated across the state to put on the 2018 ballot a question that would let voters repeal the state’s recently imposed and destructive gross-receipts tax, the Commerce Tax. Folks who want to be more active in getting the tax repealed can visit ripcommercetax.com.