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THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, July 22, 2010


ATTACKS ON FREEDOM Something’s


by John Stossel Syndicated Columnist


happened to America, and it isn’t good. It’s become eas- ier to get into trouble. We’ve become a na- tion of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom- up rules that people generate


through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives. Cross them, and we are in trouble. The National Marine Fish-


ery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained “undersized


SOWELL from 8


that the pharmaceutical com- pany Pfizer is holding on to $26 billion. If so, there should not be any great mystery as to why they don’t invest it. With the Obama administra-


tion being on an anti-business kick, boasting of putting their foot on some business’ neck, and the president talking about putting his foot on another part of the anatomy, with Congress coming up with more and more red tape, more mandates and more heavy-handed interven- tions in businesses, would you risk $26 billion that you might not even be able to get back, much less make any money on the deal? Pfizer is not unique. Banks


have cut back on lending, de- spite all the billions of dollars that were dumped into them in the name of “stimulus.” Con- sumers have also cut back on spending. For the first time, more gold is


being bought as an investment to be held as a hedge against a currently non-existent inflation than is being bought by the makers of jewelry. There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the


lobster tails” and was improp- erly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Hon- duran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed. How about this one? Four kin-


dergartners -- yes, 5-year-old boys -- played cops and rob- bers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: “Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you.” He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for “mak- ing threats,” a violation of their school district’s zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, “We cannot take


price level. Despite a big decline in the


amount of gold used to make jewelry, the demand for gold as an investment has risen so steeply as to more than make up for the reduced demand for gold jewelry, and has in fact pushed the price of gold to re- cord high levels. What does all this say? That


people don’t know what to expect next from this admin- istration, which seldom lets a month go by without some new anti-business laws, policies or rhetoric. When you hire somebody in


this environment, you know what you have agreed to pay them and what additional costs there may be for their health insurance or other benefits. But you have no way of know- ing what additional costs the politicians in Washington are going to impose, when they are constantly coming up with new bright ideas for imposing more mandates on business. One of the little noticed signs


of what is going on has been the increase in the employment of temporary workers. Businesses have been increasingly meeting their need for labor by hiring temporary workers and work-


any of these statements in a light manner.” District Superintendent William Bauer said: “This is a no- tolerance policy. We’re very firm on weapons and threats.” Give me a break. Here’s another : Ansche


Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a French fry. An under- cover officer arrested her, con- fiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was hand- cuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother’s custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: “We re- ally do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety.” She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest


ing their existing employees overtime, instead of hiring new people. Why? Because temporary


workers usually don’t get health insurance or other benefits, and working existing employees overtime doesn’t add to the cost of their benefits. There is no free lunch-- and


the biggest price of all is paid by people who are unemployed because pol iticians cannot leave the economy alone to re- cover, as the American economy has repeatedly recovered faster when left alone than when poli- ticians decided that they have to “do something.”


To find out more about Thomas


Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate colum- nists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell. com.


record. Washington’s Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy. Keith John Sampson, a stu-


dent-employee at Indiana-Pur- due University Indianapolis, had the temerity to read “Notre Dame Versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan” during breaks on the job. One student complained be- cause the book’s cover depicted the Klan. The university then found Sampson guilty of racial harassment! Thankfully, a great organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), came to his defense and got his school record cleared. Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to low- er her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one’s vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station. In 2001, honor student Lind-


say Brown parked her car in the wrong spot at her high school. A county police officer looked inside and saw a kitchen knife -- a butter knife with a rounded tip. Because Lindsay was on school property, she had vio- lated the zero-tolerance policy for knives. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to county jail where she spent nine hours on a felony weapons pos- session charge. School Principal Fred Bode told a local paper, “A weapon is a weapon.” Congress creates, on average,


one new crime every week. Fed- eral agencies create thousands more -- so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible. This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu


said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”


John Stossel is host of “Stossel”


on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.”


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