In May 2012, severe budget problems in Josephine Country resulted in massive cuts to public safety personnel and the release of 39 inmates from the county jail.

“When they left here,” said Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson, “they were laughing and joking and having a good time and went right back to doing what they do best; and that’s―you know―create victims.”

According to the sheriff, “burglaries and thefts” are the most common crimes in Josephine County. So Sam Nichols and other Josephine County residents formed their own patrols, putting would-be thieves on notice that they would not allow themselves to become victims. With eyes out for suspicious activity and a Facebook page where people can report property crimes, Josephine County residents have found that simply being an active presence can deter crime.

These law-abiding Oregonians want to prevent tragedy before it happens. This new video from Reason TV tells their story.

“Yes,” More replies. “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

“I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you―where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast―man’s laws, not God’s―and if you cut them down―and you’re just the man to do it―d’you think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

Sir Thomas More is remembered as a great statesman, humanist, and hero of conscience. Bolt’s play shows him to be all three, but particularly focuses on More’s defense of the rule of law against its disintegration and a culture of “political correctness.”

Henry VIII’s decision to make himself head of the Church of England to divorce Catherine of Aragon is famous. Considered less today is how Henry’s actions changed the balance of power in English government and civic life. Having dispensed with his opponents, the king became nearly an absolute monarch, formally limited by the English Constitution and Parliament, but only to the extent that the people’s representatives were willing and able to oppose his wishes. The fewer the checks on the power of the king, the harder it became for any individual to hold a different position from that favored by the monarch.

And all the shiftier became the political sands.

At the core of the drama is the dangerous rise of Early Modern autocratic government and how individuals react to it. More neither desires nor seeks a public conflict with Henry, who is also his personal friend. As Lord Chancellor, he tries scrupulously to follow the law and refuses to take positions he believes are not justifiable according to legal precedent or logic. He will not swear a false oath. In that he differs from most other officeholders, some of whom adopt the king’s domestic and diplomatic agendas for substantial material gain. Others concur publicly with the king because they would rather not rock the boat. As More’s friend the Duke of Norfolk says:

“You’re behaving like a fool. You’re behaving like a crank. You’re not behaving like a gentleman….We’re [the nobility] supposed to be the arrogant ones, the proud, splenetic ones―and we’ve all given in! Why must you stand out?”

More’s response shows how sincerely he values integrity, the expression of one’s personhood, over political expedience:

“I will not give in because I oppose it―I do―not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do―I! Is there no single sinew in the midst of this [grabbing his shoulder] that serves no appetite of Norfolk’s but is just Norfolk? There is! Give that some exercise, my lord!”

A nation’s rule of law depends on certain basic things, such as equal justice, clearly defined statutes, enforcement of contracts, respect for property rights, and the sanctity of the oath. Dispensing with these tips the scales toward factionalism and autocracy, against the rights of individuals and citizens. A Man for All Seasons reminds us how delicate is the fabric of freedom.

(Paul Scofield won Best Actor for his role as Thomas More in the 1966 film version of A Man for All Seasons, which won six Oscars, including Best Picture. Scofield also won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actor for the original Broadway production. Charleton Heston both directed and starred in a 1988 television movie, also based on Bolt’s play.)

On Monday, Steve Buckstein took up the fight against single payer health care, testifying about the negatives of such a plan before the House Committee on Health Care.

Click here to listen to the testimony.

On Friday, Steve defended a bill which would deregulate natural hair care in Oregon before the Senate Committee on General Government, Consumer and Small Business Protection.

Click here to listen to the testimony.

Audio of the entire hearing is here.  Steve Buckstein’s oral testimony begins at the 36:37 mark.

Testimony in Opposition to HB 2922
The “Affordable Health Care for All Oregon” Plan
Before the House Committee on Health Care
  By Steve Buckstein

Chair Greenlick and members of the Committee, my name is Steve Buckstein. I’m Senior Policy Analyst and founder of Cascade Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research organization based in Portland. Our mission is to promote policies that enhance individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic opportunity in Oregon.

I oppose HB 2922 for many reasons. I believe this bill not only will fail to achieve its goals, but actually will make our health care system worse. I testified at length about these concerns when you held hearings on the previous version of the bill in the 2011 session. You can read that testimony at your leisure online.*

Today, I just want to respond to several statements that Governor Kitzhaber is reported to have made in the wake of a recent critical report on The Oregon Health Plan.**

The Governor challenged critics of the Oregon Health Plan who pointed out that this study found little value in the Plan as far as health outcomes were concerned.

The Governor was quoted as rejecting the “…critics’ idea of taking the study as a reason to drop insurance expansion and maybe just concentrate on cheaper catastrophic coverage.” Here are his quotes:

“They will exacerbate a situation that will have people get to a catastrophic situation, and they then pay bazillion dollars for it….It makes no sense as medical policy, it makes no sense as fiscal policy, and I think it’s immoral.”

