Category: Government

Capitol Ideas has reported on an Auditor General’s report on the PALCB’s wine kiosk program. This was a failed attempt to try to sell wine in supermarkets, which most other states do without losing a bunch of money. This boondoggle has now even reached the desks of Reason Magazine, who is also reporting on it:

When they are working, the kiosks dispense a limited selection of wines at limited locations and times (not on Sunday, of course!) to customers who present ID, look into a camera monitored by a state employee, breathe into a blood-alcohol meter, and swipe a credit card.

It’s a system only a bureaucrat could love, and as soon as these things started getting introduced, I thought it had “Fail!” written all over it. If you essentially say I have to take a drug test to buy something, you can bet I’m not going to buy it.

I’m glad this issue got the attention of Instapundit, because currently, privatization of the liquor monopoly is being held up by non other than our Republican Senate President, Joe Scarnati, so if you support ending the socialist liquor monopoly in Pennsylvania, I would advise contacting his office, and tell them you want the Senator to move the liquor privatization bill forward.

Joe Huffman notes that there need to be consequences for government officials who break the law. I’ve always wondered why we imported the concept of sovereign immunity to the United States. I realize that this is derived from common law, and thus predates the United States, but the revolution upended a number of our legal institutions, yet we chose to preserve this one.

I can understand, for instance, why you shouldn’t be able to sue your legislator for passing a law that you don’t like, but it seems to me that we should have taken the concept and reversed it. Currently, government and its officials have immunity from suit except for where sovereign immunity has been waived. The Fourteenth Amendment (which, when you think about it in its entirety, was really quite radical in terms of how it restructured our federal system) waived this immunity under some circumstances for states, which brought us legal constructs like qualified immunity.

But it always struck me that you ought to be able to sue your government except where it says you can’t, and not the other way around. If I were constructing a legal system from scratch, I would use this as a concept, instead of Sovereign immunity. If the government is going to tell the people they can’t seek redress in the courts, the people ought to have a say about it.

One of the big reasons I never would have voted for Obama, even if he was a genuine moderate, is that he’s from Chicago, where the politics is so corrupt it makes Philly look good in comparison. The kind of tactics being used against Gibson Guitars, I think, are classic Chicago tactics. What did people think was going to happen putting someone from that machine in the White House?

Feds raid guitar maker Gibson. Remember, they hate us because we are free.

And Obama wonders why his approval ratings are in the crapper.