In this statement Dr. Kitzhaber shows, in my opinion, a lack of understanding about the purpose of insurance as opposed to health care itself. The concept of insurance is that none of us as individuals can afford the cost of expensive, unpredictable, “catastrophic” events, and so we pool our resources to insure against those relatively rare occurrences.

On the contrary, something like 80 percent of health care interactions are for routine care. This care should not be insured against; it should be budgeted for. What Dr. Kitzhaber calls “catastrophic coverage” should be more correctly called simply insurance coverage. For those among us who cannot afford routine health care, we can help them in other ways, just as we help low-income people feed themselves with food stamps. Health Savings Accounts, and reverse Health Savings Accounts for the poor, are just one way to accomplish this.

Handled properly, people have the correct incentives to avoid getting to the “catastrophic situations” Dr. Kitzhaber fears. Even when a catastrophe occurs, people usually don’t “pay a bazillion dollars for it” as he worries, but more likely an amount that true insurance is designed to cover and at a much lower cost than what so-called comprehensive coverage costs today.

When the Governor says that “it makes no sense as medical policy,” I think he’s wrong. When he says “it makes no sense as fiscal policy,” I think he’s wrong. And when he says that he thinks catastrophic insurance is “immoral,” I suggest that it’s exactly the opposite. What’s immoral is taking away virtually any incentive for people to be concerned about their own health by shifting the entire financial burden to everyone else. This gets the incentives exactly backwards, and virtually ensures that our health care system, its costs and its outcomes, will continue to get worse.

HB 2922 gets medical policy and fiscal policy exactly backwards. In doing so, I think it represents immoral public policy. You should reject it and consider moving in the opposite direction.

Thank you.

 * Steve Buckstein, “Testimony on HB 3510Before the House Committee on Healthcare March 11, 2011,” Cascade Policy Institute, http://cascadepolicy.org/blog/2011/03/hb-3510-the-affordable-health-care-for-all-oregon/

* * David Sarasohn, “Dr. Kitzhaber diagnoses an Oregon Medicaid study,” The Oregonian, May 11, 2013,  http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/david_sarasohn/index.ssf/2013/05/david_sarasohn_dr_kitzhaber_di.html

]]> http://cascadepolicy.org/insider/2013/05/13/cascade-in-the-capitol-testimony-opposing-an-oregon-single-payer-health-care-system/feed/ 1 http://cascadepolicy.org/insider/2013/05/11/freedom-in-film-follow-that-dream-1962/ http://cascadepolicy.org/insider/2013/05/11/freedom-in-film-follow-that-dream-1962/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 06:00:47 +0000 Kathryn Hickok http://cascadepolicy.org/insider/?p=1110 Continue reading →]]> What may be the funniest movie about personal initiative and limited government? Look no further than Follow That Dream (1962), a rollicking pro-freedom comedy starring Arthur O’Connell and Elvis Presley.

Elvis plays Toby Kwimper, the young adult son in a family that gets just about every possible government entitlement benefit; and his dad (O’Connell) is proud of it. When overbearing bureaucrats make them angry, what does the Kwimper family do? They swear off their benefit checks, build a homestead on an empty beach in Florida, and start a small business. With several subplots, Follow That Dream shows off Elvis’s deadpan comic ability. He outwits the mafia, cunning social workers, and (most) adolescent girls with equal aplomb.

Suitable for family viewing, the movie delivers a victory for ordinary folks over the powers that be. It’s full of jokes about welfare-state attitudes, zoning laws, and government “looking out for you.” In the climactic courtroom scene, a judge praises the American spirit of enterprise, initiative, and voluntary community.

As Pop Kwimper puts it, sometimes there just gets to be too much government, and a person wants to move someplace without all those regulations. If you’ve ever felt that way after a frustrating encounter with bureaucracy, Follow That Dream will have you in stitches.

One of the most basic responsibilities of any government is to protect the property of citizens.  To that end, the Oregon House has approved two bills to strengthen the property rights of logging companies in Oregon. House Bill 2595 would make it illegal to interfere in forest management. House Bill 2596 would allow contractors to sue environmental protesters over damage caused to equipment and other related expenses.

This is an important step in the right direction. According to a recent report in The Oregonian, environmental activists from groups such as “Cascadia Earth First” and “Cascadia Forest Defenders” have caused a great deal of property damage, as well as financial losses due to work interference.

Representative Wayne Krieger (R-Gold Beach) stated in support of these bills: “[Environmental activists] are known to overturn their vehicles on roads, chain themselves to trees, chain themselves to equipment, damage equipment, dig ditches in the roads, drive spikes in trees to cause injuries to workers, among other dangerous acts.”

The activist groups―as well as the American Civil Liberties Union―claim that the bills, if passed, would infringe on the right to free speech. This is patently absurd. Freedom of speech protects people’s right to assemble in groups to protest certain actions by governments or third parties. It does not, however, include the right for groups or individuals to commit acts of aggression against others.

That is what these environmental groups are doing when they threaten or cause actual harm to people and property involved in logging and forest management. While there is a right to speech, there is also a right to property, something these environmental groups should learn to respect. Environmental activist groups that unduly infringe upon the person and property of others should be held accountable under the law just as anyone else would be.

Doug DeFilipps is a research associate at Cascade Policy Institute. He is a graduate of Santa Clara University.

“Wretchedly did [Sir Thomas] feel, that with all the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought up his daughters, without…his being acquainted with their character and temper.”

Graduation season begins this weekend. Why not revisit a classic story about young people setting out into the world of new jobs, independent incomes, first homes, debt, leisure, and love?

Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park is probably the most misunderstood and underrated. Unlike Austen’s more popular tales of upper-class English gentry, Mansfield does not star a confident young woman from a prominent family. Instead, Fanny Price is a shy teenager, dependent on wealthy relatives, who says little in public and hates attention. Mansfield is the only Austen novel in which the full force of a cynical world comes crashing down on an inexperienced teenage girl who seems least equipped to fight it.

The most contemplative of Austen’s works, Mansfield is not so much about a young girl’s search for love and marriage as it is a careful study of how not to lose oneself while trying to “make it” in the world. Because Fanny is a quiet person, she observes her peers while they hash out among themselves what is important to their lives and how they judge what they encounter. They debate―often acrimoniously―what their career choices should be, how much money they stand to make, what prestige they can earn in the eyes of others, and what are the criteria by which they should evaluate these decisions.

As their friendships unfold, the young adults of Mansfield Park don’t appear much different from today’s college students. In the brief window of time in which they settle their ideals, professions, friends, and spouses, they show each other their true colors. They discover they have irreconcilable worldviews. They decide what they can and can’t live with. Their romantic and financial decisions bear fruit.

Henry Crawford and his sister Mary, friends of Fanny’s relatives, excuse their personal shortcomings by their upbringing. Raised without the example of stable, responsible adults, they don’t have the confidence (or the will) to operate from a higher set of principles than convenience, social convention, and popular opinions. They admit they don’t have the capacity to trust others or to be reliable in their relationships. Mary is socially adept and attractive, but her cynical biases against concepts and values beyond her personal experiences are crippling. Her intellectual and romantic clashes with Fanny’s favorite cousin reveal the depth of their different approaches to discerning one’s path in life.

The Crawfords had lacked guidance, but Fanny’s cousins have the opposite problem: Sir Thomas confuses his children’s abiding by conventional rules of behavior with authentic character development. Sir Thomas “had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.”

When three of his four children become involved in public scandals, Sir Thomas’s pain as a parent comes mostly from the realization that he does not truly know who they are. He knows them from the outside―how they tried to do what he expected of them while in his presence―without being acquainted with their minds, hearts, values, and aspirations. Their choices surprise him.

On the other hand, Fanny, despite her social and financial dependence and shy temperament, knows herself. Lacking self-deception or illusions about what will make her happiest in life, she is truly independent on a personal level. When morally unreliable (but financially eligible) Henry suggests that by becoming involved with him, Fanny could bring out the best in him, she delivers her most famous line: “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” By calling him to take responsibility for his own conscience, and refusing to make him a romantic “project,” Fanny shows she understands equal relationships. Her refusal to compromise her self-knowledge by being mismatched frees her to seek a healthy relationship. She and the man she really loves are the only young couple in the novel who do not subscribe to, or settle for, a transactional view of friendship.

Mansfield Park and Fanny Price have drawn acerbic criticism from writers who cannot “like” her and wish the novel “came down” on the side of the sparkling, au courant Mary rather than the quiet, conservative Fanny. That the characters make modern readers uncomfortable says more about what we value, and what we think about how to treat other people, than perhaps we want to admit. The contrast between Mary and Fanny is exactly what we are meant to see: No matter how clever she is, Mary is tragic because she will not give up her self-centeredness; Fanny is heroic because she won’t be browbeaten into going along with the crowd.

Personal authenticity requires the ability to say no, to find happiness in simple things, to value one’s primary relationships, to resist the urge to hide from oneself in a blur of activities and friendships that mask a restless spirit, and to make choices that resonate with one’s true self. The most important decisions a person will ever make involve choosing a state in life, establishing a healthy outlook on one’s career and finances, and loving a good person. Each involves surrounding ourselves with a set of people and activities that either will enable or inhibit us from being who we ought to be. By remaining steadfast under tremendous pressure, Fanny Price proves not to be Austen’s weakest heroine, but her strongest.

(British television’s 2007 Mansfield Park is a condensed but faithful―and charming―movie adaptation which remains true to Austen’s characterization and the most important themes of the novel. The 1999 feature film is seriously flawed. It alters characters, including Fanny’s, in key ways and introduces plot elements that distract from the meaning of the novel. The 1983 miniseries is faithful in both characterization and plot, but it is missing the production values audiences are used to in Austen films made since the early 1990s.)

The Oregonian’s Betsy Hammond pointed out last week that there are two lobbyists in the Oregon legislature representing K-12 Inc. (which operates the online charter school Oregon Virtual Academy) and another two from Connections Education LLC (which operates another online charter, Oregon Connections Academy). She refers to an Education Week article which notes that “there is nothing new in private companies being involved in public education. But what is new is the degree to which it is happening.”

Many people seem to have an odd aversion to profit in education. There is no reason such profit should be considered a bad thing. On the contrary, it can encourage education providers to compete, thus improving the quality of education. For example, a recent Forbes article by Adam Ozimek describes how in Sweden, where education is operated on a voucher system, “any kind of organization can start a school, including for profit companies.”

Voucher schools, both for-profit and not-for-profit, have being extremely successful in Sweden. Ozimek writes: “…[T]he higher percent of voucher students there are in a district the better students do on a variety of outcomes.”

So if voucher programs work, even when there is (heaven forbid!) profit involved, then what is the problem?

We find the problem when Hammond briefly notes: “The Oregon Education Association, the state’s teacher union, has more lobbyists this session than the two companies combined, five.”

Herein lies the real reason many are opposed to voucher systems and for-profit education.

Public school employee unions donate a great deal of money to certain politicians. These politicians then help to make the unions more powerful by directing more public funding to public school districts to hire more teachers and raise salaries and benefits―therefore increasing union membership and funds. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement. The losers in this scheme are the children and the taxpayers.

A voucher program for education, or any other competition from the private sector, obviously would be detrimental to this arrangement between these two powerful interests. Perhaps that is why the union lobbyists outnumber the charter school lobbyists.

Doug DeFilipps is a research associate at Cascade Policy Institute. He is a graduate of Santa Clara University.

In post-apocalyptic North America, the nation of Panem is ruled by a wealthy city surrounded by 12 poorer districts. In Panem’s early history, one of the districts led a rebellion against the Capitol. The unsuccessful rebellion resulted in the destruction of the district. But that wasn’t the only memory left to discourage other districts from future rebellions. An annual television event was created as a punishment “and as a reminder of the power and grace of the Capitol.” For the event, called the Hunger Games, each district randomly selects a teenage boy and girl to fight to the death, with only one of these “tributes” surviving to claim victory and spoils for his or her home district.

For Katniss Everdeen, born and raised in District 12, becoming a tribute is not just a matter of being chosen in the lottery. Instead, when the name of her little sister is drawn, Katniss volunteers to take her place, saving her life. Being an avid hunter, illegal in Panem where people are given food rations by the Capitol, Katniss becomes a major contender in the year’s Hunger Games.

Contestants are expected to kill each other without mercy; but Katniss hides, simply trying to survive without attacking others. Katniss and Peeta, her fellow tribute from District 12, work together to stay hidden and alive. Having grown so close in friendship during the Games, Katniss and Peeta can’t bring themselves to kill each other when they find themselves to be the last remaining contestants.

The name “Panem” is derived from the Latin phrase for “bread and circuses.” The ancient Roman saying refers to the practice of government buying the support (and votes) of citizens by offering spectacular―and cruelly violent―forms of entertainment and free grain, lulling citizens into relinquishing their decision making powers. In a society where rules and oppression define the lives of its citizens, the fictional Katniss shows that freedom is not completely lost, despite the external constraints on her freedom. She still has the will to make choices based on what she believes to be right and wrong, often in defiance of the expectations of her government.

Even in the darkest of circumstances, personal choice and liberty can prevail if only we don’t cave in to the immoral expectations of our leaders and peers. Good can overcome evil, one small act at a time.

Paul Guppy at Washington Policy Center commented yesterday:

Within a day of Governor Kitzhaber of Oregon saying he would not permit new highway bridge construction across the Columbia River unless Washington taxpayers agree to put up an extra $450 million toward a light rail route, Sound Transit’s light rail system claimed another victim in Seattle. A Mariners fan died of his injuries Tuesday after being hit by a Sound Transit train near Safeco Field.

This latest light rail accident comes after “a man suffered life-threatening head injuries Saturday evening when he was struck by a Sound Transit light rail train in South Seattle” December 15th, according to a KOMO News report.

Most of the ongoing debate over light rail centers on its high cost, poor record of reducing traffic congestion and consistently low ridership numbers. A significant concern, however, is light rail’s impact on public safety….

Read the rest of Paul Guppy’s blog post here.